Colin Marshall

The night goblins

I have intensely, ritualistically ogled the following light-capturing devices over approximately the last three days:




The Red One high-definition digital video camera. Price: $17,500 for the bare-bones body. The base production pack costs $1,250. The lenses set you back $19,000.




The Aaton A-Minima Super 16mm camera. Price: $15,000. And film, even Super 16, ain't exactly cheap, 'neither.




The Canon Canosound 514XL-S Super 8mm camera. Price: about $180 on eBay. I still can't afford it, but at least the night goblins allow me to dream about it. They can be cruel.

Better than the spork, even

Conducting the latest Marketplace of Ideas conversation with Travis Elborough, author of The Vinyl Countdown, a history of the vinyl LP, brought a question to mind: people love vinyl, some people — mostly of a certain hip-hop generation — love cassettes, but has anyone ever loved the poor, rapidly-getting-irrelevant compact disc? Elborough replied that, well, naturally, someone must have loved it at some point, and they certainly sounded fantastic when first introduced. But I'd say it's undeniable that, at sixty years old, vinyl claims orders of magnitude more declared enthusiasts than the CD, over its 27 years, ever has.

That's not to approve of the sort of vinyl fetishism that goes on these days — I also enjoy reading, but fixation on books themselves or any media objects over and above their content irks me — though I must remain vigilant not to fall into it myself. My collection habit began in high school, at the feverish peak of my Goodwill-haunting days, but back then, when the majority of my listening hours happened in the car, vinyl was little more than a novelty. It's since pulled out in front of every other music delivery system; rare is the night I don't come home and drop the needle on something or other. I just yesterday Craigslist-purchased an additional Tec 12, for nefarious DJing purposes, from a dude in deep Isla Vista. Those 35-pound S.O.B.s really turn heads when you're schlepping them around by hand. Especially when you take them into Barnes & Noble. Or to get a burrito.

This ends a long spell of CD-only spinning for me, which I can't help but argue says something, grandly, about the listening world as a whole. I don't plan to affect a metamorphosis into one of those insufferable everything-sucks-but-vinyl DJs — my setup will likely remain two-CD-one-vinyl at least until I buy a car move all this gear from place to place like a civilized human being — but vinyl's essentialness becomes clearer to me with every play. Why? I have no ironclad answer, and I hesitate to join the chorus of tofu-soft defenses like "vinyl has life." Two facts do stand out, though. (a) Vinyl provides a superior user experience, and lately I've gotten big on the experience component damn near everything — film, food, interaction — to the exclusion of most other elements. (b) Vinyl is a better design object than other formats. Hell, it's a better design object than most other objects. I've half a mind to declare the vinyl LP the best object of the past century. This is a designation CDs will never, ever win, and it has two words to thank for that: jewel cases. Oh, the affront, the affront to my tender sensibilities!

Unpredictable intermediation

Dicking around in Amoeba Music's experimental section, as is my wont, I came upon a pile of FM3 Buddha Machines. I'd long been intrigued by the devices, as anyone with even a passing interest in ambient music is. (Though my interest in ambient has, shall we say, past beyond passing.) They're a little like iPods in that they're rectangularish, made of plastic and play sound. They're unlike iPods in that:

• They play not just through headphones, but out of a built-in speaker
• They come with sounds pre-installed, which you can't add to or remove
• The sounds aren't songs, but seconds-long loops

Needless to say, I had to have one. So did Madelaine, and since it was her birthday anyway, we had ourselves the making of a convenient coincidence. I snagged a pair of near-randomly-selected Buddha Machines (no his-and-hers models available) to my growing pile of sweet, sweet 180-gram vinyl (50 grams better than regular vinyl!) and anticipated.

To test my machine, I wrote the majority of my latest 3QD column while listening to it. Verdict: positive. I wound up with one of the first-generation units which, unlike Madelaine's Buddha Machine II, lacks a pitch bend wheel. No matter, though; you'd want to own a few of these babies — Sasha Frere-Jones has four — in order to get the full experience of their loops moving in and out of sync, interacting. But even if you've only got one handy, one's enough. Though the individual sounds don't seem to have any obvious designed randomness or generativeness to them, I could swear some sound as if more is going on than a drone on repeat. Then again, it could just be the mind playin' tricks.

The Buddha Machine is the only deliberately "lo-fi" thing I've ever enjoyed. It feels nearly hollow and built out of the sort of plastic that comes from a country whose laws governing the manufacturing of plastic are much less enlightened than ours. (The feel is cub scout crystal radio-y.) While headphones do the job, you're better off with the tinny speaker; that way, you can line up a bunch of these things and, Phil Spector-like, create a meditative wall of sound. (If he'd had a Buddha Machine, he probably wouldn't have felt it necessary to shoot the Barbarian Queen.) It certainly validate Brian Eno's oft-stated thoughts about how much more interesting electronic sound is when you dirty it down with cheap, unpredictable intermediation. Then again, what doesn't validate Brian Eno's ideas?

(The Buddha Machine experience is also available, depending on your fanciness, as an iPhone app or an elaborate Flash simulation.)