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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.)
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