tonyballinger.com

I picked up a Buddha Machine this weekend from Hard Boiled Records on Roscoe. If you haven’t heard of the little gadget, it’s a hardware loop player put out by the electronic music group FM3. The Buddha Machine is about as simple as simple gets. It’s a small plastic box with a volume control/power switch, a speaker, a headphone jack, and a switch. You turn it on, turn it up, and it begins playing one of it’s nine ambient loops continuously. You flick the switch to change to the next loop. You can use it with headphones (it’s very stylish paired with white Apple earbuds) or you can listen to it through the very lo-fi built-in speaker.

I’ve heard it called the “anti-iPod” on some blogs, and I suppose it is in that it’s deliberately lo-tech. The sound quality is pretty poor. It’s not expandable in any way. You can’t load your own loops. You can’t even pick your color – when you buy one you’re shipped a random color. Mine’s orange, which is fun since that’s the official color of Gerard Design. Seems like I was lucky to get one at all since Pitchfork reviewed it.

I admit, I had no idea what I was going to do with this thing – but I wanted it anyway. So far, I’ve found that it’s a nice afternoon napping companion. I also imagine it would be a good soundtrack for watching koi swim at the Garfield Conservatory.

At Boomkat.com they have videos of “Buddha Boxing”. It’s a game where you put a handful of Buddha Machines on a table, and each person takes a turn either changing a machine’s loop or removing/adding a machine from the table. It’s not really a game as much as it is a method for creating interactive generative music from a very limited palette.

I’ve half considered picking up four or five more Buddha machines, but I think I’ve decided I’ll buy a refurbed iPod Shuffle instead and load it up with loops I create myself. If I get really ambitious, I may (but probably won’t) create a podcast where you could download my latest loop for your own “Buddha Shuffle”. If you have an iPod (or other lesser mp3 player) you can download the nine loops from the FM3 site and load them up yourself for a higher-fi experience.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 9:43 am and is filed under Gadgets, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.