Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
MARK TEPPO's igloomag.com REVIEW ::, November 19, 2006
MARK TEPPO's igloomag.com REVIEW ::
The Buddha Machine looks like a cheap transistor radio and, in a lot of ways, it's even simpler. It has a volume dial, a toggle switch, a headphone jack, and a DC line in. Its speaker isn't much bigger than a quarter and it has about three minutes worth of music on it. So why are the ambient experimentalists buying them by the handful? Why are they the coolest musical accessory of the season? Because -- and it really is this simple -- it makes meditatively evocative noises. Randomly.
Based on machines found in Buddhist temples that loop drones and chants endless, the Buddha Machine contains a tiny chip with nine loops on it. You can actually download the loops from the website. The ten loops range from five seconds to forty seconds in length and swirl across a variety of ambient landscapes (though, with their brevity, they aren't much more than wisps of tone and hints of melody). Given a modern MP3 player -- hell, you could slap 'em in a playlist and put it on your iPod and repeat for a century -- you can make your own Buddha Machine.
But that completely fails to capture the magic that has been created by Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian (who record as FM3 and who are responsible for this clever little box). It is meant to be heard from a crappy speaker, because ambience just isn't about the notes, but it is also directly connected to the manner in which you listen, in how the sound is made, and in the environment in which you listen. The loops are built from traditional instruments: the Mongolian fiddle called the Matouqin is captured in a speaker-rattling tremolo, the stringed Koto whispers a tiny fragment of melody, and the Chinese mouth organ exhales a fragile tone that decays almost instantly. Virant and Jian craft tiny ghosts of sound that are flush with promise, with innocent tonality, and as they are melded and transformed by the limited technology of the hand-held Buddha Machine, the sound becomes phantasmal poetry.
A Buddha Machine costly roughly 1/10 the price of a robust MP3 player. It has no manual, no cables, no DRM or EULA, and certainly has no operating system requirements. A Buddha Machine is a defiant piece of retrograde technology that asks: what is the value of sound? What is worth listening to? The space between sounds, and the accidents that rise from random creativity. The Buddha Machine reminds us how to listen. Every elevator in the world should have their Musak channel replaced with a Buddha Machine. Buy one, take it with you in public, and turn in on in the thick of the crowds. Watch how the world changes.
<< igloomag.com <<
|
|
|
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quite an experience; this thing could be huge, January 5, 2007
I've heard the Buddha Machine described with a lot of different names, but my favorite is Installation Art. I'll skip all the physical description; the Machine is not just something you come across, chances are if you're here that you have already heard much about it. Installation Art is what I want to focus on. With installation art the audience witnesses more than just the aesthetically pleasing, they witness a functioning apparatus. Art can exist as an extension of, a commentary on, and an escape from the real. With installation art, proven by the Buddha Machine, art takes on a synchronous role with the functioning real. The Machine is not elevated from the environment, it is consistent with it.
Let me take you to my living room about four hours ago today, around noon. The smoke dancing in the sun-rays piercing through the horizontal blinds, my cat lounging on the couch adjacent to mine. I am sprawled out, half way writing in a journal/halfway lost in thought. All the while my sky-blue Buddha Machine looping either track six or seven (maybe five, its the one I've named "Echos Over the Ocean"). Even after I knew I was going to be late for work I could not bring myself off of the couch. The sonorous frequencies of the Machine were so entrancing. It is more than just sound for pleasure, it is sound produced for the production of pleasure. Allow me to explain...
The absence of a silent medium such as the disk, the tape, or even the computer file, gives this audio-artifact a sort of permanence compared to conventional sites of sound. That is the first aspect of its difference to mere "music", the other, more important difference, lay in the quality of the sound loops produced by FM3. The inability to seperate the sound from the artifact (except through rudimentary recording techniques) makes the Machine a tool rather than an object of entertainment. I have a hard time calling my Machine a mere toy, because it's character has made me experience it on a use-value level more often than on a symbolic-value level. Of course, use yours however you want...
The Machine can be used for mood/evironment alteration and enhancement, it can be used as a musical instrument, it can be used for meditation, the uses are numerous. Maybe you are scratching your head at my extolling of the Machine as a tool asking, "Can't you do all that stuff with a cd or mp3?" And the answer would be yes, but the artifact of recorded music does not beg to be placed and put to labor the way the Machine does.
The Buddha Machine's primary function might end up differing from it's intended purpose. It could become the filler of every silence; the genesis of the day when all situations are suffused with their own cinematic soundscapes. The Buddha Machine is a concept that stands the chance of transcending mere trend and merging itself with the most banal of human occurrences.
But perhaps I am looking too deeply into it. But I do believe that the gentlemen in FM3 have the chance to, with something rather simple, push their way into a new marketplace. Imagine if you will a Buddha Machine installed into the walls of your home...while your doing that I'll be making a recording of Track #3 playing alongside a fishtank and an untuned guitar.
|
|
|
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Mixed Bag, In a Box, May 22, 2008
The small package arrived from Forced Exposure yesterday, and I couldn't wait until June. Kiddle received it last night. The pretty, vividly colored cardboard packet enclosed was ensconced in a plastic bag- "How inane!" Kiddle exclaimed. We opened the plastic, opened the candy colored box, and found the machine, enrobed in yet another bag of plastic! More wasteful inanity. The Buddha Machine itself? A cheaply made, yet pretty, oyster shell white plastic box, looking like an mp3 player might in a fuzzy dreamscape, with the cheapest of inputs and outputs, we were entranced. Cheap can be fun. After all, we're fun, and we can be cheap, like a boniato in the tropics. We saw the batteries, uh-oh. Cheap Chinese batteries, and we knew that our recyclables would never fit in this machine. We vowed to find a proper 4.5 volt adaptor in the boxes of electronics, and opened the machine's rear end for some battery input, so that we could listen.
No one will tell you this, so we will- THE BATTERY COMPARTMENT IS NOT ENGINEERED PROPERLY FOR THE BATTERIES TO FIT, SO THE MACHINE BENDS IN AN EERILY SICKENING WAY WHEN YOU INSERT BATTERIES, AND THE REAR COVER DOESN'T EASILY STAY CLOSED WITH THE BATTERIES IN, EITHER. With such a high profit margin on this item, that's an immense disappointment. Other than that, the machine is wonderful fun. The sound loops are interesting, but not so fascinating or complex that you MUST pay your full attention at all times in order to appreciate them. That's a plus for something with such limited sonic information contained therein. The Buddha Machine, we've concluded- it's cheap, as in cheaply made, but not cheaply priced for what you get. And it's fun, albeit a bit frustrating if you like your toys to be well made. So, cheap and fun, the description fits, but not as you might expect. A mixed bag, in a box. And a couple of extra bags, too.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
- the new music site from IMDb and Amazon.
