Disquiet

It wouldn’t be a week without a new riff on the Buddha Machine, the inexpensive sound-art gadget produced by the China-based duo FM3. The Iowa City, Iowa-based musician Mark Rushton has posted another in his ongoing series of free downloads, and like the one featured as a Disquiet Downstream entry back in May 2006 (disquiet.com), this one builds an original composition out of one of the nine loops contained in the Buddha Machine. The piece’s title, “Pulse Detector,” gives some hint at its compositional strategy. By propagating, during the course of five minutes, the warm, enveloping Buddha loop with swelling tones that appear at a slow, metronomic pace, Rushton draws attention to the seams in the raw loop’s repetition — which is to say, he amplifies the original, even as he covers it with other sounds (MP3). More at markrushton.com.

By Marc Weidenbaum