Disquiet

downstream / Broken-Beats MP3 from Craque

The broken beats and contorted melodic moments of the album Gamma by Craque (aka Matt Cooke-Davis) have their strongest showing on “Matterbuss,” the fourth of its six tracks. There’s a rotating, purposefully clunky rhythm that sounds like it might have been spliced together from snippets of a recording of an out-of-breath dog. The rhythm is later repeated on what could be chopsticks tapping out a sketch of the work on a restaurant table. Above it, throughout, fragments of spoken word and gestural acoustic guitar hover like filigrees and decorations. There is much to recommend Gamma, but the taut achievement of “Matterbuss” (MP3) makes it the keeper. More details at the releasing netlabel, monocromatica.com/netlabel. More on Craque at craque.net.

downstream / Rhythmic Ambient MP3s (Fiehn & Hess)

For their work as a duo, Stephen Fiehn is credited with “guitar/electronics” and Steven Hess with “drums/vibraphone/electronics.” Neither attribution explains what seems like rain or insect noise on “Holding,” the first of two tracks that comprise the duo’s self-titled debut — but such is the near silence of the piece that what sounds like elements of the real world could just be digital effluvia. That debut is titled Work, as is the duo; the term suggests toil, energy, and effort, though the music espouses repose, languor, and nuance. Of course, for two individuals it may be a serious effort to produce such quiet sounds in tandem, to collaborate on something that comes across as deeply private and personal.

What is the sound, you wonder, of two people meditating? According to “Holding” (MP3), it is lightly percussive progressions that subtly alter as time passes, the snail’s-pace rhythm charting a course through gentle, high-pitched noises. On “Ideal Form” (MP3), the EP’s other track, the more treble-register sounds originate as rhythm, a gentle flow that is slowly subsumed by warm drones and distant throbbing. These both are beautiful, crystalline pieces, their fragility belying the (in retrospect) significant effort that must have gone into not only their planning and recording, but furthermore the development of the sympathetic performance practice that yielded them. More details at the releasing netlabel, con-v.org.

More on Fiehn at myspace.com/stepstep2, and on Hess at myspace.com/s_hess. Fiehn and Hess are both members, along with Joshua Convey, of the Chicago-based act Fessenden (myspace.com/fessendenmusic).

interviews / Buddha Machine, Reloaded

The Buddha Machine, true to its name, is a modest device. The battery-operated plastic box emits a series of nine lo-fi sound loops composed by the China-based electronic-music duo FM3. Despite — or perhaps due to — its small scale and limited functionality, as of July 2007 the little sound-art gadget had sold reportedly 50,000 units, and FM3 (aka Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian) were already suggesting a sequel was in the works.

Last week came the announcement: Buddha Machine 2.0 brings three new colors (burgundy, chocolate, grey), nine new loops, and best of all a pitch-control knob that gives the listener the ability to adjust the sound.

On the eve of its November 1, 2008, commercial release, Virant answered some questions about the revision. He talked about fine-tuning the new loops, making peace with the random inaccuracies of Chinese mass production, and being inspired by the legions of Buddha Machine remixers. (Also available on this site is an earlier interview, from December 2005, with Virant: “Buddha in the Machine.”)

Marc Weidenbaum: The two new loops you’ve posted thus far have sounds that bring to mind string instruments. Is there some theme shared by the new group of sounds?

Christiaan Virant: Since it took us three years to get 2.0 finished, we decided to make the music about one part “evolution” and one part “revolution.” We decided that we could not just use the same sound set we were using for 1.0, regardless of how well they worked in the box. As a result, many of the tracks on 2.0 are far removed from the drones of the original — the piano on the third track, for example. At the same time, we kept a few direct references to the original loops, because we liked how they worked when you play both 1.0 and 2.0 at the same time.

Weidenbaum: What did you learn from the first set of nine sounds that influenced the new set? Did the average length change? Did you under-emphasize high or low pitches?

Virant: While we were designing the 2.0, there was a lot of thought about which loops “worked” and which did not, and we had really wanted to go with some long, evolving tunes. But in the end, what you hear is actually most influenced by mundane technical reasons. When we made the loops longer and tested them on a higher-capacity chip, it sounded awful — something to do with the clock speed of the chip and how it interacted with the PC board. So we went back to the lower-capacity chip, which forced us to squeeze everything into 300 seconds of music. That kept the average length of the new music about the same as the original loops. And for 2.0 we really tried to improve the sound quality, so we didn’t change the EQ to make the loops “fit” in the box. This time around, we made the box “fit” the loops.

Weidenbaum: Pitch control appears to be the biggest change in the new device. It’s a cool addition, almost like you’d “circuit-bent” your own machine. What inspired you to make the Buddha Machine more “interactive,” to give the listener more control over the sound? [The image below, courtesy of FM3, shows combination of volume control (top) and pitch control (bottom), book-ending the headphone jack.]

Virant: It was really the fans that made us think about how to improve and upgrade the box. We always considered the Buddha Machine as our “album.” But many, many people out there were inspired to use it as an instrument. Over the past three years I’ve received at least 100 tracks either on CD, CDR, or MP3 that use the Buddha Machine loops. Most recently I got a nice track from a 12-year-old in Portland! Many electronic musicians found it to be a handy performance device and plugged one or two straight into a mixer. Others banged it through a rack of effects, and still others got inside and rewired the machine to create all sorts of weird noise! This evolution was really exciting to watch, so Zhang and I talked a lot about how to work “with” these Buddha fans, rather than just giving them another box of static samples. We don’t really have the knowledge to design a cool performance instrument, so we decided the simplest and likely most effective modification was a basic pitch control. You can pitch it to match the 1.0, your guitar, your voice … or you can “play” the box by changing the notes as they sound out.

Weidenbaum: Can you confirm that lowering the pitch will also extend the playing length of the loop?

Virant: In theory, it should play slower when pitched down, but to be honest I haven’t timed it! Its a simple voltage control. The wheel just controls the amount of power feeding the circuit, so with less power, it plays slower and deeper. Like when the batteries were running out on your Buddha Machine 1.0!

Weidenbaum: At some point in the production of the first Buddha Machine, a change was implemented in the physical switch that alternates between loops. It had been a back-and-forth switch, but it became an inset button. Why was that change made?

Virant: This wasn’t really a conscious change. The factory just gives us whatever they have in stock. Nowadays, when they run out of the push-button, they just put on a different switch and send it out. We often don’t even know until we are at a gig, open up a machine, and wow! There’s a different switch! Early on, they would sometimes use red ink instead of white for the printing. That’s just part of manufacturing in China — always a bit of randomness. But Zhang and I both prefer the toggle switch. It makes less noise during performance and is more accurate. We had wanted to use the toggle switch as standard for 2.0, but were forced to use the push-button because of the circuit board  architecture. We are working on a new circuit board, so hopefully one day we can move back to the toggle.

Weidenbaum: That’s an interesting spin on John Cage’s idea about the role of “chance” in music. Usually by “chance,” Cage was speaking of compositional technique or performance practice. I don’t think he focused much on chance in the actual production of a musical instrument.

Virant: Originally the Buddha Machine was designed in one color only: black. When we made the initial order for 300, we told them we wanted 300 black units. So I go to pick them up in Hong Kong around March 2005, and I get about 180 black and the rest in red! We didn’t even know it was an option! Seems the factory ran out of black plastic, so they just grabbed some red stuff, melted it down, and made the machines. They were more concerned with meeting the quantity requirement than the color requirement. I didn’t really complain, but it was an early lesson in the complete randomness involved with our factory. Zhang minded even less, and the next time I saw him — at Mutek 2005 — he had a box filled with the machines in seven different colors! The initial “mistake” ended up leading us to make the machine in different colors and probably led to untold extra sales.

Related links: FM3's website at fm3buddhamachine.com. December 2005 interview at disquiet.com. Rob Walker's July 2007 New York Times story at nytimes.com.

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Free Buddha music: Five of the nine new loops (disquiet.com). Screaming Buddha by Noisewerks (disquiet.com). Aymeric de Tapol & François Martig (disquiet.com). Mark Rushton's two field-recording Buddhas (disquiet.com, disquiet.com). Jupiter Watts psychedelic-rock (disquiet.com). Two Royal Trans albums (disquiet.com, disquiet.com). Dying Buddha Machine (disquiet.com). Monolake live (this file is no longer accessible, but the original writeup is at disquiet.com). First Disquiet.com post on Buddha Machine, November 2005, with links to the original tones (disquiet.com).

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Retail remixes: Two albums have been released commercially of Buddha Machine sounds, a solo set by Robert Henke (aka Monolake) titled Layering Buddha and a various-artists collection called Jukebox Buddha with entries by Henke, Blixa Bargeld, Adrian Sherwood, Doug Wimbish, Jan Jelinek,  and SunnO))), among others; both are covered in an entry in this "best of 2006" list: disquiet.com.

downstream / Screaming Buddha MP3s

Last week came news of the updated Buddha Machine (disquiet.com), with nine new loops and pitch control. The first Buddha Machine — a looping gadget by the China-based duo FM3 — resulted in numerous remixes, by luminaries ranging from Monolake to Adrian Sherwood. One such set, a four-track released credited to Noisewerks, has been made available for free download at archive.org, each an extended soundscape resulting from putting a Buddha sample through effects, yielding lengthy passages of twisted metal, ambiguous noises, and endless echo. The third track in particular retains the near-ethereal sine-wave sway of the original, yet manages to amp it up to something full-bodied (MP3). Get the full set of four at archive.org.

field notes / Image of the Week: Marclay’s Mixtape

A cyanotype exposed by Christian Marclay to unwound cassette tapes. It’s one of several works on display at Paula Cooper Gallery in Manhattan until recently (September 4 - October 11).

More details at paulacoopergallery.com.

field notes / Quote of the Week: Dr. Dre’s Anechoic Chamber

BusinessWeek’s Matt Vella reports on a new pair of noise-canceling headphones designed by Andre Young, aka legendary rap producer Dr. Dre, who, famously, brought the noise (including the sound of gun shots) on such classics as N.W.A’s now two-decade-old album Straight Outta Compton:

A flick of the switch on the side of the headphones instantly muffles sounds of the outside world with an eerie whoosh. The effect is impressive, as a colleague of mine, who wears headgear from a shooting range to escape the din of our boisterous newsroom, happily testified when he tried the Beats.

Full story at businessweek.com.

downstream / ’70s Nature MP3 (Via Steve Roden)

The sound artist Steve Roden regularly posts MP3s on his inbetweennoise.blogspot.com website, but his is no ordinary “MP3 blog.” The materials consists almost entirely of thrift-store finds (literal, or of the eBay variety), like old Portuguese love songs and ancient bagpipes. As a spelunker of the minimal and the analog, the threadbare and the dusty, Roden regularly comes upon pre-digital audio that brings context to our understanding of sound, technology, memory, and art — he also posts images and text fragments along these lines.

Earlier this month he shared a clip from a nature-sounds 7″ that dates from the 1970s. It’s a document of some rural Florida ecosystem, all tooting birds and light wind, though of course to the modern listener, the persistent crackle of the vinyl is as much a part of the soundscape as the living, breathing organisms — and toward the end, in a moment reminiscent of Wordsworth, bells intrude (MP3).

Roden pairs the sounds with a text by Thomas Merton (in part: “the ‘rest’ which these men sought was simply the sanity and poise of a being that no longer has to look at itself because it is carried away by the perfection of freedom that is in it”). And he explicates the parallels between his selected recorded sound and written word: “when the ethereal notes of a carillon drift into the picture, the whole thing moves from present to distant, fluctuating between the natural and supernatural.” More details at inbetweennoise.blogspot.com. (And special thanks to Roden for his recent shout-out at thewire.co.uk.)

downstream / Otherworldly Boston Pops MP3

The Borgesian effect of wandering through the archive of the avant-garde that is ubu.com was easily achieved: the entries aren’t date-stamped. The result is a simultaneity in which “new” work — that is, new uploads of work by — Yoko Ono and Marcel Duchamp suggests them as contemporaries. Yes, the date of the work’s origination is almost always present, but the date on which the material became part of ubu.com is not. Any writing about ubu.com runs the risk of proclaiming as newly presented material that’s, in fact, been lurking in the background. Case in point, the sound art of Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman, much of which is archived at the ubu.com/sound/aa.html. The pair use field recordings and found sounds to dissociative ends, one highlight being a very personal piece in which Bergman transformed a cache of inherited cassette tapes into a droning requiem for a grandparent.

“Bostonpopsreverbformydeadgrandpa” (MP3), with its unwieldy yet straightforward title, takes tapes left to Bergman by his music-enthusiast grandfather, who seems to have been quite a character, and adds extensive reverb — in this particular piece warping the already strings-rich Boston Pops into something gossamer, the echo a sonic symbol of his grandfather’s passing.

downstream / Dubby Fisk Industries MP3 EP

The musician behind the dubby electronica of Fisk Industries (aka Mat Ranson) is apparently taking a year off to tour the world, and while we don’t get the proverbial T-shirt, we do get a three-track send-off, courtesy of the web-releases section of the Highpoint Lowlife label. Each song presents a dank, reverb-friendly take on digital dub, from the static-laced, wobbly grooves of “Shadow” (MP3) to the more atmospheric, minimal-techno feel of “Bubblewrap” (MP3), to the estimably downtempo skank of “Cyber” (MP3), the set’s true keeper, thanks to its acoustic touches and understated pace. Get the full set at highpointlowlife.com. More details at Fisk’s website, fisk-industries.co.uk.

downstream / Buddha Machine 2.0: New Loops, Pitch Blend, MP3

The audio file is only 47 seconds long, but it’s a tantalizing taste of the forthcoming second edition of the Buddha Machine, the suprise-hit sound-art gadget created by the China-based duo FM3 (aka Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian). According to a brief posting this morning at fm3buddhamachine.com, the new Buddha Machine will come in three new colors (as reported earlier this year — disquiet.com) with nine new loops, and it will include pitch bending, which the post describes as “like a whammy bar for your buddha box.” The inclusion of pitch-blend, while not a “game changer” per se, gently nudges the object from gadget toward musical instrument.

The sample audio is a mix of reverberant backing drones and what resemble lightly strummed, digitally augmented guitar (MP3), like the salvo to some 21st-century flamenco. The 47-second length likely doesn’t mark this as an excerpt; it’s probably the actual length of the loop.

Below are exploded views of the first Buddha Machine (above) and version 2.0 (below). While the presence of the little Buddha figurine is fanciful, there is evidence of a practical physical change in the upgrade. Note that on version 2.0 there are now two little spinning wheels at the top of the machine. One is presumably a combo volume control and on/off switch, as was the case in the first Buddha Machine. The other is, I imagine, the newly announced pitch-blend tool. The new control is circled in blue.

This isn’t the first upgrade to the Buddha Machine. At some point following its initial release, it saw a slight reconfiguration of the button that switches between loops (as reported here back in February 2008 — disquiet.com). For more background on the Buddha Machine, here’s a link to the December 2005 Disquiet.com interview with FM3 member Virant: “Buddha in the Machine.”

PS: Later in the day — that is, early tomorrow, October 29, dateline China — the FM3 Buddha Machine site posted a second Buddha 2.0 entry, with a photo confirming that the second wheel is, in fact, the apparatus for pitch control. Sample audio was provided of a loop being warped (MP3), and a second of the nine new loops was made available unadulterated — as with the earlier loop, it sounds very much like a richly plucked string instrument (MP3).

The three new colors of Buddha Machine are burgundy, grey, and chocolate. The new packaging looks less “Pacific-rim tourism” than did the first iteration of the device, and more “refined home decoration.” Details at fm3buddhamachine.com.

PPS: On October 31, over at fm3buddhamachine.com, FM3 unveiled loops 3 (MP3), 4 (MP3), and 5 (MP3).