New Disquietude podcast episode: music by Lesley Flanigan, Dave Seidel, KMRU, Celia Hollander, and John Hooper; interview with Flanigan; commentary; short essay on reading waveforms. • Disquiet.com F.A.Q. • Key Tags: #saw2for33third, #field-recording, #classical, #junto • Elsewhere: Twitter, SoundCloud, Instagram

Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code. Rewinding the soundscape.

Images of the Week: Buddha’s Roman Holiday (殺佛)

[ May 30, 2010 / Department: field notes / Comment: 1 ]

Killing Buddha 殺佛 is the name of a sound-art installation at Radioartemobile in Rome, Italy, co-created by Staalplaat Soundsystem and FM3 and due to open June 21. The duo FM3 have been posting images of the work-in-progress on their Facebook account (at facebook.com), including those shown in this post.

The Buddha Machine has had an incredible run, from offbeat sound-art gizmo to widely sampled source material to cottage industry, and the Rome exhibition suggests the run will continue for some time.

That such a modest device, none of the constituent parts of which suggest any sort of mainstream success (inexpensive production, low-fie sound quality, abstract audio loops), has captured so many imaginations speaks as much to our time, to the increasing public awareness of sound (apart from music) as a subject of appreciation, as it does to the implicit ingenuity of the beloved gadget’s inventors.

That is neither Christiaan Virant nor Zhang Jian of FM3 hammering nails into a lemon-yellow Buddha Machine, but Geert-Jan Hobijn of Staalplaat.

More at radioartemobile.it and twitter.com/buddhamachine, which seems to have succeeded the Buddha site, fm3buddhamachine.com, as the primary news source on the subject.

In related news, check out the colorful Buddha Machine gallery at flickr.com.

By Marc Weidenbaum

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  • Marc Weidenbaum founded the website Disquiet.com in 1996 at the intersection of sound, art, and technology, and since 2012 has moderated the Disquiet Junto, an active online community of weekly music/sonic projects. He has written for Nature, Boing Boing, The Wire, Pitchfork, and NewMusicBox, among other periodicals. He is the author of the 33 1⁄3 book on Aphex Twin’s classic album Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Read more about his sonic consultancy, teaching, sound art, and work in film, comics, and other media

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