Disquiet

Tristan Perich is a prolific musician who isn’t afraid to think small. His project One Bit Music will soon turn the CD on its head. The album (allowing for a broad definition of “album”) will remove the familiar disc and replace it with a set of circuitry that plays glitchy minimal electronic music, 11 tracks in all. A limited edition of 100 is available at $100 a pop, and a “general” release is expected in January 2006 from Cantaloupe Music, the label associated with the Bang on a Can organzation. Think of One Bit Music as the jewel case at the intersection of sound art, dance music and those cheesy, battery-operated glossy-magazine and greeting-card inserts that play “Jingle Bells.” The innovative device is somewhat similar to the Buddha Machine, a hard-wired, multi-loop player produced this year by the Chinese-American duo FM3 (see yesterday’s Disquiet Downstream entry for more info).

For an advance listen to One Bit Music, three tracks are available for free download, each making the most of the limited range of sounds. “Certain Movement” (MP3) is a briny Morse Code funk, six minutes of brittle little freeze-dried notes playing at counterpoint. “Just Let Go,” a cover of a Fischerspooner song, receives a fun if uneventful arrangement (MP3), a Moebius loop of pop cultural references: a 1970s video game rendition of a contemporary band trying to sound like it’s 1983 all over again; even in Perich’s version, you can’t help but mistake Fischerspooner for Berlin. “Gilgamesh” (MP3), another original, finds a common ground between those two; it’s as poppy as the Fischerspooner cover, but has moments that approach the arid simplicity of “Certain Movement.” Of the three, “Certain Movement” is the keeper.

Perich posts a lot of music on several sites, also including tristanperich.com and sinewavemusic.net. The latter features a highly recommended track, “From Above” (MP3), a fairly jaunty quarter hour of occasionally ebullient minimalism. It manages to layer an increasing number of what sound like keyboard parts without ever gumming up the works.

The niftiest electronic-music release of 2005 may be neither a traditional commercial recording nor a free download, but something else entirely: a little, battery-operated, plastic device called the Buddha Machine, devised by the duo FM3 (aka Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian). Looking very much like a generic AM radio, it contains a chip with nine loops of ambient sound. It’s reportedly made fans of both Alan Bishop (of Sun City Girls) and Brian Eno, who are said to have purchased ’em by the bushel.

It’s the rare item that receives coverage from both the tech and the music press. engadget.com wrote of the machine, “It’s not a digital audio player,” before clarifying parenthetically, “at least not in the traditional sense.” The folks at the great San Francisco record store Aquarius said, “Oooooh, we got all in a tizzy when we saw this” (aquariusrecords.org). The initial production sold out, but while it’s on back order, you can download for free the nine Buddha Machine MP3s from the “work” page at the FM3 website (fm3.com.cn). In an interview with Disquiet.com, Virant explained, “The nine loops on the website are the same as the loops in the box. These loops, each of which is named after a different Chinese instrument, are taken from earlier FM3 releases or live sets.” Ranging in length from five seconds to eight times that, the MP3s on the site consist of what could be a snapshot of a mournful accordion heard against watery piano (MP3), sad synthesized tones (MP3) and intense shimmering (MP3). Pop ’em into your favorite MP3 player and there you have it: instant Buddha.

Update: A subsequent, full Disquiet.com interview with Virant is available here: “Buddha in the Machine.”