Disquiet

A quick lunchtime office-ambience experiment, taking Buddha Machines by the duo FM3 and making new background music loops from them. Two Buddha Machines (the blue device is generation one, the uncertain color generation two), each going into separate channels, the input gain adjusted according to the selected loops. The gen-one device is split, half right to the voltage-controlled mixer, and half into Smog (a remix of the Mutable Instruments module Clouds). The Smog route provides some haze in the background. Both the gen-one and gen-two lines are then being operated on (their amplification adjusted by voltage control) thanks to dual pairs of rapid, unsynced LFOs (originating from the Batumi, those combined levels then adjusted by the SPO). And a much slower LFO from the neighboring Dixie II module is occasionally introducing a higher frequency range, which adds another layer. This experiment started off somewhere else entirely (that somewhere involving envelopes), and then was employing very slow LFOs throughout. But then the sound of the rapid LFOs worked even better. A very fast LFO can, in a manner of speaking, serve a slow LFO as well. The title, “Glass Horizon,” is a joke about how down the road there would be a Philip Glass collaboration on a Buddha Machine, but for now these automated arpeggios will have to suffice.

Today’s home-office ambience: six Buddha Machines (including two of the first generation and one from each of the subsequent four generations), plus a guest star in the form of the somewhat less meditative Gristleism box, which is the black square one on the right. Gristleism was a 2009 collaboration between Buddha Machine creators FM3 and the band Throbbing Gristle. Note that, in true Buddha Machine style, the battery on the green one was starting to go (following a weekend of [significant](https://disquiet.com/2020/04/18/buddha-machine-variations-no-5/) modular-synthesizer [effort](https://disquiet.com/2020/04/19/buddha-machine-variations-no-6/)), which is why the light turns on and then suddenly off at one point.

Two Buddha Machines, both from the first generation, playing different loops through the modular synthesizer. Each of the pair of loops is running through a different preset on the ER-301 module (that’s the large module with the dual screens in the lower left). The green Buddha Machine’s output is affected by a ladder filter, and the blue one by a grain delay. Aspects of both presets are being, in turn, modulated by slow-ish and flat-ish waves emanating from the Batumi and tempered by the SPO (note the four, short orange cables toward the upper left). Hence the sense that the filter is changing on one, as is the speed, subtly, of the other. The output of the green Buddha Machine (via the processing) is going straight into the mixer. The output of the blue one (also after having been processed) is having its spectrum sliced up (via the FDXf), with two bands (and those two bands alone) going separately to the mixer, their volumes adjusted further before being output. If you keep your eye on the equalizer-looking vertical bands in the ER-301’s larger screen, you’ll see the volume of the two Buddha Machine inputs on the left going up and down, and the LFOs from the Batumi (via the SPO) doing the same on the far right. Keeping an eye on those four signals will help the ear correlate shifts within the audio.