Layering Buddha and the FM3 Buddha Machine
Posted: Thu Dec 21, 2006 4:55 pm
You may remember the thread in which Robert Henke found out that a review copy of a new release of his was ripped and uploaded to soulseek without his permission. I want to plainly state at the outset that in my opinion the behavior of the writer who did this is inexcusable. Although legal action is probably fruitless in this case, it is a sad commentary that downloading culture has reached this point where people don't even understand what is wrong with that kind of behavior.
On a happier note: a friend gave me a Buddha Machine as a present. This apparently was the inspiration for Layering Buddha and an amazing gadget in its own right. You can read all about it at http://www.fm3buddhamachine.com as well as many other sites.
Basically it's a plastic box about the size and shape of a ciagrette pack. It runs on 2 AA batteries and has a speaker, volume/power dial, headphone and DC input jacks, and a tiny pushbutton switch on the side. When turned on, it plays one of 9 drone/ambient loops (which were created by the Chinese based producers FM3) forever.
The one change I would like to see would be if you have it randomly change the loop it plays after a given time. As it is you have to push the little button.
The really cool thing is that you can download stereo WAV files of all the loops. The first thing I did was of course import them into a Live set, and using follow actions created a set that randomly switches between the loops (well, the first 8, you'll see why when you listen to them). I exported a 70 minute stereo file of them and that way I can listen to it anywhere there's a CD player.
According to Robert's explanation of the Layering Buddha release http://www.monolake.de/layeringbuddha.html, he actually recorded the device itself in order to take advantage of its low-fi circuitry, then mangled and processed the resulting files (using Live?)
On a happier note: a friend gave me a Buddha Machine as a present. This apparently was the inspiration for Layering Buddha and an amazing gadget in its own right. You can read all about it at http://www.fm3buddhamachine.com as well as many other sites.
Basically it's a plastic box about the size and shape of a ciagrette pack. It runs on 2 AA batteries and has a speaker, volume/power dial, headphone and DC input jacks, and a tiny pushbutton switch on the side. When turned on, it plays one of 9 drone/ambient loops (which were created by the Chinese based producers FM3) forever.
The one change I would like to see would be if you have it randomly change the loop it plays after a given time. As it is you have to push the little button.
The really cool thing is that you can download stereo WAV files of all the loops. The first thing I did was of course import them into a Live set, and using follow actions created a set that randomly switches between the loops (well, the first 8, you'll see why when you listen to them). I exported a 70 minute stereo file of them and that way I can listen to it anywhere there's a CD player.
According to Robert's explanation of the Layering Buddha release http://www.monolake.de/layeringbuddha.html, he actually recorded the device itself in order to take advantage of its low-fi circuitry, then mangled and processed the resulting files (using Live?)