"Since its release, FM3's portable plastic loop player the Buddha Machine has been enshrined by the likes of Brian Eno, Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls), Thomas Fehlmann (the Orb), plus thousands of drone-friendly fans worldwide. Indeed, this very publication gave the device a respectable 8.2. So it's no surprise that the simple soundbox has launched an album, Jukebox Buddha, containing 15 tracks based on the Machine's
nine loops.
Due out on November 7 on Staubgold, this ambient offering features contributions from Sun City Girls, Sunn 0))), Fehlmann, Jan Jelinek with Andrew Pekler and Hanno Leichtmann, Einstürzende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld, Monolake's Robert Henke, Alog, Mapstation, and many other Buddha buddies.
According to a press release, the artists "stretch, compress, reconfigure, rub and dust, and generally **** around with the nine floating loops clipped out from FM3's confrontational world of quiet." Sounds like a fifteenfold path to awesome."
-- Pitchforkmedia.com news article
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As music becomes increasingly robbed of physical form and reduced down to a series of file extensions, there's something undeniably appealing about the actual-factual ownership of a physical entity. Whether this be the pleasure of handling a new 12" or copping a good sniff on a glossy CD booklet (it takes us back to our sticker collecting days, ok!?), music has always been about more than mere vibrations flooding down your cochlea. It therefore shouldn't come as any surprise that The Buddha Machine has gained such widespread admiration - simultaneously giving people something more to fetishise, whilst providing a lo-tech alternative to the opaque comfort-nipple of a playlist-addled iPod generation. You could say it's spiritual...
Reduced to it's core components, the Buddha Machine is little more than an AM radio - permanently tuned to a distant loop-emitting signal that encourages the listener to project their own interpretations on a series of diffused ambient compositions. In terms of it's physical manifestation, the tactile plastic box has a similar quality to a pack of cigarettes - the difference being you'll get some nourishment for both ears and soul, rather than a hacking great cough. The magic is conjured up somewhere between; say yes Paul!
Our first practice was in a bomb shelter... Good acoustics and solid concrete so the neighbours don't get after you!
Whilst it would be enchanting to imagine the Buddha Machine dropping fully formed from a mountain-side temple, there is in fact two uber-talented musicians, a factory full of workers and a ****-load of capacitor sourcing behind each innocuous little box. Prefaced by FM3, the Buddha Machine's gestation becomes clearer - with the already prolific Beijing duo of Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian a central spoke in China's electronic music scene. Having decamped to China from his native San Diego, Virant quickly became a stalwart of Beijing's underground punk scene, whilst elsewhere amongst the billion-strong population Zhang Jian was carving out a name as the nation's top session keyboardist and computer musician. When they came together, FM3 began transmission.
So how did an experimental duo whose work had featured in such diverse environs as the Louvre (Paris), Sprawl (London) and Out the Window (Tokyo) come to create Brian Eno's favourite toy? In order to find out we spoke to Christiaan Virant, where we uncovered a world of North Korean pop, Olympic commissions and Buddha Boxing. Fix up, read sharp!
Q: How are you?
A: Ears ringing after playing at two shows featuring a bunch of noise artists!
Q: How did the two of you come to be FM3?
A: In late 1999 I started up a band aimed at doing live electronica. Back then, Beijing didn't have a live electronic scene; not a single band was doing live electronic music. So I brought together some of the best musicians I knew from the underground rock and punk circles and started FM3. Zhang at that time was playing keyboard in a bunch of bands and I really liked his approach - more focused on creating good sounds and atmospheres rather than just melodies. So we invited him along to practice and that was the beginning of the band. Our first practice was in a bomb shelter... Good acoustics and solid concrete so the neighbours don't get after you!
We've been invited to create the "sound environment" for one of the Beijing Olympic parks
Q: Where did the idea for the Buddha Machine come from?
A: We took the inspiration from a similar device used in Buddhist temples. The device is used to play constant chants to the Buddha and some say it was developed because of the shortage of monks in modern times. I picked up my first one more than 10 years ago and it was a permanent fixture in my bathroom. For years, Zhang and I mused about how cool it would be to make an FM3 release "inside that little box" and then in 2004 we got serious and really did it.
Q: On the off chance there's still someone who hasn't had a run in with a Buddha Machine, how would you describe it to the uninitiated?
A: Before we released the Buddha machine, we used to tell people to imagine an old pocket radio tuned permanently to FM3.
Q: Has the success of the Buddha Machine taken you by surprise?
A: Very much so. Our initial pressing was 500 units. 300 for the German record label Staalplaat and 200 for ourselves to use in installation projects. Staalplaat assumed 300 would last them a year. I just read an article in the UK press that said our distributor sold almost that many in a single day! Never could we have imagined that kind of response to our music.
Q: How does it make you feel when you hear that people like Brian Eno and Alan Bishop are bulk buying them?
A: Funnily enough, Eno was my very first paying customer! He bought six based on a prototype I showed him at dinner in Beijing last year. Our second customer was Thomas Felhmann from the Orb. He took about a dozen. And then shortly after that Alan Bishop ordered 24, based on a photo and an email description I gave him! Monolake and the crew at the Ableton software office bought something like 30... So from the very beginning we had great support from some quality musicians and naturally, as two guys sitting way out in Beijing, it's mind-boggling.
Q: Do you ever worry that the Buddha Machine will overshadow FM3's other output completely?
A: It's certainly going to be pretty hard to just sit back and release a CD every now and then. And that's a good thing. Because Beijing is a pretty lazy town, so it's good to have a bit of performance pressure. In 2004 we played three shows at the Louvre in Paris. At that time, I figured that was the apex of our career. Then in 2005 the Buddha Machine came out and again we said; how could it get bigger than this? But just recently we got invited to create the "sound environment" for one of the Beijing Olympic parks. So things still keep moving forward...
Q: How did you choose which loops to use on the Buddha Machine?
A: It was a pretty quick process. We had certain favourite pieces we had developed over the years and which we knew stood up to sustained listening. For example, if anyone heard us on tour in Europe in 2004, they would immediately recognise track 1 on the Buddha Machine as the opening music for our set. Picking the loops was easy, but we spent a bit of time putting them in the current order. Actually the order strongly mimics our live sets from the years 2002 - 2004.
Q: Are the Buddha Machine's made in the same factories as the ones for religious use? Did you come up against any opposition from the manufacturers in getting them into production?
A: Same factory. The only real opposition had to do with quantity. This is China, where factories usually take orders in the range of 100,000 to a few million! So when we wanted to make 500, no one would deal with us. Most factories tried to convince us that our idea was pointless or would never sell. But we persisted, did a lot of explaining, pleading and ego-massaging, and eventually one factory took on the task. Now, of course, they are really into the product and just can't believe it has been so successful.
Q: How many Buddha Machines have been manufactured now?
A: 10,000 and counting...
Q: Where are the Buddha Machines selling best? Europe/Americas/China etc.
A: Our strongest sales are in the USA, where a few influential blogs got hold of the idea early and helped make it a geek-tech fetish object. The New York Times gave it a plug in a Christmas buying issue, so that helped sales. But mostly the strong sales are due to our distributor Forced Exposure, which has done a superb job of getting it to all the coolest records stores across America. Sales in the UK are really strong as well, again, thanks to our distributor Baked Goods and Boomkat! In Europe we mostly just sell them when we are on tour. And in China, where we are still a very obscure band, sales are very, very slow. Most people here are not used to paying for music, its all cheap bootlegs or free downloads. And except for a handful of kids, there is not really a "collectors" fetish among the hip youth.
Most people refuse to believe it, but we designed the Buddha Machine just minutes before deadline
Q: What kind of electronic music scene is there in China? Is it a cohesive movement and if so how does the FM3 sound fit in?
A: If you had asked me this question in 2004, I probably could have given you a good rundown of the China scene. But since then, the number of electronic musicians and bands has doubled, or tripled and there are just hundreds of kids out there playing all kinds of weird stuff. Noise is a big influence of many electronic musicians, as is breakcore, which has a strong representation in Beijing. It's just such a big country and so much is happening now that it's hard to give an overall picture.
Q: Your latest release as FM3 was through Staalplaat and as is traditional for the label, came housed in some suitably lavish packaging. How important to you is the aesthetic quality of music packaging?
A: We are really happy with the Staalplaat packaging. Like most stuff from them, it's well conceived and executed. Zhang and I are just terrible when it comes to design and packaging. We tend to focus our energy on the music and the performance environment. As a result, our website is completely lame and it took us about five years to do the stuff that most bands do in a few months, like make cool t-shirts, posters, etc.
Q: Did this have any influence on the look of the Buddha Machine?
A: Oh yeah! Most people refuse to believe it, but we designed the Buddha Machine just minutes before deadline. We had a few ideas about what we wanted it to look like, but we kept putting off a decision until about 4pm on the day before production was to begin. So I went over to Zhang's, we sketched a really rough drawing and faxed it to our factory. The final "design process" took about 8 minutes. One of our t-shirts has an image of that sketch. It's pretty crude.
Q: Are there any plans for more Buddha Machines in the future?
A: Not at present. Just handing the production and export of this one is a full time job. Parts are constantly in short supply; memory is hard to source during big holiday periods. Plastic prices jump as oil prices increase... It's stunning the amount of attention it takes to put them all together... It really is a full-time job for both Zhang and I. We've got a release due for Kraak records in Belgium and I'm way behind schedule, mostly cos we have to spend our days sourcing resistors, capacitors and batteries!
Q: What do you make of the slew of artists apparently using the Buddha Machine as source material for their own 'remix' EP's? Monolake, for example, are currently working on such a release...
A: Big support for these kinds of projects! Robert Henke was one of the first people to suggest "remixing" the FM3 loops and I'm told his "layering Buddha" project is coming along well. We also have a compilation project for Staubgold records that will feature a number of our friends doing Buddha Machine reinterpretations. This disk will bring together tunes from people like Sun City Girls, Tortoise, Alog, Jan Jelenik, Stefan Schneider, Blixa Bargeld and others. In addition, there are dozens of bands around the world using the Buddha Machine for their recordings or live sets. As an artist, it's just amazing to see your work take on a life of its own. And in fact, some of these people are probably gonna do some damn good stuff with these loops and probably produce some tunes that are much better than Zhang and I could have done!
Brian Eno was our very first paying customer
Q: What is Buddha Boxing?
A: Buddha Boxing is the live set we are touring in 2006. It's essentially a "sound game" played with Buddha Machines. No PA, No mixer, No stage, No lighting. A simple, go anywhere performance concept.
Q: How did the boxing come about? Was it out of necessity to play out live, or was it a natural evolution once you'd become familiar with the machines?
A: We came up with the idea while on tour in Holland and Belgium last October. By 2005, we had stopped using computers for live performance and were instead using a custom-built acoustic zither and a traditional stringed thing called the Gu Qin. One night during the usually boring lulls between gigs, we messing about with six Buddha machines and just kind of started to play cards with them, throwing down different loops and trying to make a nice tune that would make the other guy react. Suddenly we realised this would make a great live set. Two guys mucking about with coloured boxes is certainly a bit more eye-catching that someone staring at their computer screen. And it freed us from carrying around 90kg of stringed instruments. So after that night, we locked our gear in Belgium and started the Buddha boxing live sets.
Q: Can you explain the rules?
A: Simple. Only one "action" allowed per turn.
I can pick up a Buddha machine, select a loop and put it into play. Or I can remove a machine from play, or change the volume, or loop. Only one "action" then the other contestant gets a chance. He does whatever he wants to do, say he adds another Buddha machine to the mix, and then it's my turn again... The "game" ends when the last Buddha machine is removed from the playing surface. The person who takes that last machine away is the winner. The aim of the game is to make some nice music. It probably makes a lot more sense if you watch the video!
Q: What was your role in the 'Radio Pyongyang : Commie Funk and Agit Pop From the Hermit Kingdom' album?
A: Zhang and I had already done an album for Sublime Frequencies called "Streets of Lhasa." During the production process for "Streets" I mentioned to Alan Bishop that I had been to North Korea in 1994 and had a number of friends who made regular trips. He immediately commissioned a disk of tunes. So I started collecting the fragments that I had from that initial visit and put out the word to my friends for more. Bishop himself threw some tunes my way and then I spent about a year sorting thru hundreds of radio intercepts, live recordings, television captures and pop tunes. During a three-month artist residency in Switzerland I put the whole mess together and Radio Pyongyang was born.
Q: Are you intending to tour Europe more extensively in the coming year?
A: We were on the road for about six months in Europe in 2004. And about 5 months in 2005. This year, we will just do two months in Europe and hopefully three months in USA. Visa issues are a consideration for us because Zhang has a Chinese passport. So when I played London and Chicago in 2004, I had to go alone. We have a booking agent in the USA now, so we hope to sort those issues out and play as much as possible. We still both thrive on live gigs. For years, the only way I could support myself was live gigs and DJ sets. So it's in my blood. The more gigs the better!
Q: If your house were ablaze what five records would you save?
A: Five from my youth:
Husker Du "Zen Arcade"
Black Flag "Jealous Again"
Dead Kennedys "In God We Trust, Inc"
The Residents "Commercial Album"
Flipper "Generic"
Q: What have you been listening to recently? Do you have a current Top 10?
A: Still the tail end of winter in Beijing, so its dark brooding stuff on the stereo: lots of Boris, Sun O))), Earth and Sabbath. And whenever I need to know how much brilliant stuff there is out there, I just tune to the WFMU webcast and am constantly amazed! Best radio station in the world!
Q: What have you included on your FM3 Boomkat Mix?
A: The mix is a short selection of earlier FM3 works and should give the listener a good idea about how the Buddha Machine loops evolved. Similar versions of two of the songs in this mix were released on the French compilation Bip-Hop Generation Vol. 7 in 2004. The opening song is a long version of the first Buddha Machine loop. It is based on a two-note melody played on the Mongolian horsehead fiddle, called Ma Tou Qin in chinese. Underneath the main melody is a recording Zhang Jian made during a trip to Tibet a few years back and which appears on the Streets of Lhasa disk released by the very wonderful USA record label Sublime Frequencies. Total time: 21 minutes. A sleeping pill in music form?
Further Reading;
Visit the FM3 homepage -
www.fm3.com.cn/Join the Buddha Machine Flickr group;
www.flickr.comA Spannish Buddha Machine fan shares his experiences -
www.youtube.com/buddha FM3: Tiny Music
By Christopher R. Weingarten
Songs From The Buddhist Temple Gift Shop
Manufactured on a lark (and a two year struggle) by Beijing noiseambient duo FM3, the Buddha Machine is an unobtrusive little plastic box that plays nine programmed loops from a tinny speaker. From a clinical two second micropulse to a marathon 45 second suite, the lowest-fi loops find bliss, transgression, freedom and sophisticated novelty in a clunky bit of technology. Subsequently, the mysterious little monolith has hit the record geek nerve center in spite of (or probably because of) its $23 list price and complete uselessness to such contemporary interactive mediums as iPods and turntables.
Although he's one of the most progressive voices in modern sound design, with eardrums as steady as a glasscutter's etching hand, FM3's Christiaan Virant still does most of his listening with a beat-up Discman purchased in Hong Kong six years ago. The tranquility-sculptor was born 37 years ago in Omaha, Nebraska to a mom who sang Buddhist chants around the house and a dad who studied Zen. Virant moved to China when he was 20, studying literature, history and philosophy, and formed FM3 in 1999 with Chinese keyboardist Zhang Jian. FM3 built a rep around China and Europe (they've yet to play a show America), for the most still and quiet performances around, so tense and risky that people are afraid to roll cigarettes, shift their weight or even breathe at risk of disturbing the duo's spider-web-thin trickle of sound. Only the tiniest of drones come out of the Buddha Machine but, as Virant explains, so much went into it.
How did the Buddha Machine come about?
I had wanted to do this little box for many, many years. China is a bit of a weird market. You can be famous but not be rich. People know FM3 but we don't really make money, so we never really had the capital to make the little thing. We had a dinner with [Dutch boutique label] Staalplaat in Amsterdam where I sketched out the design of this box. Literally, within the first 10 seconds of our description he said, "Do it. I'll fund it. Just do it." Staalplaat agreed to buy 300 of them. Those 300 are completely gone. The very original one was black and we won't repress them, so now the only ones available are the six colors—white, red, green, this kind of orangish-yellowish thing, blue and pink.
Where did you get the idea for the machine?
It was about 10 years ago-but my mother tells me it was earlier than that. I was in a temple in South China. In temples they're always playing chants over and over and over, and I always thought this music was being piped in. Then I noticed this little box on the altar, and it was pumping out lo-fi, dirty, digitalized-sounding Buddhist chants. I was thinking, "Is it just a tape recorder just on perma-loop?" Then when no one was in the room, I checked it out and it was just a dedicated loop player. This was 10 years ago! So I went to the gift shop-every temple in China has a gift shop where you can buy little Buddhist icons and all this stuff-and I asked about it. They had two, so I bought them both. At that time they were quite expensive—80 Renminbi, which is about 10 U.S. dollars. I could have dinner for a week on that back then. I bought one for me and sent one off for my mother.
There are ones that light up and glow and play different chants, some will go for loops as long as 120 minutes before they recycle, other ones take AC power, some have like 140 different loops in them. The factories that make these products are actually attached to the temple, physically or economically. So when I started tracking down how to make one of these boxes, they didn't want to have anything to do with me. First of all they don't really "do business"—they're not set up to have customers and take orders. And then the second thing, when they do take orders, they deal on the volume of 200,000 of these things. I went to them and said I wanted to make 300 and they laughed and said, "Go away, little boy." I don't know if you've seen any of these old kung-fu movies where the guy wants to train in the Shaolin temple and they say "Go away, you're not worthy," and he just keeps going back and finally they let him in. So I just kept pounding at the door of these companies, took these guys out to dinner, slowly befriended them and chatted them up over a two year period. It was a fun band project to do… a little bit different than putting out another CD with a four-color booklet.
And it's not even some brand new technology, it's pretty prehistoric as far as digital mediums are concerned.
Well [FM3's] music is traditionally very, very quiet, and even though we originally used computers, we were always working with really dirty lo-fi samples or sounds. The music really fits with that medium. If we were a noise band and had done this same box, we don't think it would have the same reception. The music is kind of soft and quite pretty, even the jarring noise that it creates adds to the music. The early prototypes had even more noise, they were really dirty because of the way the circuit board was wired, and I was a fan of that earlier generation. Now we're in the fourth generation and it's evolved in to a bit more clean device. And a bit louder too.
The free loops on your web site are very clean.
Those may even be WAV files. Those were the original files given to the factory, so you can hear the difference in what they sounded like when we gave 'em to the factory and what they ended up like on the little 8-bit audio chip inside the box. One thing I tell everybody is that one reason that I made the box was because I was lazy. I wanted to make sound installations easier and quicker to do. One of the ways I used to make money in Beijing was doing sound installations for various art openings or gallery openings. I got really tired of having to wire up all these installations all the time and I thought, "Gosh, if I can make this box, I could literally walk into a gallery with a piece of double-sided tape and stick my boxes on there, turn them on and walk away. It's like an instant sound installation!
What are some of the more unexpected reactions to the box?
One of the major things we didn't expect is that people would buy more than one. When you're an artist and you have a CD, if you can get your friends to buy even one, you're lucky. But when we took these things to Mutek [Festival in Montreal], first they would come up and buy two, then they'd come up the next day and buy six. Our very first customer was Brian Eno. I popped it out at dinner and instantly he said, "I want six." And when I went to his studio in London he bought more. So from our very first customer, people would buy multiples of this, especially now that people see the whole color series laid out. As an artist you would never ever run into someone [wanting] to buy six copies of your CD. Or even three. Unless you're some type of Duran Duran pop idol and a teenage girl buys two copies of your album. It's just unprecedented for an underground independent artist to be selling multiple copies of their music.
A CD has a set of implied rules, but the Buddha Machine forces the listener to cater it to their own desires—deciding what loop to play, how long to run it, whether it should be ambient or a deep listening experience.
That's something we didn't think about. Maybe because it's something new, it forces people to look at music in a different way. The first buyers were our musician friends, and they took it not as a playback device, but as an instrument. A lot of our friends, big household names in the electronic world, are using this as an instrument, or as a sample bank to create their own music. There's a project with a Berlin label that will be a number of other artists doing music using the Buddha Machine in their own compositions.
I haven't lived in the U.S. for so many years. Living in China, you're really outside a lot of the dialogue of pop culture that goes on in the West, you're kind of off in your own little world. What we didn't think about was the impact of the iPod on American culture and how people would relate this to the iPod—especially when the white one came out. So one of the interesting things is how in the U.S. it's really hit this cultural nerve of people so awash in digital selection that they're happy to have some kind of reductionist solution to their digital problems. This is something we didn't think of because in China, we're not really awash in iPod culture yet. The U.S. has been the most interesting for me because it shows me how out-of-touch I am in what's going on over there. But it's also really satisfying because people have ascribed a lot of importance to this little Buddha Machine that I didn't even think about. A few reviews have said it's the ultimate answer to the iPod generation. And that it's lo-fi and it's retro, but at the same time it's very modernist. So, I have to thank all these reviews in the U.S. for making me sound like I'm a much more thoughtful and creative inventor than I really was!
How about in Europe?
In Europe, people like it because they like the simplistic, minimalist design. And I think there's less analysis about the music industry and downloading. People here just like it for purely the whimsy concept: "Oh look it's a cute box that plays music." Japan is really interesting. When I was originally trying to get it distributed in Japan, they wanted to pay me a really low wholesale price. Their argument was that, in Japan, things made in China are considered really cheap and low quality. I said, "Well, look. It's a CD, but better!" Their argument was that it was worth less than a CD.
Do you have a recommended way to listen or the Buddha Box or do you like the democratic nature of it?
These nine loops are all taken from earlier FM3 works, so people who know us will recognize some of the bits of songs. These were our favorite bits of our music over the last two years and had a lot of thought on how to arrange them. The order of the loops is the recommended listening pattern.
The way we perform live with the Buddha Machines is Zhang Jian and I have devised a sound art card game, where we sit across from each other at a card table where there are six Buddha machines lined up. We each pick three Buddha Machines where I throw down-well, I don't "throw down"-I place down a Buddha Machine with a loop, and he can add to that or take away that "card." We build up the music based on these simplistic card game rules. We even break down our own order and it become a sound art game. We just came up with his game in Amsterdam last month. It's very visual, people get to see that we're doing something. We play completely unamplified as well. No wires, no mixers, nothing. Just a table, us and the Buddha Machines. Since we know the music pretty well by now, we're able to build really nice songs out of these nine simple loops, with an ebb and flow over a performance.
How long is a typical performance?
You know, it really is a game that someone can win or lose. It has some really basic rules. In future generations of the machines we're gonna include a piece of paper on how to play. Whether I win or he wins, it's usually about 35 to 45 minutes depending on how fast we play.
So really the best way to listen to them is to buy a bunch?
[Laughs] Yeah, it's nice to have about three. Robert [Henke] from Monolake bought [a bunch] at Mutek and the way he listens to them is that he turns them all on, puts them on different loops and then puts them around the house in all the corners. So as he's walking around his house in the morning, going from the kitchen to the bathroom to his bedroom, he's walking through different loop soundscapes. When Zhang Jian sells them after shows, he always tries to sell two at a time. He holds up two to each side of your head, so you get a stereo Buddha Machine effect. He's really into the idea of people should buy more than one.
Maybe we should throw a Buddha Machine party.
[Laughs] That would be so cool! I was just in the Ableton Live [music software] office in Berlin and, as a joke, I took a Buddha Machine into their cafeteria, turned it on, and walked away. I came back an hour later and there were 15 engineers surrounding this machine like it was something out of 2001. They were just loving it. I was saying to Robert [of Monolake], I should come to your cafeteria, perform for 30 minutes and sell the Buddha Machine over the lunch hour." How cool would that to do a tour of only geek software companies? I'll give a free performance in your cafeteria as long as I can sell Buddha Machines.
How do other people listen to it?
Someone told me they use the number nine loop, the jittery two-beat fast-recycling loop to annoy their cat with. God knows why anyone would want to annoy their cat.
Have you heard of anyone having sex to the Buddha Machine?
[Laughs] No. No one's told me about that yet. One thing I can say on the record is that, so far, the Buddha Box is not a groupie magnet. It's more of a geek magnet.
I have meditated to mine frequently and reached siddhi consciousness....
Holy smokes! Now I don't feel so bad for writing long posts sometimes...
I'm going to have circle back to this one tonight and see if I can wrap my brain around it.
I'm going to go play golf now...
The Buddha Machine is available on the iPhone with the original drones.
