THE BUDDHA MACHINE
Available locally at the Candyman
851 St. Michaels Drive, 983-9309
just ran a 700-word review of a little thing called The Buddha Machine. The Buddha Machine is not a band, nor is it an album; rather it's a tiny Chinese plastic transistor box, which comes in many crazy colors only the
Chinese could produce (it's not pink, it's not purple, it's...pinkle?). What does the box do that
merits a review length usually
reserved for the latest indie-rock-IDM-fusion-noise craze?
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Well, it emits, depending on what button you press, one of nine possible pre-programmed ambient pieces of music, seemingly from some sort of Casio source, through a single cheap, crappy speaker. It's as if an iPod merged with a Pokeman that farted out bits of old Air albums.
Sounds terrible, doesn't it. But it's the most addictive, spellbinding, hypnotic little pinkle box you've ever wrapped a sweaty palm around.
What the point of the Buddha Machine is, I could never tell you. But each "song," which range from a few to several seconds, sounds in its own way like the intro to a Siguer Ros song, or perhaps what the soundwaves that slide through Brian Eno's head when he sleeps sound like, or maybe a soundtrack to a SITE Santa Fe video piece.
The beauty of the Buddha Machine is that it distills ambient music down to its purest form. You know how many songs by ambient artists contain four minutes of nouveau-smooth-jazz crap and about 10 seconds of really cool sounds? The Buddha Machine, whether on purpose or not, produces those 10 seconds and cuts off the fat, leaving a lean, mean, addictive sound machine.
