Official distributor in Thailand
A nine-loop sound box from Beijing
A small plastic box holding nine loops of sound. Switch it on and it plays forever. No stop button, no playlist — just a slider to change the loop and a dial for volume. FM3 made the first one in 2005, and musicians, designers and shopkeepers have been passing it between themselves ever since.
Sound samples are being prepared. Write to us in the meantime and we will send you a recording.
Late 1980s · Xiamen
Christiaan Virant was a language student in Fujian province. He liked to walk up the hill to the local Guanyin temple early in the morning to listen to the nuns chant. One morning the chanting sounded wrong, and when he arrived there was nobody there at all. The sound came from an old answering machine tucked behind the statue, a tape loop turning inside it.
1991
Years later he asked after such a device at a temple booth and was shown a niànfó jī — a black chanting box holding about eight chants, very lo-fi, perhaps eighty seconds of sound. Factories in Taiwan had repurposed a short-duration voice recorder into it, and they did not sell them. They gave them away to the faithful.
1990s · Beijing
He bought two, gave one to his mother and put the other in the bathroom of his Beijing flat — which by then had become a rehearsal room for punk and post-punk bands. Every musician who heard it said the same thing: you should make an album in that box.
2004
After a European tour, FM3 — Virant and Zhang Jian — finally did it. Memory chips then were still pressed as whole wafers, so you could not order one of anything. They meant to make five hundred units but had to put down a deposit as if ordering thousands, and borrowed the money from a friend. The loops inside were cut from live recordings made on that tour.
A quirk of manufacturing
The design was meant to be a plain black case. A slip at the factory turned that batch out in a bright plastic red, the kind of red a 1970s toy was made in. They let it stand — and that is where the Buddha Machine's run of colours began.
March 2005 · Beijing
The day Virant received the first and only prototype — a red unit with nine loops, sitting in his pocket — happened to be the day a friend brought Brian Eno along to dinner. He took it out to show him. Eno wrote his home phone number, his home address and a mobile number on a piece of paper and handed it back.
2005 onwards
Eno talked it up. David Byrne wrote about it in his book. A senior editor at The Wire saw FM3 play their first Buddha Machine set at Club Transmediale in Berlin and the magazine led with it the following issue. The New York Times put it in its end-of-year buying guide. At the peak, two thousand units a week were leaving Hong Kong.
Since then
Throbbing Gristle, Cornelius and Philip Glass have all had limited runs made. The Glass edition came out to mark his eightieth birthday in January 2017, and people still gather to modify and show off machines of their own.
“Visit me in London and bring me four.”
Drawn from Mike McGrath-Bryan's interview with Christiaan Virant in Bandcamp Daily · Read the original feature
Model details and prices are being prepared. Please ask us directly in the meantime.
ARTSELLAR is the distributor in Thailand. Every unit is imported directly from FM3.
