New favorite ear candy

My friends Steve and Jody kindly bought my husband a Buddha Machine [schema borrowed from maker Web site, above] for his road trip. I was so jealous, I went out and bought one for myself the next day.

When I'm writing--which is pretty much all I do when I'm not eating, sleeping, working out, reading, or hanging out with friends--I find music (especially with lyrics) really distracting. At the same time I like a little bit of white noise. This odd little doodad, created by the Chinese electronic act FM3, is the perfect solution. What is it? PopMatters' Mike Schiller has an excellent explanation of the Buddha Machine in his review:

The Buddha Machine, then, is a little plastic box that plays music. Specifically, FM3 constructed nine drones, varying from two seconds to 42 seconds, which repeat endlessly in the listener's ear until the "track" is switched to the next drone (or the two AA batteries run out). ... In a way, it's like the cheapest pre-loaded IPod you'll ever be able to buy. It even comes in a number of different colors, for the fashion-conscious experimental music aficionado. Mine's a very stylish magenta.

At its heart, however, the Buddha Machine is actually a counterargument to the onset of the downloading age. For one, the entire point of the release is to have the little box. Sure, you could theoretically download each of the drones (which are actually available in mp3 form on FM3's website), push "repeat" in your media player of choice, and have something close to the original effect, but you lose much of the aura of the work that way -- evaluating these drones purely on the basis of their musical merit is entirely different than evaluating them as an aspect of an odd little artifact. For two, the sound of the drones via the machine is very, very lo-fi, creating an audible buzz in the speaker as the volume gets higher, not to mention the fair amount of hiss that accompanies the drones at any volume. An argument could be made that the constant hiss and crackle is a part of the music (much as the point of John Cage's 4'33" is not the silence, but the sounds surrounding that silence), lending a bit of entropy to the largely static drones.
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