Layering Buddha Live is a transformation of a transformation.
It all began with my first encounter with the FM3 Buddha Machine: A cheap loop playing device, filled with nine musical loops, created by Christiaan Virant + Zhang Jian, presented at the MUTEK Festival 2004.I realized that the fun starts if you turn on more than one unit. They all sound slightly different, and if you have multiple instances playing back at the same time, all sorts of complex and rich sonic moires appear.
The singles already pointed into the direction of Layering Buddha Live: They were intended to be played in a DJ fashion, where more than one copy is running at the same time, thus creating even more complexity.
However, it can be done in a concert:
Layering Buddha Live uses six channels of audio, with the performer and the audience placed right in the center of the speakers in a focused, calm listening environment. By remixing, altering and spatialization of a large set of slowly fading loops, a highly dynamic and dramatic soundscape is created, a slow travel through the hidden details of the sound of the FM3 Buddha Machine and its transformations.Find below two stereo recordings of the Layering Buddha Live six channel performance. The first recording is from the premiere, January 31 2007 at Maria am Ufer during the Club Transmediale festival in Berlin, and the second file is from a performance recorded on November 22 2008 in Poznan, Poland.
Download / Listen:
( around 60 minutes each )