Creative Technology

Christiaan Virant: It didn’t really change anything. Let’s say this first, I think it’s impossible to separate creativity and technology, because technology constantly limits and defines what we can and cannot do.  There are artists that work with technology that push the limits to get what they want. A really good example is your software, Star6.  You approached the technology and pushed it to the limits and that is reflected in how Star6 works and functions. I had the same technology, the same platform, for the Buddha Machine application. But I purposely limited the creative input to create an almost Luddite piece of work.

So I guess the question is, after I made the plastic, physical Buddha Machine, how did it affect my creative development? Because once I developed this format, and once it became successful, then I locked myself into a new format. The fact is that 99% of musicians do not invent the format for how they release their music. Most of us use existing formats invented by big corporations. For the Buddha machine, I used an existing format, the chant box, but repurposed it for music distribution.  Once that format became “my format” then of course it did impact how I made music, because then I began to make music for a small 8-bit box with a crappy speaker.

CV: I purposely from the beginning always sought to make very lo-fi music.  Of course, I use a combination of digital and analogue technologies to record instruments and process them. But in comparison to what the average musician uses these days, im a pretty low-tech guy. I’m still running Ableton Live ver. 3 [it’s up to 8 now] and some even earlier software that wasn’t even branded, just some simply shareware that were like predecessors to Star6, but in laptop form and they didn’t have the power of Star6.

CV: To be really honest, at the beginning of the iPhone development, I was very optimistic, I thought “This is great I have this platform for creative output, and someone has made the platform all I have to do is plug in my ideas to it via software”.  But increasingly I prefer to also create my own platform as well. This is because I enjoy creating both the medium AND the message.  Since my message is pretty vague, I use medium as a crutch. Medium is a force multiplier, to use military terms. If you successfully mix message and medium they multiply their effective power. For example I’m not a great songwriter. But the Buddha Machine worked to my advantage because we limited the loops to just a few seconds of sound. I remember when I was young, a friend listened to “Who can it be now” by Men At Work for 6 hours straight. It was considered insane then, and rarely do people do that, but people will play a single track of the Buddha machine for 8-10 hours.   Of course they aren’t focused on listening to it for 8 hours, but it’s there.  Technologies, like the hardware Buddha machine and various software instruments are the creative force multipliers for our music.

For more on Christiaan and the Buddha Machine head over to their website: www.fm3buddhamachine.com