For AI-41 Astral Industries presents a vinyl reissue of Robert Henke’s multifaceted concept album ‘Layering Buddha’. An erudite masterclass on sampling and composition, ‘Layering Buddha’ encapsulates the material process of metamorphosis and a well of nascent, ever-present potentialities. This new edition comes remastered by Henke himself. Originally released in 2006, ‘Layering Buddha’ began with a curious encounter with the ‘Buddha Machine’ - a pocket-sized, battery powered playback device that, over the past two decades, has quietly achieved a cult status around the world. Conceived by the Beijing-based group FM3 (Christiaan Virant, Zhang Jian), the machine takes inspiration from TibetanBuddhist prayer boxes and consists of nine sound loop compositions of varying length, which can be toggled with a single switch. Due to low production cost and manufacturing imperfections, each Buddha Machine is unique, giving slight variations in sound, pitch and duration. Using a state of the art A/D converter Henke made high quality recordings from a single machine, providing the source material for the album. Through various processing and arrangement methods, new pieces emerged, most of them all deriving from a single source loop. The pieces were then set up on the computer as generative arrangements, living as continuously permutating structures that could theoretically go on forever - just as the loops do within the Buddha Machines... The final pieces featured on the album are rendered excerpts of these infinite permutations, and therefore exist as momentary views on a perpetual machinery, as opposed to closed works. Upon initial exploration,it also became a natural development to format the work into an immersive multi-speaker performance - which premiered on January 31, 2007
