Buddha Box - Philip Glass

Philip Glass Buddha Box - Red Edition

A beautiful and unusual piece of electronic music history: the Philip Glass Buddha Box, a very special edition of the original Buddha Machine concept, released on January 31, 2017, to celebrate the 80th birthday of legendary composer Philip Glass.

Created in collaboration with Beijing-based electronic music duo FM3 (Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian), the Buddha Machine is a pocket-sized ambient loop player inspired by the repetitive, hypnotic structures that define Glass’s music.

This special Philip Glass edition contains 7 distinct hypnotic loops, featuring Glass’s piano, organ and voice. Rather than functioning like a conventional synthesizer, it’s a small, self-contained electronic instrument designed around repetition, texture and atmosphere.

The hardware is beautifully simple: a red plastic soundbox with an integrated speaker, mini-jack headphone output and a single-button control interface. It runs on 2 AA batteries, making it completely portable and wonderfully immediate.

There’s something particularly appealing about the Buddha Box’s simplicity. Turn it on, choose a loop and let it play. The sounds evolve through repetition, creating a hypnotic, meditative quality that works equally well as an ambient music tool, an experimental sound source, a meditation device, or simply an inspiring object to have sitting alongside your instruments.