I first arrived in China for work in June 2002. I’d visited before, in 1999, but in those three short years Beijing had started changing rapidly and over the following ten years the face of the city centre acquired a radical new set of architecture and an expanded ex-pat population.

Big city but small place, where like-minded people just happened to come together. I soon met Christiaan Virant, a classically trained music student who came to China from the US (or was it Croatia or South Africa?) to continue his studies and then just stayed on and never went back. He formed FM3 with guitarist Hu Zi, exiled from the digital hardcore Japanese-style rock act The Fly, and from Chengdu the also classically trained Zhang Jian, whose father had played clarinet in Chairman Mao’s personal military band.

Virant first came across ‘original’ Buddha Machines in the early nineties in the gift shops often attached to temples. These larger pre-digital versions were repurposed from Ansafones, and were mains driven, holding Buddhist chants, sutras, songs on loops. He bought one for his mum who kept it in her bathroom.

Over time the machines became smaller and smaller, spread throughout all the predominant Buddhist communities of South East Asia, adapted for particular variants of the religion. On trips throughout China, from Liaoning in the North East to Sichuan in the South West, I visited temples when given the opportunity and always picked up examples of the little devils wherever on sale. Manufactured out of QuanZhou, near Xiamen, across the strait from Taiwan where the businessmen who controlled the means of production and distribution originated, the machines were dirt cheap. Virant had always intended to break open a machine, check the viability of adaptation, then locate the factories churning them out; the idea was to commission a small, inexpensive run with more contemporary meditative loops along the lines FM3 were developing in their live act – as a direct reaction to the swarm of rock music that was sweeping across China.

Christiaan helped me technically with the production of my On The Wire BBC radio show while I worked in China, and passported me into Beijing clubs where I started to play dub and dubstep gigs. We visited the BBC bureau in Beijing every week to prepare On The Wire with direct access to the BBC studios facilitated by the excellent Beijing bureau chief, Rupert Winfield-Hayes, now in Japan. Recreationally we would retire every Sunday to a foot massage joint at the China World end of Jianguomenwei Outer Street: myself and my wife Jan; Christiaan; New Jersey boy Steven Schwankert, a journo and recently involved in the production of The Six, the story of the six Chinese survivors from the RMS Titanic; Ray Sander, a logistics supremo from Rhode Island; and Hong Kong-American Ada Chen, at that time a fixer for Quentin Tarantino while filming Kill Bill.

We received weekly updates on the progress of Virant and Jian in their quest to locate the main man behind the mass distribution of the machines. In 2005 they eventually met in a Hong Kong branch of McDonald’s where the boss arrived cloaked in a monk’s garb draped with prayer beads – and engaged in negotiations for production that proved a more problematic challenge in the logistics than the eventual sound design of the loops. The prototype was created using both sampled and played guzheng (plucked zither); Mongolian horsehair fiddle; xiao (bamboo flute); and sheng (vertical reed pipes). It wasn’t until the third edition that the guqin was heard, the long-stringed instrument that often resembled the deepest Delta slide guitar.

While all this was going on my day job was with the British Council. Big in the education sector but with a small arts team, the officer there was struggling to come up with a new project so I suggested a Beijing version of Peter Cusack’s Your Favourite London Sounds, as change in the city was happening so fast that much of the traditional life was disappearing. I proposed Peter, and also suggested that David Toop and Clive Bell may be interested. The ball was truly grabbed and back in London both Brian Eno and Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) were added to the project. Around the time Eno arrived in Beijing in 2005, the Buddha Machine prototype was ready to roll. Christiaan, Jan and I took Eno for dinner at a Hakka restaurant in the Sanlitun area and introduced him to the Buddha Machine. Jan took a photo of Eno, Christiaan and me that he later used on his album Another Day On Earth, although me and Christiaan were cropped out of the image. His later vocal support gave the project the heft required for its launch in Europe.

Over the following years, after a period of purist commercial resistance, there were a number of notable collaborators with FM3 in versions, mutations, inhabitations and remixes of both the concept but mainly the loops. Throbbing Gristle’s Gristleism, Phillip Glass’s 80th birthday edition, and Robert (Monolake) Henke’s 7” vinyl remix set were the most outstanding, but the most outrageous remains FM3’s own edition made from a moulded block of pu’er tea, a variety of fermented tea traditionally produced in China’s Yunnan Province that unusually grows in desirability the more it ages.

Birthed before the arrival of that other iconic device the iPhone, the Buddha Machine provided a prescient resistance to the world soon to be invoked by its cultural antithesis; its recent reappearance following the post-COVID reopening of China proves its ability to weather the intervening two decades of cultural and fashion trends and sonic innovation while remaining defiantly and heroically unique.

Wire subscribers can read Marcus Boon’s July 2006 interview with FM3 discussing the Buddha Machine in issue 269 of the magazine in our online library.