I just love how Maximilian Büsser digs deep into his childhood memories when he needs inspiration for his next audacious time instrument. Remember Balthazar, Sherman and Melchior? These machines were inspired by the wind-up robots of the past and with the new Horological Machine N°6 Alien Nation, Büsser brings us back once again to a time gone by, a time when an unidentified flying object crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico fueling the imagination for sci-fi adventures.
Already when the HM6 was launched in 2014 it resembled a funky craft from outer space and now MB&F has solidified this vision by adding little aliens as ‘crew’ for this machine. Although it sounds simple enough, the resulting watch was anything but.
The case is formed out of 12 separate blocks of sapphire with reinforcing elements in Grade 5 titanium. Then after 510 hours of machining and polishing, the watch comes together as 12 elements presented as a seamless whole.
Then, there are the aliens; six of these guys are individually modelled and hand-sculpted in white gold by Olivier Kuhn. The aliens are scattered all around the watch and each takes up to 34 hours to complete so for a crew of six, its more than a month of full time work. That’s not bad considering that the arms and necks of these sculptures are finer than grains of sand.
To top it all off, AGT (Ambient Glow Technology) Ultra and Super-LumiNova luminescence are applied around the watch to give it an unearthly glow. There are even four colours of AGT to choose from: green, blue, purple and turquoise.
