Beauty in the Brevity of a Single Moment: A Conversation With Chandler Lach of Ness Lake

As I’ve repeated time and time again, I had no idea what I was in for when I moved to Detroit at the end of 2018. I had no idea what kind of weather I was about to deal with, what kind of people I was about to meet, or what kind of music scene I was about to uncover. Over the following year and a half, I witnessed some of the most incredible sets of live music I’d ever seen. I discovered bands that were overflowing with creativity, passion, and kindness. I drank so many White Claws in sweaty basements that I can practically taste the lime-flavored carbonation just thinking about it. 

I miss the midwest every day. Sure, I miss the Faygo and square pizza, but most of all, I miss that network of creative people that welcomed me with such open arms. I miss the photographers, musicians, and fans that shared the same love and appreciation for music as I did because it was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. 

Out of the large and seemingly ever-expanding pool of Michigan creativity comes Ness Lake. Initially conceived as the solo-project of Chandler Lach, Ness Lake was formed from the ashes of Swordfish, a midwest emo revival band that released one album and made a big splash before the members dispersed on to separate projects. Those bands ranged in scope and style from hardcore, throwback grungy rock, and lo-fi bedroom indie. Ness Lake definitively falls in the latter category but retains Lach’s unmistakable voice that was found throughout the 23 minutes of Rodia. While his vocals may sound similar to those found on the cult emo touchpoint, the difference is precisely what you might expect from nearly a half-decade of time passing; Lach’s songwriting has been honed to a fine point, and his sonic palette has expanded to new heights. 

Not only is Ness Lake home to some of the best songwriting in the entire state of Michigan, the scope of the project, and its initial beginnings as a hidden Bandcamp page gave Lach the time, space, and freedom to truly let his creativity unfurl. He was able to experiment, play, and break out of traditional album formats and artistic expectations. 

Earlier this year, Lach released Everything Green and Overgrown, 16 entirely self-produced tracks that act as a synopsis of his 2019. At the end of August, he gifted us Low Light, a collection of vignettes that mirror the emotions and feelings we’ve collectively experienced during this claustrophobic year spent in isolation.

While these are just two releases of more than a dozen on Ness Lake’s Bandcamp page, both Everything Green and Low Light act as perfect entry points to Lach’s unique brand of soft, electronic-tinged lo-fi. I sat down with Lach to talk about Ness Lake’s ever-evolving sound, scaling his songs up or down for live shows, and the Michigan scene at-large.

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It’s hard to pin Ness Lake down to any one genre. In the past, you’ve described the project as “delay-driven diary-rock,” and more recently, you’ve used the term “sound collections” which simultaneously feels broad yet accurate. How do you describe the project when you’re explaining it to people?

It’s hard! I actually don’t like bringing up the project with people, at all lol. But yeah, it’s hard when I do because it’s not really an easy sound to classify. At least from record to record, I think that the sounds and approach are constantly shifting. Sometimes I just tell people (especially coworkers) that I play “alternative rock” and try to change the subject. 

I chose “sound collections” for this most recent release because I’ve been ruminating on like, the molecules of songs? It sounds stupid, or pretentious or whatever, but in sampling and sequencing music, you have so much control about the individuality and minutia of each hit. This is the first record where I’ve used a significant amount of sampling in my production. It’s sort of in vogue, right? Lo-fi beats to chill and study to is such a meme for a reason lol. I can’t explain it, but there’s something really cathartic for me in hearing a fuzzy sample of Lisa Simpson talking over dreamy melodies and loops. With sampling, you can take literally any noise that catches your ear and do whatever you want with it. It reminds me of this VHS they would play for us in elementary school music class of the performance STOMP where they make beats and choreography by slamming trash cans around. It’s like I can take any noise I hear in real life, record it with my phone, then run it through the knobs later on. There’s something really special about viewing music as collecting and arranging, it’s kinda like scrapbooking.

But yeah, I usually just call Ness Lake an “ambient lo-fi pop” project.

Watching you transition from hyper-narrative slice-of-life emo to restrained hypnotic lo-fi has been incredibly fulfilling to watch. What is your process when it comes to writing lyrics and how has that changed over the past few years? 

My favorite English teacher, my senior year of high school, would always say “brevity is the soul of wit!”

Yeah, I think there’s a lot of power that exists in the “hyper-narrative slice-of-life” stuff. You can obviously tell more fleshed out stories, but I don’t think that it’s always the most effective approach. In the last year or so, I’ve dedicated a lot of my energy to thinking about my voice as another instrument in the arrangement--being more conscious of its rhythm, melody, and place in the song. Sometimes, that means less is more.

Now, at 25, I work as a 10th grade English teacher, and the last few years I’ve been teaching this collection of vignettes called The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. In teaching vignettes, and having my students write vignettes, I’ve learned a lot about the beauty in the brevity of a single moment. I try to meditate on that throughout the day. Many of my recent songs embody feelings sparked by brief, beautiful interactions and I try to craft the song around that experience. 

How has the autonomy of self-producing and self-releasing your own music changed your creative process?

Most of the songs for low light were written and tracked in single 4-8 hour sessions with absolutely zero pressure or outside influence. In seeking further independence, I was also able to complete the complementary tasks like mixing/mastering the songs, crafting the album art, creating the website, and editing the music videos. This was empowering because it’s the first time I’ve ever been able to do these things by myself. 

Without an official label leveraging the costs, I don’t feel obliged to fit any specific molds or do anything a certain way anymore to reach an intended audience. I’m just making the kind of stuff that I like now. This being said, I am very thankful for my friend Gabriel Clements and their label Two Foot Parade for doing a small tape run of the album (announcing 10/10/20!)

Of course, I’m also saving a lot of money doing it this way. It’s sad, I wish I had the money to commission and collaborate with the beautiful artists and producers in my life. Recording in a professional studio with an engineer is an incredible experience! Unfortunately, there’s very little to be made in the music industry…. Especially for lo-fi bedroom pop musicians lol. 

All this to say, I can’t make this machine turn all alone. I’m very thankful for my friends Matthew Johnson and Isaac Daniels who support Ness Lake in earnest. They’re both very special to me. It’s cool to build relationships with artists who primarily delve into other mediums. Isaac and Matthew have both left lasting impressions on the way that I create and view art.

[Matthew is a multimedia artist and MFA student at University of Northern Texas, where he also teaches introductory art classes to undergraduate students. We find a lot of parallels between our work; while I primarily create auditory media and he creates visual media, we’re able to consider and critique each other’s art at its core form: as expression! Matthew regularly contributes beautiful pieces of his art to the project, including the full album spreads of both Kicking and Rodia (by Swordfish).]

[Isaac is a graphic designer at a company called AREA 17, based out of Brooklyn, New York. Isaac has been a fervent supporter in my life, since he discovered Swordfish in 2017 and somehow inserted himself into my life as a trusted friend and collaborator (lol). Isaac is basically my one-man all-things-emo focus group--he’s honest, in-tune, and constantly hunting for new music to spin. Isaac has helped me with spectacular design work (and is also really patient when I send him some text that I can’t figure out how to align) and also just finished the design work for the low light tape pressing with Two Foot Parade Records.]

It seems like you have all the tools at your disposal to create the exact type of songs that you want. How has your approach to music creation changed over the last few years?

Oh god yeah. The people that are close to me are all well aware of my habits. My collecting habits don’t stop at sounds, unfortunately. I feel like what you’re saying rings true though. When I first started making music (in 2009, freshman year of high school), all I owned was my acoustic guitar, so all I wrote were terrible acoustic pop-punk songs. As I’ve accumulated different pieces of musical gear, I’ve found that I’ve expanded with it. Like… If I have a keyboard, I’m going to use it! I try to create interesting layering with my music to try and make textures, so there’s a lot of room for experimentation.

I’m very privileged to be gainfully employed and have a relatively low cost of living at this current moment. I’ve found great pleasure in buying/selling/trading music gear as a way of testing and trying various gear. After all, as long as you keep good care of your stuff, it usually retains its value. There was a point in my life where I just constantly refreshed /r/letstradepedals, Craigslist, and Facebook Marketplace. 

It kind of turned into a game? An addiction? It was cool, I basically got to try every reverb pedal on the market for pretty much the cost of shipping. I feel like you can watch a thousand pedal demos of the same pedal and then once it comes in the mail, it sounds completely different through your own rig than it did through your iPhone speakers when you’re watching Knobs demos. It’s like a curation process. Except I own like eight cassette players for no reason now.

The two main instruments I used for low light were my Teenage Engineering OP-1 and the Elektron Model:Cycles. I was fortunate enough to get them used from friends in some Facebook gear groups I subscribe to. My main workflow lately is to record four instrumental tracks onto the OP-1’s internal recorder, program six drum tracks onto the Model:Cycles, and then I can play them at the same time, essentially allowing me to control ten loops concurrently, bringing parts in and out. Then, I fill in the gaps and add layers on top of this foundation to flesh out the rest of the song. This process has its limitations, but it’s been wonderful for wrangling these collections of sound.

At the beginning of the year, you announced that Marco Aziel of kissyourfriends and Bran McDole of Great Expectations were rounding out Ness Lake live band. What was it about these two that made them the right fit for Ness Lake live?

Marco and Bran are both close friends of mine. I’ve been friends with Marco since like 2016, when Swordfish played with Daddy and the Long Legs. I met Brandon shortly after, from playing with his band too.

It actually worked out really well. A couple years ago, at the school that I work at, we had an open position for a chemistry teacher, and at the time I knew that Brandon 1. Was a pretty cool, good, decent guy, and 2. Had a chemistry teaching degree! So Brandon eventually came to work at our school. It’s pretty funny to be in a band with your coworker. 

I tried to keep our music lowkey at work because I’m not ready for the critiques of teenagers haha. But then, about a year ago we asked our principal if we could use an empty classroom as a practice space. So a couple of the students have seen our drum kits and amps haha.

Marco and I have had a close artistic relationship for a while. I really admire their perspective on life, but especially music. They’re like my musical sage haha. We have a group chat where we’re just constantly bouncing demos and experiments and ideas off of each other. It’s really inspiring to have these kinds of relationships and hear other’s perspectives on art. Both Marco and Brandon, being songwriters, bring immense value to the project, past their technical abilities. It’s really beautiful (and satisfying?) to see how songs expand and evolve once they’ve spent some time with the full band. 

Your live shows range from full-band post-rock to loopy distorted acoustic slowcore when playing solo. How do you go about scaling your songs up or down to fit the given situation?

So I feel like I have two different types of songs.

There are songs that I just do as one-offs, to capture ideas or moments that I’ve created but have no intention of trying to recreate. These songs typically have a ton of layers and would be very difficult to recreate in a live setting (without just using backing tracks, which I might have to do for low light? IDK I’m still thinking about how I want to perform some of those tracks). These songs aren’t played live, but I think that they are unique, special, and worth sharing. I believe that a lot of musicians probably have similar practices, but don’t publish that writing. I just scrolled down and looked at the interview questions, so it seems like I can elaborate more on this a little later on.

Then, there are the songs that I commit more energy and thought into their creation. This is much easier for me to do on my guitar. These songs are usually written with the intent of bringing them to a full-band arrangement. These songs are also the ones that I remember how to play, so they’re typically on the setlist...

For performances, if the full band is available, practiced, and willing, absolutely nothing matches the energy, excitement, and immersiveness of playing with a full-band. It’s sweet. If the band doesn’t meet those conditions, I’ll typically ask the promoter if it’s cool if I perform solo. Sometimes, they’re looking for a full-band, and that’s totally cool. 

For scaling the songs down, I like ‘loopy distorted acoustic slowcore’ as a genre name lol. Yeah, I’d say that the “loopy distorted” elements are new to the last few years. I guess it’s kind of me just experimenting with and expanding on the singer-songwriter-with-an-acoustic-guitar trope to try and make it more interesting/true to what I want it to sound like? 

Before every solo (or + Marco) set, I choose like 5-7 songs that I’m confident in. For smaller, more personal shows, I might get a little creative, but I put a lot of pressure on myself when I’m performing, so I try to play ones that I’m really comfortable with. Then each song is conceptualized for whatever I want to play.

If I’m feeling lazy/depressed/etc. Maybe I’ll just bring my acoustic, but if Marco doesn’t have anything going on and we can practice, we pull out as many stops as we can, preparing loops/samples and figuring out which of the Casio drum beats sound good. It’s cool to approach the songs as general structures and then flesh them out in unique ways for each performance. 

You’ve seemed to be using more and more vocal manipulation over the years to the point where your voice is almost unrecognizable on some tracks. What is it about these techniques and effects that you’re drawn to?

I think it’s starting to get trendy in our circles. There are tons of artists, especially outside of “emo” that are already skewing their vocals and have been forever, but I think the “archetypical voice” of emo might be shifting? It’s like you click on 90% of /r/emo posts and their vocalist either sounds like Brendan Lukens, Mike Kinsella, or Brian Sella. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad, but in the wake of this, I’m seeing many artists in the genre start to develop their own vocal stylings with positive outcomes. My friend Geoff of the hit rock and roll band Blush Cameron sings like no one else I know, and it’s captivating. Simultaneously, you have acts like 100 gecs, Alex G, and NNAMDÏ that are all wizards of vocal manipulation and are heralded in our music communities. I think people are excited to hear artists breaking the mold.

I think there are a lot of things that draw me to it though. I think that manipulating my voice, similar to how I manipulate my synths/guitars, puts me in a place where I think of my voice as an instrument? I’ve spent so many years agonizing over lyrics and viewing them almost separately to the music itself, but vocal manipulation, especially pitching, makes me think about the role of melody. If you listen to my older songs, you can definitely tell. 

I don’t always love my voice either haha, it’s fun to obscure the track and make it feel like someone else is singing the song.

Despite the fact that the pandemic has thrown a wrench into live music, it seems you’re as productive as ever. How has quarantine and isolation impacted your creative flow? 

I guess that it hasn’t impacted my creative flow much at all- except my hours as a teacher are a lot more flexible now since we’re doing some hybrid virtual/in-person learning right now. There are some days where I don’t have to go to school, and I can work on music as soon as I finish my professional tasks for the day. I wrote and recorded low light during the summer though, so we’ll see how much writing I can get done now that work has picked up again.

That being said, the pandemic definitely threw a wrench in our full-band recording plans. Marco, Bran, and I were supposed to have a full-band record finished by the end of Summer 2020. With everything that’s happened, we haven’t practiced since March. It’s hard for me because we had about 12-15 demos I was excited about, and now I can’t even remember how to play some of them haha. I trust that when the time is right, we will be able to bring it to life, but I don’t think there’s any point in rushing it.

I would say that I’ve always sort of leaned toward isolation before all of this happened too. Being social takes a lot of energy, and mental illness only makes it more difficult. Working on music alone in front of my computer is really peaceful. I don’t think this is anything really unique, but things like music, video games, TV, and social media let me pause the executive functioning parts of my brain for a bit- giving me some release from anxiety. Sometimes the pausing can be a little excessive though.

Writing songs alone allows me to really ruminate on the feelings I’m trying to compartmentalize and channel into these songs. I think that there is a certain freedom of expression when you’re alone too. Even when I’m collaborating with my most trusted friends, there is a pressure that comes with playing with other people. There’s comfort in solitude.

Even though it’s only several years old, your discography as Ness Lake is pretty daunting. Do you view yourself as prolific, or is that just the form that your process takes? Similarly, what would you recommend as people’s entry point to the band?

I definitely view it as the form that my process takes. I counted all of the songs I’ve ever written and published a while ago, and it was like over 100 lol. I don’t take any pride in writing a lot of songs. I think that there are at least a handful of terrible, unlistenable songs in the discography too. Ness Lake started as a way for me to privately post and share demos that weren’t a good fit for Swordfish. I liked Bandcamp’s UI better than SoundCloud, so I made NL as a secret Bandcamp project so I could pass around demos without something like Google Drive or Dropbox. I think I romanticized myself as some kind of aloof mysterious lo-fi artist at the time. There’s a Ness Lake Tumblr from that time period too lol.

I think that most people in the industry or scene or whatever have the mindset of “quality > quantity” and there’s validity to that for sure. I would say it's definitely motivated by capitalism though because “quality” is what sells records, runs labels, collects clicks, whatever. I think this mentality locks a lot of people out because it takes a LOT of resources to record an LP in a professional studio.

Along with this, I think there’s tremendous value in capturing the process of artistic expression and growth alongside these “quality songs.” If an artist on a low-scale indie label’s press schedule can only release one, ten-song album a year, what happens to all of the stuff that doesn’t make it into that record? Where is the first acoustic demo of their #1 single? Where is the song that the band decided was too slow? Where is the goofy pop song that the band made at 2 AM? Where is the song that the band couldn’t afford to record because they ran out of time? 

I think artists limit themselves by only revealing only *the most pristine* bits to the public. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be good. If you’ve created something that you think is beautiful and worth sharing, then it’s worth sharing. If anything, let it be a token on your path so you can look back and see how far you’ve come. 

But yeah, when I’m telling someone about the band, I usually ask them if they know what lo-fi is. If the answer is no, I usually just recommend hopping into kicking because it has the broadest appeal to your average “rock n roll listener” lol. If the answer is yes, I would suggest listening to low light because I feel like it’s the best representation of my music right now (which would make sense since it just released lol) I don’t know. Each of the albums has a different feel or texture. If I was trying to get into NL, what I would do is just put the whole discography on shuffle and write down the names of the albums that the songs I liked were from.

Finally, what advice would you give to people looking to create music on their own?

Uhhh, I’m going to write a bunch of cliches/things I’ve learned here:

The hardest part of music is coordinating band practices.
Be gentle with yourself and others; it’s just art, so it’s ok to mess up.
Don’t compromise your visions for others’ approval, because sometimes you won’t get any approval at all, and then you’re left with nothing.
If you’re not enjoying the process, you’re not doing it right.
You don’t have to publish everything you create, but you should probably record it.
There are lots of inexpensive ways to dip your toes into music creation.
Everyone can and should make noise.

Thanks for readin!

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Follow Ness Lake:

Bandcamp | Twitter | Instagram | Website

Young Thug Can't Stop Rapping About His Glasses

I’m gonna let you guys in on a little secret, the most successful posts on this website aren’t the long-form dissertations, the nostalgic countdowns, or even the loving album reviews. No, the reality is, the most viewed articles on this site are consistently the most stupid ones. I’m talking about that time that I compiled every time 21 Savage talked about food on his debut album. I’m talking about the time I analytically broke down every reference Lil Pump has made to the elderly. I’m talking about when I listed out the (shockingly-high) number of times that Offset has name-dropped Patek Philippe. 

I don’t know if these posts succeeded due to some unintended SEO magic on my part, or I have a silent sleeper cell of fans who enjoy what essentially amounts to long-form hip-hop shitposts. Either way, my brain can only handle so much of that intentionally-stupid writing style before it starts to self-immolate in protest, so I tend to do it in very select bursts. That said, every once in a while I like to take a break from “serious posts” to talk about something abjectly stupid, and today is one of those days because I have important news to share with you all: Young Thug is obsessed with his glasses.

Yes friends, shocking, I know… world-shattering even, but I’ve listened to enough Young Thug over the years to pick up on this startling phenomenon. Whether intentional or not, Young Thug has made spectacles an artistic throughline in his music the same way that some other rappers might rep their cities or romanticize their drug of choice. Sure, glasses are essentially an extension of bragging about expensive jewelry or other fashion accessories, but it’s the consistency with which Thug relies on this device that’s notable here. Below you’ll find no less than a dozen references to glasses penned by the artist born Jeffery Lamar Williams. I hope your vision is good and you’re ready to be called a nerd, because we’re through the looking glass here, people. Let’s begin.

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“Stoner” (2013)

Fittingly, Young Thug’s first recorded reference to his glasses can be found on the song that initially put him on the map: 2013’s “Stoner.” I’ll be honest, I have no idea what this line means, but that doesn’t stop it from going any less hard. 

“Tell Nobody No” (2014)

Gucci Mane’s co-sign was an important milestone in the early stages of Thug’s career. While Young Thugga Mane La Flare legitimized Thug as an up-and-coming trap star, it also marked the beginning of Thug’s optical obsession: marking the second instance of this lyrical crutch. With this line, Thug manages to allude to his wealth with a fashion-forward Chrome Hearts name-drop (glasses that typically run about $1,000) and doubly-flexes with the fact that they make him look like a nerd but elaborating that he doesn’t particularly care. 

“Can’t Tell” (2015)

One is an example, two is a coincidence, but three is a trend. Barter 6 was a landmark album in Thug’s career that finally made his style click for thousands, if not millions of people. This line, in particular, glorifies Thug’s glasses to a point where they possess an almost Superman-like quality that allows him to accurately disguise his identity.

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Everything seemed to be going right for Thug in early 2015. He successfully used the momentum of “Stoner” to drop a tape with Gucci Mane, he proved himself versatile in a wildly-successful collab with Rich Homie Quan, and his major-label debut received glowing reviews from both the press and his budding fanbase alike. Young Thug was doing everything right, and it was truly shaping up to be his year. 

Sometime in May of 2015, right as Young Thug seemed to be at the height of his exploding popularity, over one hundred of his songs leaked online. While leaks of any sort tend to do more harm than good, a leak of this size was unprecedented and represented a massive blow to Thug’s momentum at the time. While it certainly impacted the rest of his year, Young Thug’s indomitable spirit managed to shine through, and he decided to make the best of things. This leak led to the release of a series of fantastic mixtapes in Slime Season that allowed Thug to collect the best of this material and polish it up for public consumption. Most importantly, this leak also exposed Thug’s continuing eyewear obsession, as I’m about to highlight.

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“No Way” (2015)

While this is almost certainly one of his weakest glasses-related lyrics, the phase “big-time glasses” is a hilarious (if not flat-footed) way for Thug to segue into money talk.

“Crime Stoppers” (2015)

On this early collaboration with Migos (a part of the long-rumored MigosThuggin collaborative tape), this line calls back to Thug’s Chrome Hearts purchase while also drawing a playful connection to one of the most famous glasses wearers of all time: Harry Potter.

“Calling Your Name” (2015)

It was around this time that Thug truly began to lean into the lyrical absurdity and over-the-top sexual references he later became known for. Undeniably a standout from the first entry of the Slime Season series, this line turns the lens away from Thug and onto the listener questioning whether or not they have any vision problems. Truly fourth-wall-breaking poetry.

“Scoop” (2016)

Young Thug is nothing without his glasses. Not only do they help him see, they’re practically a source of power, confidence, and self-worth. They help him accomplish his goals and pursue his dreams, whether that be money, women, or success. When Thug breaks out his glasses, that’s how you know things are about to get serious.  

“Far Away” (2016)

Almost more of a checklist than a flex, these lines allude to Thug’s gang affiliations and taste for expensive glasses all in the same breath. A breathtaking economy of words.

“Say” (2016)

Much like “Scoop,” in this line Thug’s glasses are a conduit to an almost superhuman ability, serving as the psychological framework through which he views the world, or in this case, judges someone’s character to be untrustworthy. 

“Daddy’s Birthday” (2017)

It appears that Thug has moved on from name-dopping his Chrome Hearts to his new Celines. Here the ad-libs support his fixation with glasses as he pleads with some unknown force that all he wants are his glasses. Here we see Thug in his raw, most spiritually-crushed state as he recognizes the one thing in this mortal world that genuinely brings him pleasure.

“Three” (2017)

Much like “Can’t Tell” from two years prior, this collab between Young Thug and Future finds Thug shaming himself for feeling like a nerd for wearing glasses. Maybe he’s a self-hating glasses wearer, motivated by some deep-seated shame or psychological trauma, or perhaps he’s saying his outward nerdiness doesn’t even matter because he’s still achieving success in life and finances regardless of that fact.

“Anybody” (2018)

In a double-flex, Thug gives us a fashion-forward fit check from the Maison Margiela shoes on his feet to the Farrakhan glasses on his head. It’s a clever way to give a quick overview of his high-fashion choices while also tossing off two quick references to how much his average outfit would cost (allowing the listener to fill in the blanks with equally-priced pieces).

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There you have it, folks; one dozen references to glasses stretched across half a decade and nearly a dozen releases. Thug has always been a polarizing fixture in the rap landscape, but as his continued success paved the way for billboard smash hits, #1 albums, and new artistic heights, it’s important to recognize the successes that led him to where he is now. We simply cannot lose sight of Thug, nor his glasses obsession, lest we be just as blind as him.

The History of the Guitar Pedal

From blues-rock luminaries like Jimi Hendrix and Jack White to obscure but talented new artists like the ambient musician James Li, effects pedals have allowed guitarists from different generations and genres to explore new soundscapes and find their own unique sound. But how did it all begin? How did electric guitarists first discover the best ways to modify their signal?

The roots of guitar effects pedals can be traced back to the 1930s when the guitar amplifier first started gaining traction. At the time, the typical amp offered just 10 watts of power, until Leo Fender introduced the Super Amp in 1947. Guitarists who purchased the Super Amp very quickly discovered that turning the volume all the way up resulted in a fuzzy, distorted sound.

Years earlier, this dirty, fuzzy tone was already popularized by Western blues legend Junior Barnard. Combined, Barnard’s percussive playing style and his use of two instead of one set of guitar pickups allowed him to produce some of the earliest, truly dirty licks in the blues genre's history. As more electric guitarists figured out that they could achieve Barnard’s tone by just turning the Super Amp’s volume all the way up, the distortion effect swept the nation. Fender responded by turning the power up and releasing 50-watt versions of the Super Amp.

Riding this wave of distortion headfirst, Ike Turner and his guitarist Willie Kizart showed the world the potential of distortion in 1951 when they recorded “Rocket 88,” which Time Magazine argues is a close contender for the first-ever rock ‘n’ roll record in history. Depending on who you ask, on their way to the studio to record the song, Kizart’s amp either fell off the top of the car or was damaged when rainwater leaked through the trunk where it was stored. Either way, Kizart immediately fell in love with his damaged amp’s gritty, fuzzy new sound, and recorded it for posterity.

Apart from being hailed by many as the first true rock ‘n’ roll song, “Rocket 88” started a wave of musicians and sound techs attempting to imitate Kizart’s seminal distortion for decades. One of the more successful attempts was by sound tech Orville Rhodes who built a basic fuzz pedal for The Ventures, an instrumental rock band from the ‘60s.

Realizing the massive potential of this idea, Gibson guitar developed the Maestro Fuzz-Tone pedal, which is behind Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richard’s iconic tone in 1962’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Capitalizing on that development, in 1966, Arbiter Electronics released the now legendary Dunlop Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face, which Tonebox’s pedal review notes was the effect that was behind the classic tone of Jimi Hendrix himself. And while distortion, fuzz, and overdrive gain pedals comprise a truly seminal part of guitar effects history, they were far from being the only effects units being developed at the time.

The first standalone guitar effects unit ever manufactured was the DeArmond Tremolo Control, which was released in 1946. Its key component is a vial of electrolytic liquid, which is shaken up and down by a small electric motor and spindle. Ran through the signal, the movement of this liquid cuts and allows the signal to pass in uniform speeds, resulting in the tremolo volume modulation effect. This shimmering guitar sound has also been instrumental in the earliest days of electric blues and rock ‘n’ roll, as heard in the tremolo-driven works of luminaries like Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley. Today, the tremolo vibrato lives on through guitarists like Jack White and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood.

Another seminal effects unit was Market Electronic’s Echoplex delay, which was released in the early ‘60s. Inspired by the work of renowned engineer Les Paul in the field of multitracking and tape manipulation in the ‘50s, the Echoplex delay, in turn, paved the way for the Roland RE-201 delay and reverb effects unit. And both effects have been well utilized by the likes of St. Vincent, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, John Mayer, Mac DeMarco, and other well-known innovators in guitar history.

While there are many other pedals that deserve to be included in the earliest days of guitar effects, the aforementioned pedals were some of the most seminal effects units in history. Today, the thousands of standalone units for overdrive, delay, reverb, fuzz, tremolo, boost, wah, and other effects continue to augment the impact of both analog and digital effects on the development of contemporary music.

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Article for swimintothesound.com
By Jen Bawl

Blogger, amateur guitarist, and music historian Jen Bawl is fascinated by how guitar effects have changed and evolved over the years. When she’s not online and looking for new and innovative musicians, she likes to dig up music history through old vinyl records, links, and stories from the web.

Knope – Broken Couch | Track Premiere

You know what would sound great right now? A gig. As of today, I am 179 days without a concert, and there’s nothing I want more than to be packed into a sweaty basement drinking cheap beer and screaming along to songs that I love with dozens of other fans. I miss tipping $5 at the door, I miss the comforting sight of people smoking on a porch, I miss coming home with armfuls of new t-shirts that no one at my day job will understand… hell, I even miss my earplugs. 

While we’re still a ways away from any of these feelings returning, we’re lucky to have a new Knope song that captures the energy of a gig better than anything I’ve heard over the course of quarantine. 

Following up their excellent collaboration with Kicksie back in January, “Broken Couch” is the first single off the band’s upcoming EP An Exercise In Patience. Beginning with a thrashing volley of guitar, bass, and drums, I can practically see the pit opening up within the first few seconds of this song. If I close my eyes, I can almost feel the hands on my back as if I’m in someone’s basement being pushed against a wall of strangers illuminated by the soft glow from a string of multi-colored Christmas lights. 

Within seconds, lead singer Jack David bursts into the track, spitting bile at things completely out of his control before recounting a tale of teenage abandonment that becomes the foundation for the rest of the song. “I kinda felt like I was wasting your time,” he explains, grappling with decade-past trauma as the instrumental gnashes beneath him. 

Guided by an even-keel bassline, mathy guitar taps, and swift drumline, the song propels itself forward in time, introducing new characters and events that find the roles reversing as David now feels like he’s the one wasting someone else’s time. Eventually, the song returns to where it started. Now in search of some form of closure or acceptance, David finds himself returning to the scene of the first verse with a new outlook, arriving at the conclusion “I kinda feel like you've been wasting my time,” achieving some form of redemption before the song quiets to a close, leaving us to fill in the rest. 

The fact that Knope is able to pair this heartfelt narrative (complete with a clever lyrical through line and three-act structure) in just under three minutes is a testament to their ability as writers. The decision to pair this sentimental storytelling with such an energetic instrumental is an arresting contrast that will have you coming back for multiple re-listens, hungry what comes next in the EP. On the bright side, at least we all have some time to memorize the lyrics before our next communal basement singalong, whenever that may be. 

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“Broken Couch” drops on all streaming platforms tomorrow, and Knope’s upcoming EP, An Exercise In Patience, will be available everywhere on 9/16 through Chillwave Records.

Follow Knope:
Bandcamp | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

How Spotify Made Music Disposable

“You can’t record music every three or four years and think that’s going to be enough.” That was a sentence uttered in an interview earlier this year by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. Widely derided by musicians and fans alike, this sound bite brought the “Streaming Discussion™” back to the forefront of music circles on places like Twitter and Reddit. While very few artists are happy with the financial arrangement between themselves and Spotify, this statement breathed new life into the unrest at the heart of this agreement. This suggestion of “just release more music” also brought to the forefront a litany of problems with the current economic model that platforms like Spotify and Apple Music have used to make millions off of the backs of artists. 

It’s no secret that these services are notoriously stingy, offering up fractions of a penny per stream, but a less-discussed byproduct of this model is how it has literally devalued art and made music more disposable in the process. 

The pandemic (and general state of the world) has obviously caused irreparable damage to our collective mental health and finances alike, but musicians have been hit especially hard. Robbed of the outlet of touring, this has been an unspeakably horrible year for musical artists. Album rollouts have been disrupted, tours have been postponed, and musicians are struggling to make ends meet more than ever before. 

As creators flock to alternative sources of income to keep themselves afloat, the music industry as it stood at the beginning of the year will look very different than the one we see on the other side of this. Groups like Ratboys have taken up Twitch streaming; promoting their merch, prompting donations, and forging direct connections with fans along the way, all while promoting their (excellent) album that released in the weeks before quarantine. Bands like Mannequin Pussy, Prince Daddy, Glass Beach, and Diet Cig have taken to Patreon offering exclusive covers, merch discounts, and access to Dischord channels as benefits. On top of all this, Bandcamp has made a monthly tradition of eschewing their own cut of earnings, the end result being fans putting more than 20 million dollars directly into the pockets of artists, labels, and charities over the course of the summer. 

Then you have Spotify, where it takes 229 streams to make one dollar. Their solution to this? Silly bands, it’s so obvious: simply make more music. Fill their playlists, servers, and coffers with your art if you want to be successful in the musical landscape of 2020.

Near the beginning of quarantine, Spotify gave artists the option to add “donation” buttons to their pages, which, on the surface, seems like a nice gesture, but ultimately proved to be an unsuccessful endeavor. It’s something Spotify can point to and say, “look, see, of course we care about the bands!” Then turn around months later and say things like, “maybe if you were shoveling more coal into our content furnace, you wouldn’t be struggling so much to make ends meet.”

I’ve written before about how “disposable” streaming services have made music, but never went into detail articulating what that meant to me, and this feels like the perfect time. 

At the dawn of commercial music, you’d go to a store and buy your music in the form of a large piece of plastic that you’d bring home and listen to. As time went on, the size and shape of that plastic changed from vinyl to tape to cassette to CD, but the process always remained the same. Soon you could take your music on the go, listening in the car, on a boombox, a walkman, or a portable CD player. At this point, you might be thinking, ‘okay, yeah, thanks for mansplaining physical media to me,’ but this process actually had an impact on how we viewed and interacted with the music itself. 

Due to the financial (and physical) investment you just made, when you bought an album like this, you were going to listen to it, and you were going to listen to it a lot. At a certain point, it almost didn’t even matter if the record was bad or not, because you just sunk $20 into it, and now it’s going to be on your shelf forever. You were going to listen to it over and over and over again. 

My first collection of childhood CDs was pretty appalling. It ranged from stuff like Sum 41, Good Charlotte, and Simple Plan to Eiffel 65, Aaron Carter, and the Baha Men. Hell, I owned multiple Baha Men CDs. You can probably think of one Baha Men song off the top of your head, but I listened to the deep cuts because I had no other alternatives. If “Who Let The Dogs Out” released in 2020, it would go viral, get the band millions of streams, and then fade out in a month or two. People wouldn’t listen to that song and think, ‘Gee, I wonder what else these guys have to offer’ and then jump into the rest of their discography. 

Even in the mid-2000s, once iPods and mp3 players became widely accessible, your digital music library still had some semblance of connection to who you were as a person. The songs sitting in your iTunes library were all files that you ripped from your own CD collection, bought from Apple, were sent by friends, or obtained through more… nefarious means. It felt like every album, and sometimes even every song, had a story and a purpose. Everything was in its right place, even if it was just a 5mb file sitting somewhere deep in the tangled web of folders on your hard drive.

Now, streaming services have done a lot of good. Having a majority of this century’s auditory output one scroll away is an unspeakable achievement, but it’s a double-edged sword. The flip side of this is that it leads artists to game streaming numbers, create insanely bloated tracklists, and beg fans to fake streams. Those aren’t telltale signs of a sustainable business model. 

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The byproduct of this process for fans is that music is not held with the same reverence when viewed through this platform’s lens. If you’re a capital “M” Music Fan, you’re likely following hundreds, if not thousands of artists from different genres and backgrounds. This is rewarding because it means you have something new to listen to every Friday, probably too much in fact. When there are five to ten new releases to listen to every week, things become buried so quickly that you might not even realize it. 

An artist as big as Taylor Swift can now surprise release an album to critical acclaim and fan approval. It can break records, dominate social media feeds, and feel like a genuine event, only for it to fade from all memory not even a month later. I enjoy folklore, but it’s no longer part of the “culture” as of September 2020, so therefore I’m not thinking of it and not streaming it unless I scroll far back enough in my library to see it. 

You could argue that’s just because it’s a bad album or otherwise unmemorable, but I’ve found this happening with every band, even ones I love dearly. Earlier this year, The Wonder Years, my favorite band of all time, released an acoustic EP that I spun for weeks and weeks but haven’t listened to more than twice this summer. That would have been unthinkable in the era of physical media or iTunes. 

I think the problem here is two-fold. First, it’s platforms like Spotify who capitalize on the hype of something like folklore to generate more users, streams, and engagement for their platforms. Second, I think we’re experiencing an era of unprecedented acceleration in every facet of our lives. Perhaps a product of being sequestered in our homes for six months, our sense of time is skewed beyond repair. Things that happened mere days or weeks ago feel like months or years. How can I remember that an emo band I like put out a new EP two weeks ago when I’m busy filling my brain with social media rot, political discourse, and the horrors of the modern world. 

I’m not begging for the return of the monoculture here, we’ll never return to an era where one band dominates the hearts, charts, and minds of millions of Americans, but it’s frustrating to watch an artistic medium that I love so dearly be treated as a passing fascination. Yeah, cool album you just put out, but what’s next? Artists release one thing, and fans are immediately clamoring for what’s next. It’s harder than ever to fully-digest art as we used to, and streaming platforms like Spotify aren’t helping. 

This is the difference between sipping on a glass of finely-aged whiskey and slamming shots of bottom-shelf vodka…. Not to compare my childhood Baha Men CD to a bottle of whiskey, but you get the point. Dozens of albums came out this year that impacted me in the moment and then faded from my immediate consciousness over time simply because they became buried in the never-ending scroll of my digital streaming library. No matter how much I love an album, something will come out in the next few days that covers it up and pushes it further down the screen. I’ve learned to keep a database of new releases and a shortlist of my favorites, but that’s because I run a music blog, I am far from the average use case.

At the end of the day, most people are perfectly fine throwing on a Spotify-created playlist and vegging out to whatever the algorithm sees fit. I know active listening will never become a truly lost art, but I feel awful for artists who put hundreds of hours, thousands of dollars, and incalculable amounts of effort into their art only for it to be swallowed up by the streaming beast and fade into obscurity within weeks. This is yet another reason why vinyl and cassettes are enjoying a resurgence because people are hungry to reconnect with art. 

Try as we might with petitions, outreach, and just roasting them on twitter, Spotify isn’t going to change any time soon. This is the norm for the foreseeable future, and it kind of sucks. It sucks for artists, and it sucks for fans. In fact, it sucks for everyone involved except the people at the top making millions of dollars off the blood, sweat, and tears of every artist at the bottom of the pyramid. 

Streaming services treat music just like that; a service. Spotify will continue to exploit artists in order to fuel their machine, so as fans, we need to break out of that routine whenever possible. There’s no preciousness anymore unless you bring it, so let’s bring it. Go support an artist’s Patreon, go start a thread on twitter, go buy a shirt on Bandcamp, go post a makeup selfie inspired by a band’s album art. Those are only a few ways to connect with artists, but they go farther than you probably realize; you never know how much your support snowballs. As long as there are passionate fans supporting artists, sharing music, and spreading songs that they love, streaming services will never truly be able to make music disposable, try as they might.