Retro Mechanical Labs: Dr. Strangetone

[failureinc]

Retro Mechanical Labs: Dr. Strangetone (Or, "How I learned to stop worrying and love the Atomic Pedal")

 

Like a mad scientist from some dystopian Raygun Gothic production directed by a cross between Orson Welles and Ed Wood (with a sincere nod to the phantasmagoric fantasies of enraptured adolescents of yesteryear who grew up ducking under their school desks during A-Bomb drills, and who would soon be feeling the oppression of an ultra-conservative America as it locked into a deadly staring contest with Soviet Russia), the enigmatic Johnathan Irish has been busy inventing devilish distortion boxes from his laboratory in Portland, Oregon under the apt name Retro Mechanical Labs. With an aesthetic and craftsmanship seldom seen in a cottage-industry where little attention is paid to looks past the requisite flair of a silk-screened sticker (most pedals are made from one-size-fits-all aluminum housing not too dissimilar from the cookie-cutter neighborhoods of the small-town, Post-World-War cul de sac), RML's boxes are both beautiful and refreshing, and speak to a bygone era of pride taken in the blood and sweat cost of superior handiwork. Not only are these boxes awesome to behold, but in many cases utterly unique due to the various vintage meters (that's right, pedals with honest-to-goodness magnetic-needle VU meters) acquired no doubt by scraping, scrapping, and charming the various and sundry swap meets and flea markets of the greater Portland area. One man's snake oil is another's electric baptismal bathwater.

 

It is a common culinary confession that the gentrified Homo Sapien, even with his ready-to-party palette inextricably fused with his olfactory office of prescreening (to anthropomorphize these sensory receptors immediately invokes images of scores of purse-lipped critics staring perpetually down their noses at any stray molecule to enter their domain, hands ever at the ready to command the only two rubber stamps available to them - the diminutive "Pass," or the vibrantly red and violently bold "FAIL!"), eats first with his eyes. And while one's visual cortex is sufficiently stimulated by RML's external exuberance to move the mouth to salivation, it is the uncontainable sound housed within that rings the Pavlovian dinner bell. Stabbith with your steely knives all you want, there's no putting this beast down.

 

The tone available to anyone who is brave enough to own an RML original is sure to open doors into the deepest recesses of the imagination, tapping into the primal terror of finding your dreams stepping out of the laboratory cage and into stark reality. Guitars will be possessed by living wraiths howling with fiery discontent, basses transmuted into primordial sludge golems singing subharmonic songs of savagery, and synths will crackle with arcane energies powerful enough to create an army of Frankensteinian monstrosities. Distortion - warm and creamy, exotic and lusty, jarring, brooding, invading distortion - is the currency of the realm here, folks, and everyone -- even the psychotic organ grinder -- gets paid in full.

 

With a care bordering on obsession, these pedals have been created with a fine eye toward every detail, and the electronic guts are no exception. The boards are hand-drilled, the components culled in many cases from NOS sources (vintage germanium transistors and diodes sprinkle the product line). Even the knobs are vintage bakelite chicken heads in some cases, repurposed from some faded Art Deco Ham Radio of Yore. Jacks and knobs all feel extremely solid, and while the build of these boxes can no doubt endure the rigors of the road, some of the more artistic pedals with vintage meters will remain in my studio, thank you very much. Others, such as the amazingly sultry Pedal and a Gun bluesy overdrive, are available sans delicate meter and could survive an atomic mushroom field without so much as a flinch.

 

To date, I own nearly all pedals RML has offered, and each is as unique and artful as the next. In addition to the standard builds, Johnathan offers special custom orders, where (for an appreciably minimal fee), he may offer to add a mod or even to encase the intestines in a unique housing salvaged from the Golden Era (vintage voltage testers are ideally suited to this purpose). Of the seven RML issued effects I own, three are similarly housed (the Mig Fuzz; a modified Big Muff clone with feedback circuit, the Fuzz Doubler; a single-input, stereo-output sublime fuzz box, and the Electron Fuzz; a balls-to-the-wall screaming fuzz at home next to the Jacob's Ladder in every mad scientist's circuit menagerie). The rest are standard builds: the 432; a dual-distortion with wet/dry mix well-suited for beefing up synth lines, the TroubleShooter; a two-way cross-disortion with saturation circuit that I love on drum machines, the aforementioned Pedal and a Gun; every guitar player's overdriven wet dream, and lastly, the brand new Jeckyl & Hyde (JnH) dual-ladder filter with true stereo or dual-filter mono operation and internal LFO or external CV control over both filters individually. The JnH is RML's pièce de résistance, a culmination of all previous cadaverous resurrections and sonic experimentations, and has immediately found a permanent home in my modest studio as my go-to filter, its bite severely worse than its bark - not even the piercing MS-20 filter circuit comes close to the screeching resonance and self-oscillating territory of these impressive filters.

 

So if you're like me and you spend hours hunched in your studio wandering the dank cellars of sonic credulity like some rheumatoid mummy searching endlessly for a lost artifact, some buried gear horde, to break the curse, you should check out Retro Mechanical Labs. While certainly more boutique than the tastes (or wallets) of most off-the-street musicians can appreciate, those who thirst for tones from the creepy to the sublime need to look no further. For the mad scientist in all of us, RML has it covered.

[cryptosonic]

Yawn

[goodhonk]

if the spammers would stick around and post we'd have quite a community here.

[Turd Furgison]

tl;dr

[failureinc]

I thought it was a good post. Not spamming, but alerting the community of something they might not be aware of. I'm obviously passionate about the company - anyone who offers a product or service that is heads and tails above their peers deserves some unsponsored shout-outs IMO.