Once a player has got the essentials on their pedalboard they need a wildcard, and wildcards don’t come much wilder than the Catalinbread’s Antichthon Deluxe, a newly expanded version of its Antichthon stompbox, which ostensibly combines fuzz and tremolo in one pedal.
But that is an inadequate description. Somehow, this is one pedal that resists easy categorisation, which is to say that this is one pedal to engage when you need to send your electric guitar tone through the chaos machine.
It is not for the faint of heart. Catalinbread describes the original Antichthon as “a primo signal destroyer, featuring an oscillating fuzz that dipped into tremolo territory as well as otherworldly squeals and other assorted madness,” and it has taken a second pass at the circuit to make it even more useable, to extend its range further and, crucially, to make it a more performance-friendly option for your ‘board.
“We’ve distilled the magic of that circuit into a much broader offering with the Antichthon Deluxe, a more performance-oriented device with tons of extras to create harmonically-rich soundscapes and tight distortion alike,” it says.
The fact you can use an expression pedal to take the place of the Action knob makes this a totally different proposition. What does the Action knob control? Again, no easy description, and how it responds depends on how you set the other controls, but set at zero it introduces tremolo into the signal. There is also an Action footswitch that toggles between the value set by the dial/expression pedal and zero.
Not all of the controls are this far-out. Bias behaves like the bias on an ordinary fuzz pedal, controlling the voltage that enters the circuit, changing the character of the fuzz tone. Velcro splutter is available, so too the “harmonic bleeps and bloops” that make this a viable option for the soundscape artist.
The Body control adds more gain, which in turn gets all the other controls more excitable, yielding more harmonic textures to play around with, while Mids is a mids boost centred at ~800Hz that helps you cut through a mix. Though Catalinbread advises cutting the mids and cranking the volume for a Univox Super Fuzz tone.
The Feedback is activated by a toggle switch and feeds your pre-mids signal back through the input again, increasing the intensity of the effect. Volume, mercifully, is just that, controlling output volume.
So there you have it, an unconventional fuzz, capable of chaos, but also of dialling in musically interesting textures and something different. For more details, see Catalinbread. Priced $234, orders are open now for the first batch, which ships early September.
