As the son of a Beatle, Sean Lennon had a tough job stepping out of his father’s looming shadow. With his psychedelic, Primus-coded collaborative project, The Claypool Lennon Delerium, he’s done that in style. And it’s a gig that requires some wonderfully weird pedals.
The band – which also features Primus bass player and vocalist Les Claypool – is set to release its third album, The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy, next month. That’s seen Lennon sit down with Guitar World to dish the dirt on the stompboxes coloring their latest trip.
“My Delirium pedalboard is pretty basic,” he admits. But there’s an outlier: “The most interesting pedal is actually on the song Melody of Entropy [currently unreleased]. On that, there’s a famous pedal called the Tremopolis.”
The pedal isn’t a household name quite like an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff or a Dunlop Cry Baby wah, but there’s a huge amount of mystique and intrigue around it.
“It’s famous because it’s impossible to get, and it’s extremely bizarre,” Lennon notes. “It’s a tremolo pedal made by this very strange guy, who disappeared. No one knows where he is, but he was this pink-haired dude on Facebook who made a couple of these pedals.
“They’re extremely strange, and you can hear this tremolo that reacts to volume, like an attack. So, you have the speed of the tremolo changing very drastically depending on how the guitar is played, and it makes some really wild sounds. The tremolo goes up so fast that it almost sounds like a glitch.”
Famous it may be, finding information about it online is not easy. Even Tremopolis images are rare, and there's no mention of it in Josh Scott's (of JHS Pedals) in-depth explainer video on the effect, its history, and the pedals that define it. So, we'll have to take Lennon's word for it. But color us intrigued all the same.
Talking to GW upon the release of Delerium’s second album, South of Reality, Lennon discussed Hendrix, having famous parents, and pushing his playing. Claypool, meanwhile, recently looked back on his disastrous Metallica audition.
Lennon’s new interview with Guitar World will be published in full in the near future.
