Why do you like crazy/broken fuzz?

[blanket]

I like the JHS Colour Box, Bearfoot FX Candiru and PTD Mini-Bone for Neil Young style exploding amp sounds - my personal holy grail fuzz tone

[DarkAxel]

Even if T.S. Eliot was talking about poetry, it for me sums up why I feel so drawn to "ugly" and "unpredictable" sounds:

"Our civilization" he wrote, "comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning". This speaks for all of art, but especially poetry and music. For me the profound emotional conditions are to be found in the juxtaposed sounds of "ugly" pedals and music. In the entangled connectives that sometimes lack any logics. It resonates more with my own being than most other musical genres or "traditional" music, like what Eivind August wrote in a way. I can't explain to anyone why. Maybe it's my psychology, or my spirit if you believe in that sort of thing. Maybe my ears are just fucked. There's just so much beauty in dirt.

Beauty in Dirt - band name, called it

[KaosCill8r]

For me it's about the total destruction of a sine wave. There is a certain beauty in ugliness. The chaotic, sputtering madness, oscillating, static and white noise. In other words FUCK HI-FI! That's for the blooz lawyers on tpg.

[Ev_O)))]

... FUCK HI-FI!...

werd

[rfurtkamp]

I've making noise for over twenty years. Even before I picked up an instrument, I was that guy who helped friends record or do live sound since I was the only dude in my peer group who didn't play something. There were moments when recording or doing live sound that something went wrong, and was beautiful, and I'd ask "how'd you do that" and get glared at, because people thought I was mocking them. I wasn't.

I never wanted to be a "guitar player" in the traditional sense. I wanted to play with walls of sound, with cracking, organic hell, and as a child of the Duck and Cover age, I love the concept of things being absolutely, positively beyond redemption - and finding beauty in that. The right broken or sounds-broken thing is like finding a flower in the middle of a corpse pile, or a sign that somehow, no matter what happens, there's still something worth being for.

I'm also a child of the mechanical era of instruments - I think my first absolute love in effects and things broken was an Echoplex with a thrashed erase head. It just added and added and added, and you couldn't stop it. It was glorious, and a thing in and of itself. I didn't start on an acoustic guitar - the very day I got an instrument I got a delay pedal and a 4 track recorder, and back then that was an absolute extravagance. I learned to play with things that spit back and pushed back and did what they wanted to regardless of what I told them to do - it was interplay with machines instead of people, and frankly, to this day, I still prefer that.

The right sonic destroyer is like a compositional partner in a hellish dance - once you've found it, there is no substitute.

[Casavettes]

"I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things."
Tom Waits

[colossus]

Whoa. Thanks so much for all of the responses. I knew asking this forum was a good idea. I need to read through these when I have a minute.

[Bellyheart]

Beauty in Dirt was already a band here in Va, USA. Played with them a lot. Tube Screamer Elliot.

[DarkAxel]

Beauty in Dirt was already a band here in Va, USA. Played with them a lot. Tube Screamer Elliot.

Everything was already a band somewhere in the USA at some point of time I think

[D.o.S.]

Because it sounds fucking awesome.

[penelope tree]

Total disclosure: I'm working on a piece for a conference about the aesthetics of destruction in fuzz/distortion/OD guitar effects and I thought I'd present a question to this board. Of course, if I end up quoting anyone on here, I'll PM you.

So, I know quite a few of us (including myself) are big fans of crazy fuzz sounds (I'm thinking Soundwave Breakdown, Fuck/Mini, Geiger Counter, Clari(not), etc) -- tones that make your guitar/amp sound broken or on the verge of destroying itself. I see adjectives like "apocalyptic" and "destroyed" thrown around a lot. Some of us like random, sputtering fuzzes, full of feedback and white noise, quite far from the "transparent" ideal of many other players. What I'm curious about is why. Why do these types of tones draw you in? Why do you seek them? What do you seek in them? Or do you hate them and why?

For me, and these are a lot of cliches, the broken amp tones of Neil Young or the noisy freakout fuzz tones of Acid Mother's Temple or even someone like Warren Ellis just sound primal. I don't crave pristine musics. I crave music that sounds like it took blood to make, that it broke a few things in the process. At the same time, I love improvisation and I love the (excuse the cliche) orgasmic feeling of a noise freakout in a live setting.

So....

What say you, fuzz brethren?

I expect that you have already explored this option but it might be interesting to consider some of the theories surrounding avant-garde culture, post-modernism, transgressive art, etc. Also, Rock music has always been about rebellion to some extent and the mangling of the genre's well established vocabulary could probably actually be seen as a continuation of that tradition. I think the fact that the more extreme fuzz pedals are largely made by small 'boutique' builders/companies also makes them more easy to fetishise (and it's probably easier to experiment with making or modifying a fuzz than certain other effects). A pedal made by DBA or SS/BS probably couldn't be obtained in a generic mall or roadside retail park and the purchase can enable an individual to feel as if they have become initiated into a progressive, creative community that is comfortably outside the mainstream.

Ro_S mentioned MBV's 'holocaust' but I'm not sure whether Kevin Shields actually used fuzz pedals when he first performed that 'piece'. MBV's holocaust section reminds me of the work of the Fluxus artists of the 1960s. It is intended to be provocative and disorientating yet sensual and transcendent. I don't know whether it always achieves that but I expect a lot of noise musician have similar aims and feel that it is advantageous to consciously avoid using conventional song structures and instrumentation.

[whiskey_face]

cause when you bendfuckup that high G on bass, that sputtering octave up clang zing is a masterpiece.

[Ro_S]

If you haven't already, you might want to look into: AMM, and Keith Rowe; La Monte Young; 'found sound'; and 'musique concrete'.

[penelope tree]

John Cage and his ideas about indeterminacy might be relevant too.

[bigchiefbc]

I think the first time I really understood fuzz as an actual effect was "Spirit in the Sky", and I still fucking love that shitty broken sound he got. I have both "normal" sounding fuzz and broken crazy fuzz, and for me it's all about the mood of the song I'm playing. The normal fuzzes sound kinda happy and cool and party-time. The more broken crazy fuzzes sound either ugly and pissed or stoned/drunk/tripping/fucked up. It's all about the mood with me.