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From The Desk Of The Dandy Warhols’ Peter Holmström: Boutique Effects Pedals

Without a doubt, the Dandy Warhols is a band, a meeting of the Velvet-y minds with Brent DeBoer, Peter Holmström, Zia McCabe and Courtney Taylor-Taylor calling the shots. But drummer-turned-guitarist/singer Taylor-Taylor is its handsome face and baritone voice who pushed the band from graceful poetic garage music (1995’s Dandys Rule OK) to guileless glam (2000’s Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia) to sleek-yet-twisted ’80s-ish new wave (2003’s Welcome To The Monkey House). While the rest of the 20th century found the band drifting through three additional like-minded albums, the outfit has grown leaner and meaner with the focused, guitar-centric This Machine (The End). Taylor-Taylor, a ruminative lyricist with a caustic lean, makes the most of this particular Machine moment. He allowed novelist Richard Morgan to write the Dandys’ press notes and found his own icy literary voice in graphic set-in-Germany novel One Model Nation. Taylor-Taylor and his bandmates are also guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.

Holmström: In a world where everything is mass-produced and you can find anything on the internet, it’s nice to see a lot of little companies trying to make cool stuff. With effects pedals, I was always searching for new sounds. All the vintage stuff has associations to different players and songs, which drives the prices way up. A lot of the boutique companies are just cloning classic pedals, but some are expanding on those tried-and-true ideas and coming up with really amazing sounding toys for me. On the last record (Earth To The Dandy Warhols) we had Death By Audio make us a limited run of a pedal (“Mission Control”), and for This Machine we are working with Spaceman Effects to create “The Wow Signal.” Spaceman, by the way, makes the coolest pedals, using old stock NASA indicators and super cool design. His Gemini III pedal is my favorite fuzz pedal ever. Also check out Vintage FX, Locomofon from Norway, Koma Electronix from Germany and Blackstone Appliances.

Video after the jump.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC_G63NLdIQ