Death By Audio
The wiring inside a Brooklyn guitar-pedal maker
Mark Iantosca
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Oliver Ackermann is trying, and failing, to describe the sound of his effects pedals. He builds them all from the ground up—designing the circuits; attaching the transistors, capacitors, and resistors; and drilling and silk-screening the metal cases—so it comes as something of a surprise that he has trouble finding the right words. "You could almost describe these sounds," he says, but then stops himself. Ackermann is enthusiastic, manic, and charming; his mouth remains locked in a permanent smile. He starts again: "I guess it's about making something that I think sounds badass."
"Badass" is an apt description for Death By Audio, Ackermann's DIY empire, which occupies two adjacent lofts in Southside Williamsburg. One of them houses a concert space, which showcases acts that occupy the interstitial spaces between rock, noise, and sound-art, while a nearby loft houses a recording studio, a rehearsal space (for Ackermann's band, A Place To Bury Strangers), a room for silk-screening and painting, an electronics assembly room, and a wood and metal shop. It's the pedal business, though, that keeps Death By Audio humming—not to mention ringing, shrieking, and twisting into and out of eardrums in basements and garages across the country.
Mark Iantosca
Ackermann's enterprise reflects a lifelong obsession with aural transformation and a Frankenstein-like penchant for melding ill-fitting parts into an oddly harmonious whole. After growing up in rural Virginia, Ackermann moved to Providence, R.I., to study at the Rhode Island School Of Design. Upon graduation in 1999, he returned to Virginia to play in Skywave, a band that specialized in dreamy, Slowdive-style shoegaze. Living in Virginia wasn't especially exciting, but it nurtured Ackermann's electronic imagination. "It's really slow living," he says. "You can chill out or completely focus on your own thing." For Ackermann, that thing was noise, in all its messy and unpredictable glory.
While playing with Skywave and hacking pedals on the side, Ackermann also worked as a toy designer, a job he describes as "too sweet and too easy." He quit in 2001, a decision that would prove auspicious for his pedal-making ambitions. "I really wanted to go to Europe for a month with my girlfriend at the time," Ackermann recalls, "and I didn't have any money." He did, however, have an idea for a pedal called Total Sonic Annihilation. The concept was simple: a pedal that would turn other, more pedestrian pedals—delay, distortion, and reverb—into demented and unpredictable versions of their former selves. After marketing the pedal to various websites, he sold $3,000 worth in a matter of weeks. It was plenty to support a European vacation, and more than enough to reveal a career opportunity.
Skywave broke up in 2003, at which point Ackermann moved to Brooklyn. The first couple of years were harrowing. "I lived in this house in Bushwick," Ackermann says, "and all sorts of crazy fucked-up shit would happen. At some point, some dudes broke into my neighbor's house while he was there and tied him up to a chair and pistol-whipped him. One of my friends found him in a pool of blood. So after that our landlord let us have an open-ended lease, and I was looking for a place for nine months."
Mark Iantosca
After completing the build-out of the current Death By Audio space, Ackermann began streamlining his operation. He hired a friend to manage the business side of Death By Audio, and he began using custom-designed circuit boards, which replaced the earlier, time-consuming work of wiring the pedals by hand. Now that bands like My Bloody Valentine and Nine Inch Nails use pedals by Death By Audio, keeping a low profile is difficult. Ackermann doesn't have the time to make custom pedals anymore, like he used to when he created whimsical one-offs like the Overloader, which boasted 10 different distortion sounds and, in a tragic turn of events, was lost by the post office.
The uptick in sales for Death By Audio surprises Ackermann as much as anybody. "Everything we're doing is pretty nasty and gnarly," he says. "Some of my pedals are so crazy I wouldn't use them." It's hard to think of a stronger endorsement.
