Veteran members of Melbourne’s heavy music scene came together in 2017 to form Tropical Fuck Storm. From left to right: guitarist/vocalist Erica Dunn, guitarist/vocalist Gareth "Gaz" Liddiard, bassist/vocalist Fiona Kitschin, and drummer Lauren Hammel.
In June 2021, while the pandemic was raging worldwide, Gareth “Gaz” Liddiard, who was isolating during one of Melbourne’s many lockdowns, decided he wanted to cover a Jimi Hendrix song. But the vocalist and guitarist for Australia’s Tropical Fuck Storm didn’t want to cover one of the legend’s hits. “I thought, ‘Let’s do a Hendrix song, but what’s the most ridiculous and ambitious one?’” he recalls. He ultimately decided that Hendrix’s “1983 (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)” fit the bill.
The cover is now the centerpiece of Submersive Behavior, the band’s latest release. The Hendrix version of “1983” clocks in at about 13 minutes and features the kind of guitar histrionics one would expect from the legendary guitarist. Tropical Fuck Storm’s version of “1983” is an epic 18-minute swatch of sonic surrealism that honors the original, but also leans heavily on their own energetic style. From Liddiard’s opening guitar salvo, through the acid-trip, synth-psych middle section, the spirit of Hendrix is heartwarmingly embraced, and raucously and inventively reimagined.
1983 (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)
Submersive Behavior is the latest entry in a growing catalog marked by fearless choices. The band’s 2018 debut album, A Laughing Death in Meatspace, was a singular-sounding mashup of post-punk and psychedelia driven mightily by the crafty guitar work of Liddiard and the band’s other guitarist, Erica Dunn. 2019’s Braindrops further solidified their reputation as one of Australia’s most innovative and boundary-busting exports. It featured an eclectic mix of genres and unconventional song structures, laced with the duo’s now-signature effects-saturated, experimentally recorded guitar sounds. With Submersive Behavior, Tropical Fuck Storm is pushing the envelope yet again, this time by gutting and reconstructing the once tried-and-true covers-record concept.
Gareth "Gaz" Liddiard's Gear
Gareth “Gaz” Liddiard says the vast Western Australian desert is one of his biggest influences. Growing up, he didn’t know if he’d ever get out of it.
Photo by Mike White
Guitars
- Fender Jaguars with humbuckers
- 1967 Guild Starfire
- Gibson ES-335 with Bigsby
Amps
- Fender Twin Reverb
- Fender Hot Rod DeVilles
- ’60s and ’70s Goldentone amplifiers
- ’70s and ’80s boom boxes in studio
Effects
- 4MS Mr. Ugly
- Bananana Effects AURORA
- Boss LS-2 Line Selector
- DOD Overdrive Preamp 250
- Jackson Audio 1484 Twin Twelve
- Line 6 HX Stomp XL
- Meris Ottobit
- Mid-Fi Electronics Magick “i”
- Montreal Assembly Count to 5
- ProCo Fat Rat
Strings and Picks
- Dunlop Tortex Standard Picks, .88mm
- Ernie Ball 2627 Beefy Slinky .011–.054
Aside from their own self-described “deranged spins” on “1983” and the Stooges’ “Ann,” the other three songs on the 36-minute EP are originals, credited, tongue-in-cheek, to fictitious bands like Men Men Menstruation and Compliments to the Chef. “Those are some of the band names that we used for our first four gigs,” explains Liddiard. “Since we just had that Hendrix song [for Submersive Behavior], and it’s 18 minutes long, it needed a B side, so that’s why you see some pretend band names on the album cover.” Even the title, Submersive Behavior, accurately sums up just how effective Tropical Fuck Storm is at bucking the status quo.
To color outside of the lines has been the band’s inheritance from the beginning. They formed in Melbourne, Australia in 2017, shortly after Liddiard’s previous band, the Drones, went on hiatus. Veteran musicians from Melbourne’s heavy music scene fill out the band, with fellow Drones alum Fiona Kitschin on bass and vocals, Mod Con’s Dunn on guitar and vocals, and drummer Lauren Hammel from High Tension. By combining elements of their previous endeavors, including rock, punk, and experimental music, and spearheaded by lightning-rod lyrics addressing climate change, political corruption, and societal unrest, Tropical Fuck Storm quickly developed a reputation for their musically chaotic live performances and unapologetic worldview.
“There’s lots of bands with guitars and it’s good. But other things, you just go, ‘What the fuck?’ Something’s really happening and it’s that almost careening-out-of-control thing.”
Dunn says restrictions imposed by the lockdown, like having to isolate from one another, set creative parameters that played a big part in the cultivation and evolution of the original material on Submersive Behavior. Liddiard had a hard drive full of jams that the band had shelved as “fuck-ups,” and when he had nothing else to do, he combed back through them, grabbing program and session files that the band had forgotten about. “He was mulling over things and seeing ideas in a new light, and he kind of fell in love with a few things,” says Dunn. “So he set the beds [backing tracks], which were mostly from mistakes. We all were grateful that he went mad. I mean, we were all going mad, but he really put his energy into that. So it was cool. The lockdown was to blame for that. Or maybe we should be grateful.”
After isolating and excavating material from hard drives, Tropical Fuck Storm convened and recorded Submersive Behavior in a house that they rent outside of Melbourne. Liddiard, who does much of the band’s engineering, relied mostly on Pro Tools as his DAW of choice. “We tried Ableton, but it was just too clean,” he says. “If you turn a drum machine on and you turn a metronome on at the same time, they’ll just stay in sync forever. But when we do it in Pro Tools, if you hear a drum machine start one of our songs, if you were to set a fucking metronome in motion, it wouldn’t keep up with the song because it’s all out of whack. It’s cool. We’re the loosest electronic band in history.”
“I thought, ‘Let’s do a Hendrix song, but what’s the most ridiculous and ambitious one?’”
The ways that Liddiard and Dunn interact with each other and arrange their guitar parts is an important pillar of the Tropical Fuck Storm sound. “There was always some conscious effort to get out of each other’s way, and to know where to double down,” says Dunn. “Gaz is just this unbelievable shredder, and my work is to be the bedrock, keeping something repetitive and rhythmic. I think we’ve really got it going now, having played a lot live, and having more intuition about, ‘Well, if you are going to chuck a wheelie, I’m going to hold it down.’ We understand that balance.” Dunn says that process includes making a conscious effort to carve out different sonic territory. For Braindrops, she put all her guitars through a “crappy boom box” to further separate the quality of the guitars.
To build the Hendrix centerpiece of Submersive Behavior, the band tracked the beginning and end of “1983” first, and then recorded the tripped-out middle section separately, making use of synthesizers and “weird shit” laying around. “We didn’t want to go down the route of the Stratocaster noodling in the middle,” says Liddiard. “A friend of ours had a 7′-long spring that bolts to a wall that’s got a pickup on it. And he uses a violin bow—that’s the drone underneath. So we did that. When we cut and pasted it into the song, and it worked, I was like, ‘Wow.’”
Erica Dunn's Gear
The punny new EP, Submersive Behavior, features three new songs credited to fake bands pulled from Tropical Fuck Storm lore.
Photo by Mike White
Guitars
- Shub Jazzmaster with P-90s
- Fender Mustang
Amps
- Fender Twin Reverb
- Roland JC-120
Effects
- Electro-Harmonix Soul Food
- Gojira Fx “Mr Sparkle” Tubescreamer 808
- JHS ProCo Rat “Pack Rat”
- Pickletech Mega Berkatron
- Veternik Audio Fall Reverb
Strings and Picks
- Dunlop Tortex Standard Picks, .88mm
- Ernie Ball 2220 Power Slinky .011–.048
The idea of constructing a separate song section from odd elements, then dropping it into a quintessential classic rock song, sits well within Tropical Fuck Storm’s songwriting ethos. “We’ll try anything,” says Liddiard. “It’s always an act of desperation because when you start a record, there’s nothing. Sometimes we’ll get a drum machine or some kind of weird sampler to start us off in a way that isn’t your stock guitar or drum thing because when you sit down with a guitar and a real drum kit, you fall into habits. So if you can get a crazy little drum machine and plug it into an Eventide delay pitch shifter thing, it’ll come up with some chopped-up strange beat you would never have thought of. And maybe there’s a synth line in there that we’ll try and learn on guitar, and then we start jamming things out. Once we’ve started from that strange spot, we’ll move on.”
According to Liddiard, Tropical Fuck Storm song ideas are forged entirely in the studio and aren’t required to germinate in a live setting before making it onto a record. “Obviously, it’s a patriotic duty in Australia to admire AC/DC,” he chuckles. “But we’re not like them. We make stuff up in the studio, so we don’t even know what it’s going to sound like live when we’re doing it, because we’ve never played it live. We’re just trying to invent something and then we learn it later. Again, it’s desperately trying to get some material together.”
One might imagine that capturing such off-the-cuff-sounding recordings is challenging, but Liddiard’s ability to craft incendiary, seemingly improvised performances in the relatively controlled studio environment is rooted within some of rock’s most influential and freewheeling acts. The ability to toe the line between flawless execution and teetering on the brink of collapse is an art unto itself, and it’s a quality of performance and songcraft that Tropical Fuck Storm wholeheartedly embraces. “The minute I heard Van Halen, it was like hearing Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin,” he says. “There’s lots of bands with guitars and it’s good. But other things, you just go, ‘What the fuck?’ Something’s really happening and it’s that almost careening-out-of-control thing. I love that. It’s a fun thing to do.”
“We’re just trying to push it out there and keep it fresh and interesting. It’s like Hendrix or Captain Beefheart, just looking for something that hasn’t been done.”
Despite the experimental, loose nature of their songwriting and recording process, Liddiard says a lot of his ideas should translate easily enough to and from an acoustic guitar. “Generally, everything we do is doable in the real world,” he says. “I’ll noodle on the acoustic guitar because you might have a riff, but you want to know what key it’s in, and then you want to know what keys you can move to as well.” But starting songs with guitars and ending with guitars is not something that particularly inspires him these days.
“I’ve been in bands for years, so with Tropical Fuck Storm, we’re just trying to push it out there and keep it fresh and interesting,” he says. “It’s like Hendrix or Captain Beefheart, just looking for something that hasn’t been done. Those are my favorite things. The adventurers like Van Halen or even people like Hubert Sumlin from Howlin’ Wolf…. He had a kooky style that no one had. He introduced the whole eccentric kookiness to that electric guitar thing.”
Tropical Fuck Storm like to experiment. To achieve greater separation of guitar tracks while recording, guitarist Erica Dunn ran her guitars through a busted old boom box.
Photo by Mike White
Dunn shares a lot of the same influences with Liddiard, including Hendrix, but ultimately describes herself as a very “tactile, hands-on sort of person,” and a bit more of a minimalist than Liddiard in terms of effects pedals. “I’m not like Gaz, who is a full-on, self-described nerd when it comes to pedals and knowing them and taking them apart and building them and making them work,” she explains. “I find a thing and I generally stick to it and then I push those parameters. Sometimes, if I’m given too much, I’m overwhelmed, and I shut down.” With that in mind, one of her preferred, go-to effects in any situation is a JHS-modded ProCo Rat. “It’s sort of your base-level sound effect. We had a show the other day and it looked like our bags weren’t put on the airplane and we were just laughing about what we might be able to borrow or beg or steal to make the show happen. And I thought, ‘If someone has a Rat around, I’ll be alright.’”
“I gravitated to the metallic clang of a guitar, the rusty, barbed wire sound like early AC/DC or Neil Young.”
When it comes to framing out their own territory in the modern musical landscape, one of the most significant influences that continues to profoundly affect the Tropical Fuck Storm sound is their geographical upbringing. Had Liddiard not grown up in Western Australia, they simply would not be the same band. “Western Australia is like Southern California or Arizona,” he says. “Really dry desert, but it’s also super vast. So I gravitated to the metallic clang of a guitar, the rusty, barbed wire sound like early AC/DC or Neil Young. It seemed to make more sense and it had a vastness in it because there’s literally nothing out there.”
Western Australia occupies a geographical space roughly the size of the lands between the Rocky Mountains and the West Coast of California. But in the U.S., there are densely populated cities and millions of people occupying that area. “In Western Australia, there’s just nothing,” Liddiard says. “There’s one city, and it really did have an effect.”
When Liddiard was a teenager in the ’90s, he felt like he couldn’t escape. He was too far from anywhere. But somehow, things worked out. “You feel so trapped and you feel like everything that’s happening in music is happening somewhere else, and you’ll never be a part of it,” he says. “There was never any pretension or effort to conform in any way musically. So we just did our own thing.”
Effects Bakery MECHA-PAN BAKERY Series MECHA-BAGEL OVERDRIVE
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The Mecha-Pan Overdrive is like a delicious bagel for your guitar tone, but it’s been upgraded to a new level of cuteness and functionality!
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It would have been easy for Wampler to simply make a Mostortion clone and call it a day, but they added some unique twists to the Mofetta pedal. While the original Mostortion had a MOSFET-based op amp, it actually used clipping diodes to create its overdrive. The Mofetta is a fairly accurate replica and includes that circuitry, but also has a toggle switch for texture, which lets you choose between the original-style diode-based clipping in the down position and multi-cascaded MOSFET gain stages in the up position.
Luscious Low Gain and Meaty Mid-Gain
The Mofetta’s control panel is very straightforward and conventional with knobs for bass, mids, treble, level, and gain. The original Mostortion was revered for its low-gain tone and is now popular among Nashville session guitarists. Wampler’s tribute captures that edge-of-breakup vibe perfectly. I enjoyed using the pedal with the gain on the lower side, around 9 o’clock, where I heard and felt slight compression that gave single notes a smooth and silky feel. I particularly enjoyed the tone-thickening the Mofetta lent to my Ernie Ball Music Man Axis Sport’s split-coil sound as I played pop melodies and rootsy, triadic rhythm guitar figures. The Mofetta has expansive headroom, and as a result there’s a lot of space in which you can find really bold, cutting tones without muddying the waters too much. Even turning the gain all the way off yields a pleasing volume bump that would work well in a clean boost setting.
There’s a lot of space in which you can find really bold, cutting tones without muddying the waters too much.
Switching the texture switch up engages the MOSFET section, introducing cascading gain stages that elevate the heat and add flavor the original Mostortion didn’t really offer. Classic rock and early metal are readily available via the MOSFET setting. If you need to stretch out to modern metal sounds, the Mofetta probably isn’t the pedal for you. Again, the original Mostortion was, first and foremost, a low-to-mid-gain affair, so unless you’re using it as a boost with a high-gain amp, the Mofetta is not really a vehicle for extreme sounds.
One of the Mofetta’s real treats is its responsiveness. Even at higher gain settings the Mofetta is very touch sensitive. You can tap into a wide range of dynamic shading just by varying the strength of your pick attack. I enjoyed playing fast, ascending scalar passages, picking with a medium attack then really slamming it hard when I hit a high climactic note, to get the guitar to really scream.
The Verdict
Wampler is a reliably great builder who creates pedals with a purpose. I own two of his pedals, the Dual Fusion and the Pinnacle, and both are really exceptional units. The Mofetta captures the essence of the Mostortion and makes it available at an accessible price. But even if you’ve never heard or played an original Mostortion, you’ll appreciate the truly versatile EQ, touch sensitivity, and the bonus texture switch, which expands the Mofetta’s range into more aggressive spaces. The wealth of dirt boxes on the market today can make a player jaded. But Wampler pushed into a relatively unique, satisfying, and interesting place with the Mofetta.
Filthy, saturated fuzz is a glorious thing, whether it’s the writ-large solos of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s live “Ball and Chain,” the soaring feedback and pure crush of Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady,” or the sandblasted rhythm textures of Queens of the Stone Age’s “Paper Machete.” It’s also a Wayback Machine. Step on a fuzz pedal and your tone is transported to the ’60s or early ’70s, which, when it comes to classic guitar sounds, is not a bad place to be.
Catalinbread’s StarCrash is from their new ’70s collection, so the company is laying its Six Million Dollar Man trading cards on the table—upping the ante on traditional fuzz with more controls and, according to the company’s website, a little more volume than the average fuzz pedal, while still staying in the traditional Fuzz Face lane.
The Howler’s Viscera
Arbiter Electronics made the first Fuzz Face in 1966. The StarCrash is inspired by that 2-transistor pedal, but benefits from evolution, as did almost all fuzz pedals in the ’70s, when the standard shifted from germanium to silicon circuitry to improve the consistency of the effect’s performance. The downside is that germanium is gnarlier to some ears, and silicon transistors don’t respond as well to adjustments made via a guitar’s volume control.
While Fuzz Faces have only two knobs, volume and fuzz, the silicon StarCrash has three: volume, bias, and low-cut. Catalinbread’s website explains: “We got rid of that goofy fuzz knob. We know that 95 percent of all players run it dimed, and the remaining 5 percent use their guitar’s volume knob to rein it in.”
I suspect there are plenty of players who, like me, do adjust the fuzz control on their pedals, but the most important thing is that the core fuzz sound here is excellent—bristly and snarling, with a far girthier tone than my reissue Fuzz Face. It’s also, with the bias and low-cut controls, far more flexible. The low-cut control allows you to range from a traditional, comparatively thinner Fuzz Face sound (past noon and further) to the StarCrash’s authentic, beefier voice (noon and lower). Essentially, it cuts bass frequencies from 40 Hz to 500 Hz, resulting in an aural menu that runs from lush and lowdown to buzzy and slicing. And the bias control is a direct route to the spitty, fragmented, so-called Velcro-sound that’s become a staple of the stoner-rock/Jack White school of tone. The company calls this dial a “dying battery simulator,” and it starves the second transistor to achieve that effect.
Sweet Song of the Tribbles
Playing with the StarCrash is a lot of fun. I ran it through a pair of Carr amps in stereo, adding some delay and reverb to mood, and used a variety of single-coil- and humbucker-outfitted guitars. While both pickup types interacted well with the pedal, the humbuckers were most pleasing to my ears with the bias cranked to about 2 o’clock or higher, since the ’buckers higher output allowed me to let notes sustain longer before sputtering out. Keeping the low-cut filter at 9 o’clock or lower also helped sustain and depth in the Velcro-fuzz zone, while letting more of the instruments’ natural voices come through, of course.
With the low-cut filter turned up full and the bias at 10 o’clock, I got the StarCrash to be the perfect doppelganger of my Hendrix reissue Fuzz Face. But that’s such a small part of the pedal’s overall tone profile. It was more fun to roll off just a bit of bass and set the bias knob to about 2 or 3 o’clock. Around these settings, the sound is huge and grinding, and yet barre chords hold their character while playing rhythm, and single-note runs, especially on the low strings, are a filthy delight, with just the right schmear of buttery sustain plus a hint of decay lurking behind every note. It’s such a ripe tone—the sonic equivalent of a delicious, stinky cheese—that I could hang with it all day.
Regarding Catalinbread’s claims about the volume control? Yes, it gets very loud without losing the essence of the notes or chords you’re playing, or the character of the fuzz, which is a distinct advantage when you’re in a band and need to stand out. And it’s a tad louder than my Fuzz Face but doesn’t really bark up to the level of most Tone Bender or Buzzaround clones I’ve heard. In my experience, these germanium-chipped critters of similar vintage can practically slam you through the wall when their volume levels are cranked.
The Verdict
Catalinbread’s StarCrash—with its sturdy enclosure, smooth on/off switch and easy-to-manipulate dials—can compete with any Fuzz Face variant in both price and performance, scoring high points on the latter count. The bias and low-cut dials provide access to a wider-than-usual variety of fuzz tones, and are especially delightful for long, playful solos dappled with gristle, flutter, and sustain. Kudos to Catalinbread for making this pedal not just a reflection of the past, but an improvement on it.
Catalinbread Starcrash 70 Fuzz Pedal - Starcrash 70 Collection
The release of a newRed Panda pedal is something to be celebrated. Each of the company’s devices lets us crack into our signal chains and tweak its inner properties in unique, forward-thinking ways, encouraging us to be daring, create something new, and think about sound differently. In essence, they take us to the sonic frontier, where the most intrepid among us seek thrills.
Last January, I got my first glimpse of the Radius at NAMM and knew that Red Panda mastermind Curt Malouin had, once again, concocted something fresh. The pedal offers ring modulation and frequency shifting with pitch tracking and an LFO, and I heard classic ring-mod tones as the jumping off point for oodles of bold sounds generated by envelope and waveform-controlled modulation and interaction. I had to get my hands on one.
Enjoy the Process
I’ve heard some musicians talk about how the functionality of Red Panda’s pedals are deep to a point that they can be hard to follow. If that’s the case, it’s by design, simply because each Red Panda device opens access to an untrodden path. As such, it can feel heady to get into the details of the Radius, which blends between ring modulation and frequency shifting, offering control of the balance and shift ratios of the upper and lower sidebands to create effects including phasing, tremolo, and far less-natural sounds.
As complex as that all might seem, Red Panda’s pedals always make it easy to strip the controls down to their most essential form. The firmest ground for a guitarist to stand with the Radius is a simple ring-mod sound. To get that, I selected the ring mod function, turned off the modulation section by zeroing the rate and amount knobs, kept the shift switch off and the range switch on its lowest setting. With the mix at noon and the frequency knob cranked, I found my sound.
From there, by lowering the frequency range, the Radius will yield percussive tremolo tones, and the track knob helped me dial that in before opening up a host of phaser sounds below noon. By going the other direction and kicking the rate switch into its higher setting, a world of ring-mod tweaking opens up. There are some uniquely warped effects in these higher settings that include dial-up modem sounds and lo-fi dial tones. Exploring the ring mod/frequency shift knob widens the possibilities further to high-pitched, filtered white noise and glitchy digital artifacts at its extremes.
There are wild, active sounds within each knob movement on the Radius, and the modulation section naturally brings those to life in more ways than a simple knob tweak ever could, delivering four LFO waveforms, a step modulator, two x-mod waveforms, and an envelope follower. It’s within these settings that I found rayguns, sirens, Shepard tones, and futuristic sounds that were even harder to describe.
It’s easy to imagine the Radius at the forefront of sonic experiments, where it would be right at home. But this pedal could easily be a studio device when applied in low doses to give a track something special that pops. The possible applications go way beyond guitars.
The Verdict
The Radius isn’t easy to plug and play, but it’s also not hard to use if you keep an open mind. That’s necessary, too: The Radius is not for guitar players who prefer to stay grounded; this pedal is for sonic-stargazers and producers.
I enjoyed pairing the Radius with various guitar instruments—12-string, baritone, bass—and it kept getting me more and more excited about sonic experimentation. That feeling is a big part of what’s special about this pedal. It’s so open-ended and controllable, continuing to reveal more of its capabilities with use. Once you feel like you’ve gotten something down, there are often more sounds to explore, whether that’s putting a new instrument or pedal next to it or exploring the Radius’ stereo, MIDI, or expression-pedal functionality. Like many great instruments, it only takes a few minutes to get started, but it could keep you exploring for years.
Red Panda Radius Ring Modulator/Frequency Shifter Pedal
