This was a special project, and one I wasn’t sure would happen. It’s also not a public release, but it’s a story I want to tell.
This is Balance. It’s a three-way collaboration between Obstructures, Dirge Electronics, and ourselves. It’s like the bonus track of the 0xEAE line.
Below is a little documentary we made. (Many thanks to our friend J Kimball for the edit, and many thanks to Andy Pitcher for the score.) There is also a demo which includes some lore about the circuit itself. Finally, you can also read about Balance at its archival product page.
So, how did this come about?
I always thought xkcd #140 was applicable to manufacturing.
When costs skyrocket and minimum order quantities become unwieldy, sometimes you end up with leftovers that don’t have a clear purpose or destination. When we retired the Obstructures x EAE collab series, we had some enclosures to spare. Matt, Nate, and I decided we should save them for something with Evan, and it stayed open ended for a while.
Prior to announcing his retirement from pedal building for health reasons, Evan reached out on working on some more projects. Nate and Matt of Obstructures hatched a plan for the two of them and Evan to come visit. We spent a weekend with Evan at the shop, with three goals: 1) design a circuit that epitomizes the Dirge sound and ethos 2) paint some enclosures 3) have as much fun and make as much noise as physically possible.
I have been lucky to collaborate with many people, but it’s not always easy. Often the development loop is slowed by geographical separation or competing obligations. It’s rare to get everyone in the same room, and even more rare for an inspired flow state to overlap the same brief moment. This time, everything aligned perfectly.
I had a rough idea of what we wanted. Some years ago Evan and I worked on a percolator variant called Even Anguish. I started there, got a little reckless with extra gain staging and tone controls, and then let the scaffolding sit until we could all be together.
As soon as Evan plugged in Shovel (a lovely, distinctive instrument) I knew it was right. We spent maybe half a day taking turns playing it and making adjustments. But it always came back to Evan. In his hands, Balance shines. It’s bright, it’s mean, it’s textured, it’s a shockingly good clean boost. It makes you want to play big chords and find feedback overtones and rip the strings off your guitar out of sheer joy.
Between rounds of tweaking the circuit, Evan set up shop on our loading dock to paint every enclosure by hand. Paint splattering done right is deceptively intentional work. We were enraptured by the process. It felt like witnessing some kind of meditative ritual. We cut up the drop cloth to wrap each pedal we made. As soon as the paint was dry, Evan engraved each pedal one at a time.
It wasn’t all work. We ate pizza, we reminisced, we swapped tales of unusual instruments, we jammed, and we enjoyed our shared company. And we have this pedal to commemorate it. I never knew how much love we could pack into a bizarre piece of functional art.
At the Relic Music 5th anniversary party, which was a beautiful celebration in its own right, Evan played a Balance demo that became an impromptu performance. There's a picture of Evan's wife Jamie watching him play that is so beautiful. Afterwards Even hugged me so hard that he got a nosebleed all over my shirt. I cried.
I think that’s what it’s all about.
Thanks for reading.
-John
As a postscript, I will acknowledge the highly finite nature of this collaboration. It should go without saying that finishing these enclosures was an extremely labor-intensive process that cannot be replicated or scaled. We intentionally made sure people close to Evan had priority. But this circuit is too special to fade into obscurity, and we will certainly revisit it in a more traditional form factor. With Evan’s retirement, I know some folks are thinking about the future of Dirge. We’re thinking a about it too. We’ll say more when things are further along and the time is right.