Description
As you may already know, Dr. No doesn’t just make high-end analog guitar effects. Dr. No like’s to portray an artist, a song, or a story. Dr. No uses the guitar effect as his canvas.
“I’m constantly pushing myself to evolve. I create a metaphor, a story, and a concept around a muse, an idea, or even a collaboration with an artist. I try to capture that — not as a painting or sculpture, but as a multidisciplinary, even multidimensional object. In it, the subject is central to the concept, cosmetics, and design, but also to the sound.”
“From my perspective, that sound represents the artist or the subject in all those aspects, to arrive at a complete, all-encompassing result. Not just to look at, but to play, and hopefully to inspire.”
The Siamese Twin SkullFuzz is a standalone concept where Dr. No wanted to distill an album from a moment in his life into one large, cohesive “Arteffect.”
The starting point was Siamese Dream by The Smashing Pumpkins from 1993. That meant researching what was happening sonically, and also capturing the intensity of the record through metaphor and connection.
“I chose the SkullFuzz as the carrier because it lent itself to containing all of that. And so began the 3-month puzzle and search to bring the idea to life.”
The analog circuit consists of two parts that are dominant on the record: a Distortion and a Chorus/Phaser.
The Distortion is a 4-gain-stage overdrive. I had to heavily modify my Kafuzz to get closer to that intense, deep sound that still cuts through. The biggest challenge was the tone section.
The Chorus needed to lean more toward a Phaser, so it became a hybrid Chorus/Phaser that even occasionally veers into UniVibe territory. On Siamese Dream this combination is used throughout the entire album.
“Conceptually, I wanted to capture the album cover, but also the immediacy and the tangible process that makes this record so intense. To do that, I fused two cast skulls to stay true to the Siamese Twin feel. Even though the two girls on the cover aren’t actually Siamese twins, the angle of the photo and the name of the album create that perception.”
“What’s fascinating is that those two kids are now adults, of course. With this concept I wanted to translate and immortalize the atmosphere of the record, because all that remains after a life is the skeleton kept safe as a secret potion hidden in a dusty basement, ready to unleash it’s power after it has been discovered. It made me think and wonder: do Siamese twins also die at the same time?”
To complete the full story, Dr. No wanted to capture the feeling and concept in a kind of curiosity cabinet — something you carry with you like a charged relic. It uses that weight as an accumulation of the album, in a magical form.
Dr. No plan’s to make 5 in total, but not doing that now because they are too elaborate to build and will take him a half year. No time for that.
So Dr. No decided that The Siamese Twin SkullFuzz is made exclusively to order, with options to customize the color variations if you want to customize it to your taste and gave something really exclusive.
Hand-building the Siamese Twin SkullFuzz takes 8 weeks, so please keep that in mind.