Hello.
Some person living in an apartment in west Tokyo.
I make pedals.
I enjoy it.
I spend an inordinate amount of time creating weird finishes for the pedals which results in each pedal being unique.
These pedals and the finishes themselves reflect the world around me. I am in a city of concrete, steel, glass and wood. Modernist with a respectful eye to the past.
I hope you use them to make some great (or terrible) sounds. Who am I to judge?
The first pedal I designed was the Brutalist Fuzz. This was a development of a scrapped design called the Void Fuzz. The Void Fuzz was good, but lacked a discernable personality. It just sounded like a fuzz pedal. There are literally thousands of pedals in the world, so I felt there's no point in developing something which doesn't feel unique.
The Void Fuzz was tossed into the void.
I then decided to rebuild it to see what I could do to perhaps make it more unique. While rebuilding it, I used some different transistors by mistake, leading to a very happy accident. The core sound was there! Unfortunately, everything else about the pedal was still lacking - poor tone controls, a volume control that had to be maxed out to get unity gain etc.
Anyway, after many iterations, the Brutalist Fuzz was born, and with it, West Tokyo Waves sprung to life.