What happens when you take The Mars Volta, The Dillinger Escape Plan, a saxophone, a bunch of LSD, a fantastic shirt, and throw them all into a delicious flakey crusted Hot Pocket? You get the explosive math rock band from Pittsburgh, PA known as MICROWAVES. Pittsburg is a town that has been exporting some quality talent over the years. Anyone from Mac Miller (RIP) to Code Orange has seen their start in the good old city of steel and MICROWAVES can certainly be added to this list of prestigious acts.
This brand new video for the track “ANTIBODY” off of their record Via Weightlessness perfectly captures this band putting a new spin on their genre and is definitely going to be turning some heads in the near future. The visualizations in this video go along flawlessly with the music. This song has “claustrophobia” written all over it and the flashes of acid-laden images coupled with the cold dissonant explosions of technological visualizations take this listening experience to another level.
Some fun facts about the recording of this song from guitarist and vocalist C. Dinette:
“This one started out with two parts in 5, the part that begins the song, and the third part where the bass drops out and John is playing a roll on the snare. I decided to try and write an entire song in that time signature. It’s not that odd time signatures are anything unusual, but I realized that it’s rare that we pick one and stick to it for an entire song.  “Antibody” was recorded at the second of two sessions for the Via Weightlessness record. I had two guitars with me, but I can’t remember which one I used. It was either a green Scott French custom headless or a Tele shaped parts caster with a Warmth neck. At any rate both of those, as well as a third guitar used on an earlier session all have a Bill Lawrence L500XL pickup in the bridge position, which is pretty much all I use. I have a bunch of pedals, but the only one in use on “Antibody” is a Phosphene Audio Fuzz Sans Visage. I made it and it’s a Fuzz Face type circuit tweaked to be a little tighter sounding, not a traditional loose sounding fuzz. The guitar was sent to two amps, both of which I built. One is a 100 watt head that started as a Metro 2203 style kit. I modified it to be more like a 1959, with the first tube as two parallel channels instead of in series. I left the master volume in the circuit, but used a dual ganged pot to control the two input channels, which also happen to be fed from a single input jack. I also made some changes to coupling caps and the cathode resistors/caps. I set it up for mild crunch and get gainier sounds with pedals. The other amp is a 15 watt 2xEL84 thing built in an old Bogen PA chassis. Each amp fed an Avatar 2×12 cab with Warehouse Guitar Speakers, can’t remember the model. Johnny Arlett used his Schecter Stiletto Elite bass, with EMG pickups and active tone controls/preamp. For pedals on this one, he used an Electro Harmonix Ring Thing and a Phosphene Audio 976-KVLT, built by me. The 976-KVLT is a silicon/germanium fuzz that I initially intended as a black metal pedal. Instead of an amp, the bass signal was routed into a Tech 21 Sansamp Bass Driver DI.”
The video was edited by the band’s very own Johnny Arlett, who, as you can tell, did a bang-up job. Via Weightlessness is available through Three One G Records on black vinyl as well as digitally via iTunes, which you can order here.
