A Conversation with Oliver Ackermann

In Jewish Mysticism God tells Abraham that he will spare the city of Sodom if he finds 10 people in the entire city who are “doing what they are suppose to do". In our modern Babylonian times there is one person my dear readers I am convinced, is doing what he was born to do - Oliver Ackermann - the creator of the analog guitar pedals company - Death by Audio. Tackling the perplexities & paradoxes of making art in the age of electricity, it has been a pleasure to observe his journey from afar and relishing in his analog creations in person. His guitar pedals embody the chaos & the ecstasy that artists crave for in our modern paradigm. Working tirelessly for the past two decades on his analog tools & awesome music and sharing them with the world, people like him are the reason that artists like myself are able to advance our own creations and can find beauty & expression in our industrial age. Me and my electro-punk buddy Jatin Chowdhury were finally able to gather the courage to initiate contact with him almost an year ago to get feedback on our digital plugins. We were seeking advice, feedback & mentorship but we found something more rare and valuable - friendship. I am sharing here one of our more recent conversations, to which Mr Ackermann heartily agreed to publish here. A special thanks & a very special bottle of wine to my partner in crime in all things creative & mundane - Dyumna - for transcribing & editing this for your reading pleasure. Buckle Up!

Sumit: Oliver! Man, it's good to finally connect for this. I've been nerding out waveform destroyer lately and had to reach out.

Dyumna: Hi! This is awesome!

Oliver: [laughs] Hey! Crazy likes crazy! Just finishing up some circuit testing here. You smoking too?

Sumit: Not now but definitely later! Its 4 am over here man! So...We have to ask—what is it about distortion that just never gets old for you? Like, you've built hundreds of Death By Audio pedals at this point.

Oliver: You know, it's the chaos factor, man. Distortion is electricity misbehaving in the most beautiful way possible. When you clip a signal, you're literally forcing electrons to do something they don't want to do. It's rebellion at a molecular level. Every new circuit I design, I'm trying to find a new way to make electricity scream.

Dyumna: That's poetic as hell!  Do you think there's something political in that? 

Sumit: Making things malfunction on purpose?!

Oliver: Absolutely. I mean, look at what we're sold as "normal" or "proper" tone. Clean, pristine, manufactured. Distortion says fuck that. High gain is anti-authoritarian. It's why rock and metal and noise music always gravitate toward it. You're taking the system—literally the electrical system—and pushing it until it breaks. That's protest.

Sumit: I love that. Speaking of breaking things—the Absolute Destruction. That pedal is insane. What were you thinking when you designed that?

Oliver: Oh man, the Absolute Destruction!! That one's special. So the concept was: what if you could have multiple types of destruction happening simultaneously? It's got two independent fuzz circuits that you can blend together, and then this filter section that can sweep and oscillate. The toggle switches let you choose between different clipping options—asymmetrical, symmetrical, LED, germanium.

Sumit: It's like a choose-your-own-adventure for obliterating your signal.

Oliver: Exactly! And the crazy thing is how it interacts with itself. You must have noticed. When you push both fuzz circuits hard and start messing with the filter, you get these sub-octave artifacts and intermodulation distortion that's just... [makes explosion gesture] ...it's beautiful chaos. I designed it right after we'd been on this brutal tour, and I just wanted something that could capture that feeling of everything falling apart in the best possible way.

Sumit: The filter sweep on that thing can get really sensual, honestly.

Oliver: Right?! That's the erotic part of circuit design! You're building something that responds to touch, that moans and screams based on how you manipulate it. The Absolute Destruction especially—when you get that filter resonating and self-oscillating while the fuzz is maxed out, it's almost obscene.

Dyumna: Damn!

Sumit: Okay! So then the Waveform Destroyer—that's a whole different kind of insanity. That's not even really distortion anymore, is it?

Oliver: [gets animated, picks up a Waveform Destroyer from his desk] This is my favorite child, not gonna lie. So the Waveform Destroyer is a wave-folding circuit. Instead of clipping the waveform like traditional distortion, it literally folds the signal back on itself. You get these weird harmonic stacks that don't exist in nature. It's very synthesizer-inspired.

Sumit: The Harmonics knob on that is crazy.

Oliver: Yeah! So that's controlling how many times the wave folds. At low settings, you get this crystalline, almost ring-mod quality. Crank it up and it becomes this dense, metallic storm. And the Rate knob controls this built-in tremolo that's chopping up the folded waveform. When you max everything out, it's like your guitar is being processed by an alien machine.

Sumit: Spaceships! I remember you telling me once that you hand-painted each enclosure for the original run?

Oliver: Yeah, every single one. Each one was unique. It was important to me that these weren't just mass-produced units. The Waveform Destroyer especially—it's such a weird, aggressive pedal that I wanted the aesthetic to match. Lots of blacks, reds, harsh brush strokes. The pedal sounds violent, so it should look violent.

Dyumna:  Black & Red! Unknown & Violent! No wonder Sumit is obsessed!

Sumit: Crazy minds think alike! There's something really rock & roll about hand-painting gear. It's like... anti-corporate, even though you're running a business. I have been trying to distill out something similar.

Oliver: That's the constant tension, you know? Death By Audio started as this completely DIY thing. I was literally drilling enclosures in my apartment. As we grew, I tried to keep that ethos—like, we still assemble everything in Brooklyn, we pay fair wages, we don't offshore production to save a buck. But yeah, it's hard to stay pure when you're also trying to keep the lights on and pay people.

Sumit: How do you balance that? The artistry versus the commerce?

Oliver: [leans back, exhales] Honestly? Weed helps. [laughs] But seriously, I just try to only make things I genuinely believe in. Every pedal we release, I ask myself: would I use this? Does this bring something new to the table? The Apocalypse, the Total Sonic Annihilation, the Waveform Destroyer—these aren't "me too" pedals. They're not trying to be a Tube Screamer clone or whatever. They're trying to expand what's possible.

Dyumna: Speaking of expanding possibilities, where do your inspirations come from? Like, who or what shaped your approach to sound and art?

Oliver: Oh man, so many things. Early on, it was bands like My Bloody Valentine, Jesus and Mary Chain—that wall of sound approach where the distortion becomes its own instrument. Kevin Shields especially, the way he treated the guitar as a textural device rather than just a melodic one. That was huge for me.

Sumit: The shoegaze thing definitely comes through in APTBS.

Oliver: For sure. But then also the New York new wave scene—Sonic Youth, Swans, Glenn Branca. Branca's guitar orchestras, where he'd have twelve guitars all playing these microtonal drones—that showed me that guitars could be more about frequencies and harmonics than notes and chords. And Swans, just the sheer physical brutality of their sound. Michael Gira's commitment to intensity.

Sumit: Have to check these out! D take notes please!

Oliver: Yeah, there's something about New York that breeds aggressive music. The constant noise, the density, the friction of so many people crammed together. It gets into your nervous system. But I'm also inspired by people doing completely different things—like, I love what people like Actress or Burial do with electronic music, creating these emotional, ghostly soundscapes. Or Autechre's algorithmic chaos. Even though I work with analog circuits, I'm fascinated by what's possible with digital manipulation.

Sumit: That's interesting. What's your take on digital audio plugins versus hardware pedals? Because there are people who'd say you're on one side of that debate by default.

Oliver: [laughs] Yeah, people assume I'm some analog purist who thinks plugins are the devil or whatever. But honestly? I think it's all just tools. You guys make em too! I love them!  Plugins can do incredible things that hardware can't. The precision, the recall, the ability to automate parameters in ways that would be impossible with physical knobs—that's powerful.

Sumit: So you use plugins? Not ours I hope!

Oliver: Of course! In the studio especially.I love Jatin’s work! Genius! Like, I'll use a plugin to do surgical EQ work or parallel compression that would be a pain in the ass with outboard gear. Some of the granular synthesis plugins out there are mind-blowing. You can do things with time-stretching and spectral processing that you just can't do with analog circuits.

Sumit: But you still make hardware! You are an analog junkie at heart just like me!

Oliver: [animated] Right, because hardware has different strengths. The main one is the physical interface—turning a real knob, stomping on a switch, that tactile feedback loop is part of the creative process. When I'm on stage and I'm grinding my foot on a pedal, pushing it harder even though it's already fully on, that's a performance gesture that means something. You can't do that with a mouse.

Sumit: It's the body thingy.

Oliver: Exactly. Plus, hardware has happy accidents in ways that plugins don't. Analog circuits respond to temperature, to the impedance of your guitar, to the electrical environment they're in. They age and drift. A plugin does exactly what it's programmed to do every single time, which is sometimes what you want, but sometimes you want the chaos.

Dyumna: I don't think Jimmy Hendrix would have ever touched a digital plugin.

Sumit: Thank god he did’nt! Do you think plugins can ever truly emulate analog distortion? Physics itself prohibits that. Mathematics can get us closer though.

Oliver: The best ones get really close. Like, scary close. But there's something about the way analog circuits interact with each other in real-time, the phase relationships, the harmonic generation—it's complex enough that it's hard to model perfectly. That said, in a mix? Most people can't tell the difference. And honestly, if it sounds good, who cares?

Sumit: That's refreshingly non-dogmatic.

Dyumna: Learn Sumit Learn!

Oliver: I've spent too much time around gear snobs. The truth is, some of my favorite recordings have tons of digital processing on them. The purist thing is often just insecurity dressed up as principles. Use what works for the sound you're trying to make.

Sumit: Although you're not about to release a Death By Audio plugin suite, are you?

Oliver: [laughs] Never say never, but probably not. 

Sumit: Fuck Pragmatism. Fuck off D!

Oliver: [laughs] The whole point of Death By Audio is the physicality, the craft, the objects. But I'd never tell someone they shouldn't use an amp sim plugin if that's what they've got access to. Making music is hard enough without gatekeeping the tools.

Sumit: That's a good philosophy. We wanted to ask— when are you planning to come to India?

Oliver: Yeah! I'm so excited about this! I told you earlier I've been wanting to go for years. It's tentatively planned for late 2026 or early 2027, probably hitting Mumbai, Delhi, maybe Goa and some other cities if we can make it work.

Sumit: And the Himalayas!

Dyumna: Is this for touring or something else?

Oliver: Oh yes the Himalayas! Shiva! It's a combination of things. There's a potential tour in the works—some promoters out there have been reaching out, your friends reached out and I feel the underground music scene in India seems really interesting right now. But I'm also just fascinated by the culture, the music traditions, the chaos of it all.

Dyumna: The chaos thing seems on-brand for you.

Oliver: [laughs] Right? From what I understand, Indian cities like Delhi or Mumbai make New York look calm. That density, that sensory overload—I feel like it would be incredibly inspiring. Plus, I want to explore some of the traditional music, the drones in classical Indian music, the microtonal systems. That stuff influenced so much Western experimental music, but I've never experienced it in its original context.

Sumit: Are you thinking of incorporating any of those elements into your work?

Oliver: Maybe? I don't want to be that Western musician who goes to India for a week and comes back making "world music" fusion or whatever. That feels appropriative and lazy. But I'm definitely open to being changed by the experience, you know? Letting it filter into my consciousness and see what emerges naturally.

Sumit: Bring gear man! We need more Deaths by Audio over here!

Oliver: [excited] I'm definitely bringing some travel gear! I want to do field recordings—like, the street sounds, the traffic, religious ceremonies, whatever I can capture. And yeah, maybe process some of that through pedals and see what happens. There's this idea I've been toying with about creating a piece that uses only found sounds from a specific place, heavily processed. India could be perfect for that.

Sumit: That would be incredible. The DIY thing is probably more intense here than even in Brooklyn. Us audio junkies have to manage, repair and  assemble everything here by ourselves.

Oliver: [nods] That's what I'm assuming. Like, when you can't just order parts from Reverb or Sweetwater or online, when the infrastructure is different, you have to be more creative and resourceful. That's inspiring to me. I've gotten comfortable in a lot of ways—I have a well-equipped workshop, access to any component I need. Seeing how people create in more constrained environments, that can shake you out of complacency.

Sumit: Are you planning any workshops or anything while you're here? We can help you with that!

Oliver: That's the dream! If I can set something up, I'd love to do a pedal-building workshop or just talk about circuit design with people who are interested. Share some knowledge, but also learn about how people there approach electronics and sound. It's an exchange, not me coming in as some expert.

Sumit: That's a cool approach. ADC 2026 for sure! D that’s on you now!  Also, the food is going to blow your mind.

Dyumna: I wish I got the food department but arranging workshops for the awesome Oliver Ackermann will be awesome as well!

Oliver: [laughs] Awesome! Dude, I know! Everyone who's been there says that. I'm ready. I eat spicy food constantly, so I'm hoping my tolerance is up to par. Although I'm a little worried about getting sick—I've heard the horror stories.

Sumit: Just embrace it as part of the experience!

Dyumna: [laughing] The physical purge as artistic inspiration? I like it. Very on-brand.

Sumit:[ picks up a pedal] The Total Sonic Annihilation is another beast entirely. This one scares me a little.

Oliver: [laughs] It should! That's a theremin-controlled fuzz with eight oscillators that can sync and de-sync. You can create these massive drone walls or glitchy, stuttering rhythms. I built it because I was frustrated that most "experimental" pedals were still too predictable. I wanted something that felt genuinely alien, where you couldn't quite control what was happening.

Sumit: That's the thing about your designs—they have this element of danger. Like they might not work, or they might work too well.

Oliver: [animated] Yes! That's the electricity thing again. When you're pushing circuits to their limits, especially with starve circuits or feedback loops, there's always this edge where things could tip into unusable noise. But that edge is where the magic is. It's like... in sex or in art or in music, the most intense moments are when you're right on the boundary of control and chaos.

Dyumna: That's a hell of a design philosophy. Speaking of boundaries, how does this connect to your thinking about social causes and community? I love how you take up social causes.

Oliver: So, I think there's a direct line. When you're designing pedals that reject the standard "professional" sound, you're making a statement about what deserves to exist. Same thing with running DIY venues or supporting underground artists. Society wants to smooth everything out, make it palatable, turn it into content. Distortion—real distortion, the ugly kind—says no. It says some things should be raw and confrontational and uncomfortable.

Dyumna: And that applies to politics too.

Oliver: Absolutely. I'm not gonna get too specific here because I'm high as fuck [laughs], but yeah—whether it's housing justice, artist spaces, labor rights—it's all about resisting the forces that want to homogenize and commodify everything. The same developers who shut down Death By Audio the venue are the same mindset that wants every pedal to sound like a Klon and every apartment to be luxury condos.

Sumit: Gentrification of sound.

Oliver: Exactly! Gentrification of sound, gentrification of space, gentrification of culture. It's all connected. That's why I love that noise and experimental music have stayed so stubbornly unmarketable. You can't really sell true noise to a mass audience. It refuses to be commodified.

Sumit: Although someone's probably trying to make noise music for commercials right now. Fucking parasites.

Oliver: [groans] Don't even. I've gotten those calls. "Can we license your harshest track for a car commercial but make it, like, 60% less harsh?" Miss me with that asshole!

Sumit: [laughing] Okay, back to the gear—what's the relationship between the pedals you make and the music you make with A Place to Bury Strangers? Are you designing pedals for specific sounds you want, or do the pedals inspire new musical directions?

Oliver: It's totally circular. Like, the Waveform Destroyer came about because I wanted these aggressive, folded textures in our live show but couldn't find anything that did it right. So I built it. Then once it existed, it opened up new compositional possibilities I hadn't considered. Same with the Interstellar Overdriver—that was me trying to capture this specific sustained, harmonic scream I was hearing in my head.

Sumit: The Interstellar Overdriver is underrated, I think.

Oliver: It's subtle compared to some of the others, but it's a workhorse. It's a dual-stage overdrive where each stage has its own EQ and gain. You can stack them for this massive, thick sound, or use them separately for different tonal colors. I designed it for rhythm playing specifically—like, when you need that chunk but also clarity. A lot of high-gain pedals turn to mush in a band context. The Interstellar cuts through.

Sumit: Do you think there's something erotic about that too? The way a good overdrive feels under your fingers?

Oliver: [grins] Oh, definitely. Touch sensitivity is huge. A good pedal responds to how hard you attack the strings, how you roll off your volume knob, the angle of your pick. It's intimate. It's your body directly affecting the sound through this electronic intermediary. That's why I hate overly compressed, sterile distortions—they remove that human element. They're not responsive. They're like... [pauses] ...bad sex? [laughs]

Sumit: [cracking up] I'm here for these analogies!

Oliver: Sorry D! But! I mean, it's true though! A responsive pedal is like a good partner—it listens, it reacts, it surprises you. The Absolute Destruction, the way it interacts with your playing dynamics, that's what makes it special beyond just "it's loud and fuzzy." Sorry again D!

Dyumna:[laughing] I am immune to these analogies now!

Sumit: This is making me want to go play guitar immediately!

Oliver: [enthusiastic] Do it! That's the whole point. All this theory and philosophy is cool, but ultimately it's about that moment when you plug in, hit a chord, and something unexpected happens that makes you go "oh FUCK, what was that?" That's the high. That's better than any drug.

Dyumna: Speaking of drugs though, does weed affect your creative process? Like, when you're designing circuits or making music?

Oliver: Yes and no. I don't usually smoke when I'm doing the actual technical work—like, soldering while high is asking for trouble. But the conceptual phase? Definitely. Weed helps me think non-linearly about what a pedal could be. The Waveform Destroyer probably wouldn't exist if I hadn't spent an evening super stoned, thinking about how signals could be manipulated beyond just clipping. It removes the "this is how it's supposed to be done" filter.

Sumit: That's the rebellion thing again I feel.

Oliver: Yeah, exactly. Question everything. Why does distortion have to work this way? Why do we accept these conventions? Some of the best pedals I've made came from asking "what if I'm wrong about everything?" and exploring that space.

Sumit: What about the visual art side? You mentioned erotic art earlier, and I know you've done photography and other visual work. How does that fit into everything?

Oliver: Oh it's there man! And me and Liz love your work. Keep it coming! So, I've always been interested in the body as a site of truth, you know? Like, we lie with our words all the time, we perform socially, but the body—especially in states of pleasure or pain or exertion—the body doesn't lie. Erotic art, when it's honest, captures that raw truth. Same with really heavy music or harsh noise—it's trying to bypass the intellectual brain and hit you in the gut, or the groin, or wherever.

Sumit: There's definitely a physicality to your music. The volume alone is an assault.

Oliver: We want it to be felt, not just heard. Low frequencies in particular—they move your organs, your chest cavity. That's primal. That's why bass-heavy music has been part of human culture forever. It's body music. And yeah, there's something sexual about that too. The throbbing, the pulsing, the way it builds and releases tension.

Dyumna: Have you encountered different attitudes toward sexuality and the body in different cultures? In India we have complex views on that.

Sumit: Castrated views. Bollywood fucking Impotence & non-creativity masked as sexuality! Boring shit!

Oliver: [laughs] I think everywhere has complex views on sexuality, right? The West pretends to be liberated but is actually super fucked up about bodies and desire in lots of ways. From what I understand, India has this interesting paradox where there's ancient erotic art—the Kama Sutra, temple carvings—but also contemporary conservatism. I'm curious to see how that plays out, how artists there navigate that tension.

Dyumna: It might influence your visual work. Sumit lives in his VIP fool’s paradise so he is immune!

Sumit: Not paradise - Spaceship!

Oliver:[laughs] Maybe. I'm trying not to go in with too many expectations. Just be present and see what resonates. But yeah, I'm always thinking about how to represent intensity and intimacy visually without falling into cliché or exploitation. That's the challenge with erotic art—so much of it is either sanitized or exploitative. Finding that space where it's raw but respectful, that's hard.You do it beautifully man! Even in your music!

Sumit: Thank you master! All thanks to people like you!

Dyumna: Okay, so if you had to connect all these threads—pedal building, music, visual art, social consciousness, eroticism, your upcoming India trip—what's the underlying theme?

Oliver: Intensity… Presence... Anti-numbness. We live in this world that's constantly trying to buffer us from real experience, right? Everything's mediated, sanitized, algorithmically optimized. My work—whether it's a pedal that makes your amp scream or a photograph that shows bodies without shame or a song that's so loud it's physically uncomfortable—it's all trying to crack through that numbness. It's saying: you're alive, this is real, feel something.

Dyumna: And coming to India is part of that. Or will be! You just have to give us the green light!

Oliver: Absolutely. Travel, especially to places that are radically different from what you know, that's one of the best ways to snap out of your habitual patterns. The unfamiliarity forces you to be present. You can't be on autopilot when nothing is familiar. That's valuable.

Sumit: That's beautiful!  And kind of exactly what I needed to hear today.

Oliver: [smiles] That's the best part of these conversations. The pedals and the music are cool, but connecting with people about why we make things, why art matters, why we push ourselves into unfamiliar territory—that's the real shit.

Dyumna: Before we wrap up, what are you working on now? Any new pedals or music or art in development?

Oliver: [looks around at his workbench conspiratorially] I probably shouldn't say too much, but I'm exploring some stuff with voltage-controlled filters and random modulation sources. Trying to make something that's like... a pedal that plays itself, in a way. Where you're more conducting chaos than controlling a circuit. Very early stages though.

Sumit: That sounds incredible and terrifying. Fucking insane!

Oliver: [grins] That's the goal. Always. And who knows, maybe after India I'll come back with completely different ideas. Next year will be tough. I am maxed out over here. 2027 will be the year.  But yeah. Maybe I'll want to build something that incorporates drone elements or rhythmic concepts from Indian classical music. Or maybe it'll push me in a completely different direction. That's the exciting part.

Dyumna: This was amazing, Oliver. Thanks for taking out the time and getting weird with us!

Sumit:[folds hands] Thank you once again Sensie!

Oliver: [laughs] Anytime. Keep making noise, keep questioning shit, and definitely keep smoking the good stuff. And hey—don't be afraid to crank that Absolute Destruction until something breaks! That's when you know you're doing it right.

Sumit: Words to live by!

Oliver: Thanks! I'll bring you back some weird noises.

That's all folks! Me and my team plan to bring many more of such conversations with amazing people who inspire me and are kind enough to take out time to share their amazing insights about all things weird, electric, insane and heretical. Do let us know about artists & creators you would like us to connect with or you could help us connect with! Cheers!