Tues 12/27
When it comes to boutique guitar effects pedals, Akron’s EarthQuaker Devices has become a major player in the industry.
In addition to the award-winning international company, which was started in Jamie Stillman’s basement, there’s also prominent New York City boutique manufacturer Death By Audio. These days both organizations provide pedals to bands of all sizes, sounds and styles.
In a way to celebrate the boutique guitar industry, as well as the underground music scene, EarthQuaker Devices has scheduled a movie night including documentaries Goodnight Brooklyn — The Story of Death by Audio and EarthQuaker Devices: A Mini Movie for Tue 12/27 at The Nightlight in Akron.
CoolCleveland talked to EarthQuaker Devices spokesperson Aaron Rogers about the upcoming double feature, the unique Akron company and having fun in 2017.
Let’s start with EarthQuaker Devices: A Mini Movie. How did the movie come about?
There’s a company called Knobs. They make these really great avant-garde, artsy product demos. They came into town, hung out with us for a couple of weeks and sort of traced the history of EarthQuaker starting from the bedroom of a duplex as sort of a one-man operation to where we are now in a downtown warehouse with about 50 employees. We sell pedals all over the world. The film just lets people that are interested in what we do to kind of see the process from the start right up until now.
Did you commission the movie?
We didn’t commission them. We worked with them before on the product films and they do little kind of portraits of different companies. This one just kind of grew into a short film. The big part of what we do is try to shine a spotlight on the people who are actually making the pedals. So this puts names with faces. It’s also showing there are real people making the pedals, and that we all play in bands or we make art ourselves. It’s to kind of let the personalities of the whole company shine through from the production floor all the way to the president. The movie is about 20 minutes long.
Are you excited about Goodnight Brooklyn — The Story of Death by Audio?
Yeah, because the great thing about them was that in addition to the pedal company, they had a DIY performance space. A lot of our backgrounds come from the DIY or punk rock/hardcore underground movement. For me, the very first show that I ever played was at a space similar called Orange Street in Akron. It was an all-ages club. It was a place I could go as a teenager and see bands. I could really draw a straight line to the people I met while I was playing shows as a high school student at the Orange Street to my job now at EarthQuaker.
There’s obviously a through-line between movies.
I hope what people take away is that it doesn’t take much apart from maybe a seed of an idea to build something that is useful and to build something punk rockers can be successful at. We can have businesses and provide jobs for people like musicians and artists. And we’re able to have a company be successful and do it our own way.
Looking ahead to 2017, what does EarthQuaker Devices have planned?
The next EarthQuaker Day is August 5. We’re trying to do local events at a frequency of once a month or once every two months. I can’t give details just yet but we’re trying to reach out to local nonprofit groups and agencies like the Nightlight and Akron Art Museum to be a positive force.
It seems as though the intent is to make EarthQuaker Devices the epicenter of activity in Northeast Ohio?
We’d like to. We all live here, and we have nothing else to do. We might as well bring the fun here rather than go elsewhere.
[Written by John Benson]