Catalinbread Antichthon Deluxe

The Catalinbread Antichthon Deluxe is a fuzz and tremolo pedal from Catalinbread, a newly expanded version of the company's Antichthon stompbox, itself an experimental chaotic oscillating bias fuzz¹. Where the original was a compact four-knob box whose unruly fuzz produced squeals and tremulous timbres largely by manipulating your guitar's volume and tone knobs, the Deluxe moves much of that shaping onto the pedal itself, with six controls, a feedback loop, an expression input and a dedicated Action footswitch².

Catalinbread describes the original Antichthon as "a primo signal destroyer, featuring an oscillating fuzz that dipped into tremolo territory as well as otherworldly squeals and other assorted madness"¹. Of the Deluxe, the company says it is "a more performance-oriented device with tons of extras to create harmonically-rich soundscapes and tight distortion alike"¹.

An oscillating bias fuzz with tremolo

The original Antichthon was a dynamic fuzz/tremolo pedal in which, as Paolo De Gregorio put it in his The Pedal Zone demo for Delicious Audio, "nothing behaves as you expect it to," with the guitar's volume knob interacting with the effect in unexpected ways³. Guitar Pedal X's Stefan Karlsson called it "one of my favourite Catalinbread pedals, and an excellent ambassador for the experimental and chaotic oscillating fuzz genre overall," noting that with the original you induced "all manner of cool squeals and tremulous timbres by manipulating both your guitar's" volume and tone². In a later roundup of trem-fuzzes and oscillating fuzzes he summed it up as "a cool quirky highly sensitive fuzz - where you really need to work both your guitar controls - volume and tone" to deliver its sounds⁴.

The Deluxe keeps that circuit at its core but reworks it into a larger landscape enclosure, where the original retained minimalist etched aesthetics². Karlsson found the Deluxe "a lot more shapeable via the pedal controls - and overall requires a little less guitar knob twiddling" than the original².

The controls: Action, Bias, Body, Mids, Feedback and Volume

The Deluxe panel carries six knobs plus a toggle, a big step up from the original's four controls of Gravity, Time, Volume and Space²⁴.

The Feedback loop is the Deluxe's most notable addition: an on/off switch for the FDBK control that recirculates the signal ahead of the Mids stage back into the input¹².

Action footswitch and expression control

Two performance features set the Deluxe apart from the original. First, an expression pedal can take the place of the Action knob, which Horsley noted "makes this a totally different proposition" from the compact Antichthon¹. Second, the Action footswitch toggles between the value set by the dial or expression pedal and zero¹. Since Action at zero introduces tremolo, the footswitch gives you an instant jump between your dialed-in setting and the tremolo end of the pedal's range, live and without bending down¹.

From the original Antichthon to the Deluxe

The Deluxe is a relabelling as much as an expansion. Action is the Gravity of old, Bias is the original Space, and Body is presumably similar to Time, which governed low input frequencies². What is genuinely new is the Mids control, the Feedback loop with its toggle, the expression input, the Action footswitch and the roomier enclosure¹².

The original Antichthon is discontinued; Guitar Pedal X listed it at $180 in that status in May 2024, a few months before the Deluxe arrived⁴.

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