Malaise Forever Clubber Lang

The Malaise Forever Clubber Lang is a fuzz pedal built around the circuit ideas of the Interfax HP-1 Harmonic Percolator, the oddball 1970s fuzz that Steve Albini made famous. It is not a copy: Malaise Forever's builder describes it as a love letter to the Percolator with several changes, including a MOSFET input stage, asymmetrical germanium soft clipping, increased low end output, and a Tone control the original never had¹.

What you get is a fuzz that reacts strongly to how you play it. Reviewers describe a lot of interactivity between the two gain controls and the tone controls, with the pedal responding to pickup selection, your instrument's tone knob, input dynamics, and stacking with other dirt pedals¹². Pedal of the Day named it one of its Top Pedals of 2021².

A Harmonic Percolator-style fuzz

The original Interfax Harmonic Percolator used a very particular circuit with a mix of now rare germanium and silicon transistors¹. The Clubber Lang keeps that germanium and silicon mix: the clipping is asymmetrical germanium soft clipping, and the output comes from a silicon transistor whose stability is set by an internal trimmer².

The big circuit difference is up front. The Clubber Lang features a MOSFET input stage that pushes wild texture out of the circuit¹. On top of that come increased low end output and a widely effective tone control, two things players often want from a Percolator-style build that the original did not deliver in the same way¹.

The controls: Burn, Harm, Tone and Level

The V1 carries four knobs plus one trimmer inside. The V2 made with Mask Audio Electronics renames Level and Harm as LOUD and MORE, but the jobs are the same⁴.

Burn and Harm are where the character lives: Burn drives the MOSFET input stage and Harm drives the fuzz stage, and reviewers found excellent interaction between the two². The Tone sweep is wide, producing the amount of low or high end your rig needs². One quirk worth knowing before you buy: Burn crackles when you turn it¹.

The Whud trimmer

Inside the pedal is an internal trimmer called Whud. It controls feedback resistance, which is the stability of the output from the silicon transistor¹²:

• Lower it and the pedal sounds wilder and more interactive, but the volume can drop below unity¹.
• Raise it and the output signal strengthens and the volume slightly increases, but some of the interactivity goes away¹.
• Midpoint is the stock setting¹.

History and the V2 with Mask Audio Electronics

The Clubber Lang was reviewed by Pedal of the Day in October 2021 in its original form, and it made that site's Top Pedals of 2021 list². In June 2026, Delicious Audio reported that the circuit's V2 had been reworked in collaboration with Mask Audio Electronics, adding a MOSFET input stage to push the pedal further in the wild texture department¹.

Mask Audio Electronics now sells its own version, partnering with the builder it calls "fellow Midwest dirt farmer Zac at Malaise Forever Customs" to bring the Clubber Lang to its lineup⁴. That version is described as a fuzz pedal with a MOSFET input stage and asymmetrical soft clipping, a love letter to the harmonic percolator with improvements for the modern player⁴. Details are on the Mask Audio Electronics Clubber Lang page.

How it differs from an Interfax Harmonic Percolator

Comparing the Clubber Lang to the original is complicated by the fact that the original was never one fixed circuit. The Percolator does not seem to have had one "stock" design; slight changes were made in component values over its life cycle⁵. Aion FX traces at least two known versions, "stock" and "Albini," with Albini's unit using several different component values from every other traced copy⁶. Pedal of the Day puts it more bluntly: of all the Percolator-inspired builds, "each is its own beast, with no two being alike, and none being a precise recreation of the original"⁷.

Against that backdrop, the Clubber Lang's changes are concrete:

• An additional Tone control, which Guitar Pedal X's Stefan Karlsson called "handy for sure" against the original's fixed voicing³
• A MOSFET input stage for wild texture¹
• Asymmetrical germanium soft clipping¹
• Increased low end output¹
• A wide variety of colourways, and a price advantage at $150 over some other Percolator-inspired pedals³

The Clubber Lang is far from the only Percolator-inspired build. Pedal of the Day has also counted the Nine of Swords Headache, Bowman Audio Endeavors' Harmonic Percolator, and the Vaderin Pedals HP-X among the clones it has seen⁸, and Fredric Effects makes a version with a switch offering three clipping options⁹. What sets the Clubber Lang apart in that crowd is the MOSFET front end and the interactive two-gain-control layout.

What reviewers said

The Malaise Forever Clubber Lang is built by Malaise Forever and carries a list price of $150 USD³.

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