Mattoverse Electronics Mattoverse AirTrash

The Mattoverse AirTrash is a fuzz pedal for guitar or bass that, in its maker's own words, "sounds like absolute garbage"¹. That is the point. Mattoverse Electronics found the circuit by accident while breadboarding an unrelated idea, hit on sounds the maker calls "absolutely sickening, like really bad," and could not stop playing it, so the pedal shipped as what the product page calls a simple disgusting beast rather than a refined fuzz². Delicious Audio described the result as "some kind of lo-fi fuzz with a tad of ring modulation (or sample reduction maybe?) thrown in for good measure"³.

For a bass player, it is an experimental noise tool rather than a warm vintage fuzz. It reacts hard to how you play: Mattoverse says it is very sensitive to pick attack and input volume, so digging in or rolling back your volume knob reshapes the corruption, not just the loudness⁴. The original version is currently listed as sold out at $149.00 USD¹, and an engraved acrylic faceplate variant is listed at $159.00 USD, also sold out¹⁵.

A fuzz that sounds like garbage on purpose

The AirTrash's origin story is unusual even by fuzz standards. Instead of cloning a classic circuit, Mattoverse stumbled onto it¹²⁶:

• The maker was breadboarding an idea and "happened upon some absolutely sickening sounds, like really bad, but couldn't stop playing it"².
• Rather than tame the circuit, the maker left it alone and put it in a box.
• Premier Guitar's launch coverage states plainly that "it is not based on any known fuzz circuit and is capable of some truly unique sounds"⁷.
• Gearnews adds a technical clue: the pedal "makes ICs squeal," pointing to an integrated circuit at the heart of the sound⁸.

The sound itself sits somewhere between fuzz and modulation. Gearnews found "a sound all of its own, although we're still within the realms of unadulterated fuzziness," and called it anarchic but an acquired taste, aimed at noise makers and experimental players rather than everyone⁸. Guitar Pedal X's Stefan Karlsson, reviewing the later MKII, framed the AirTrash as "a very unusual experimental noise-maker fuzz" that he refers to as a signal scrambler and corruptor⁹.

Delicious Audio's write-up captured the divided reactions it provokes:

Paolo De Gregorio and Matt Olson, Delicious Audio³

The controls: level and two unlabeled knobs

The original AirTrash has three knobs, color-coded, and only one of them does what you would expect⁸⁴²:

Mattoverse is direct about why two knobs have no labels: "I could not come up with words to properly describe what the red and yellow knobs do so I created those little icons"². Gearnews put it similarly at launch, noting the yellow and red dials' parameters are indicated only by pictograms and that it is not easy to describe exactly what they do⁸. In practice, you set them by ear: they push the circuit toward different flavors of broken, from compressed fuzz to fizzing, burbling, static-like textures.

The MKII: a clean blend and more volume

Seven years after the original, Mattoverse released the AirTrash MKII, which keeps the core circuit with some minor tweaks and adds two controls¹⁰:

• Clean-Blend-Trash: blends the AirTrashed signal with a clean buffered guitar signal, so you can keep some clean low end underneath the wreckage, which matters on bass¹⁰.
• Post-gain: a gain and volume control placed after the blend, allowing greatly increased volume and gain¹⁰.

Guitar Pedal X lists the full MKII control set as "Post-Gain, Clean-Blend-Trash, RED Scramble, AMBER Corrupt, BLUE Make Louder," and describes its range as "from compressed fuzz, to carbonated fizz, to burbling glugs, airy static, and everything in between"⁹¹⁰. The MKII is also a pedal for guitar, bass, synths and drum machines, where the original was aimed at guitar or bass, and Mattoverse notes the original "did not do much on synths or drum machines"²¹⁰. Like the original, the MKII is listed as sold out, in Gray, Pink and Yellow variants¹⁰.

Power, bypass, and pedalboard placement

The AirTrash is straightforward to power but has no battery option: it takes standard center-pin negative 9VDC only, drawing approximately 30mA, and the power supply is not included¹. Gearnews confirmed the no-battery design at launch⁸. Bypass is soft-touch relay true bypass, so the pedal leaves your clean signal alone when disengaged⁴. Top-mounted jacks keep the footprint tight on a pedalboard⁸³.

Placement matters more than with most fuzzes. Mattoverse says it usually sounds best with the guitar or bass plugged straight into it, first in the chain, and Gearnews echoed that it "likes to be first in the signal chain"²⁸. Because it is so sensitive to input volume and pick attack, putting a compressor or volume pedal in front of it will flatten the dynamic interaction that makes it interesting.

Variants and availability

The original AirTrash was offered in a Gray Matte enclosure at $149.00 USD, plus engraved acrylic faceplate variants such as a Transparent Blue version with a white LED and a Clear Acrylic version with a pink LED at $159.00 USD¹⁶¹¹. All of the listings checked in October 2026 show the pedal and its variants as sold out¹⁶¹¹. Mattoverse ships via USPS Priority Mail within one business day when stock is available¹.

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