You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

The band Blonde Redhead formed in 1993.

21 years later, in 2014, the trio released their ninth album. And in this episode they deconstruct Penal Timo, a song from that record that caused them to send between the band members.

At the heart of the controversy was the pitch factor effect pedal by Evendhyde, a harmonizer that does a lot or maybe too much.

Here's Blonde Redhead on Song Exploder.

The song is a song that has a lot of different styles of music.

The song is a song that has a lot of different styles of music.

The song is a song that has a lot of different styles of music.

I couldn't admit to the entire concept of this song, so I was just kind of resisting it until the last moment.

This is Kazoo, Makino, the member of Blonde Redhead.

The other members are Amadeo and Simone Pache, twin brothers from E.T.E.

I am Amadeo. I play most of the guitar in the band. I kind of started with the arpeggio part.

The thing about the Eden type pedal with which I wrote Song is that it just by replaying one note it does the arpeggio.

It's a harmonizer, so...

He's just playing...

But the effect is doing...

So it was a bit by accident. Kazoo was not teaching on the idea of having something that was played with the pedal.

We couldn't call it a song without the pedal.

I felt like we were taking sort of shortcut to slacking off or like cheating or something like this.

So it was a little bit skeptical about calling it as a...

I worry. I censor myself quite a bit, you know, sometimes.

But Amade is not like that. He just goes for it and then he goes for it until he's had enough.

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