Lo-fi music

Lo-fi is an aesthetic in music production which uses low fidelity recording practices. Its use is sometimes due to the artist's financial limitations but is often a deliberate rejection of so called main stream music. Many lo-fi artists use inexpensive cassette tape recorders. The term was adopted by WFMU DJ William Berger who dedicated a half hour segment of his program to home recorded music throughout the late '80s under the name Lo-fi.

Pre-1980s

Lo-fi's roots could perhaps be dated as far back as a set of live cylinder recordings created in 1900–04 by Lionel Mapleson from a catwalk 40 ft (12 m) above the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. The sound quality of these "Mapleson Cylinders" is appalling (more so since they are one-of-a-kind artifacts that have been further worn down by being played over the last century); the aesthetic quality, though, partakes in the electric, authentic feeling of an unedited event being captured in real time. In the same historical period, commercial field recordings of folk music had begun to be created in many nations of the world, recorded catch-as-catch-can by early record producers such as Fred Gaisberg of HMV. From field hollers to ghazals sung by Indian courtesans, these spontaneous recordings made on portable equipment remain some of the most compelling music one can hear. The description of "lo-fi", however, would be slightly amiss, since the intention of the recordists can be assumed to be to capture the recordings in as high a quality as was possible within certain pragmatic boundaries.

In a later era, Buddy Holly would record some songs in a converted garage, and some posthumous Hank Williams demos would be overdubbed for commercial release, but it was not until Bob Dylan decided in 1975 to officially release a set of The Basement Tapes, first recorded as music publisher demos in 1967, that the first lo-fi pop music milestone was reached. Perhaps benefiting from the fact that the music was really not originally intended for general release, the recordings, made on a consumer-quality Ampex quarter-track machine with two microphones set up for "dual mono", made a virtue of their flaws; with their asides, laughter and unselfconscious looseness, they defined the authenticity of the lo-fi experience. As a historical matter, in the years between the production and the official release, the popularity of these particular recordings also created the first market for pop bootleg records, which as a listening experience came to include seemingly every scrap of certain rock artists' off-the-cuff and unreleased work, including home recordings. A seminal early example of this was the 1976 home-made debut album Phonography by pioneer DIY popster R. Stevie Moore. Also, famed songwriter Lou Reed produced a version of the self-titled 3rd album by his band, The Velvet Underground. Its lo-fi, cramped sound became known as the closet mix. It was highly influential to up-and-coming indie lo-fi groups.

Lo-fi recordings became more commonly heard in the late seventies to early eighties with many electronic acts. Suicide's debut album is a large collection of Lo-fi classics, which Bruce Springsteen took inspiration from on his 1982 lo-fi album Nebraska. Other classic lo-fi's to appear around this time include Throbbing Gristle's "United", Thomas Leer's "Private Plane", The Normal's TVOD/Warm Leatherette single, and The Human League's "Being Boiled". Another UK classic Lo-fi band is the Young Marble Giants.

1980s onwards

As a term to describe a musical genre, lo-fi is mainly associated with recordings from the 1980s onwards, when cassette technology such as Tascam's four-track Portastudio became widely available. Prime early exponents included Daniel Johnston, New Zealand bands such as the Tall Dwarfs, who recorded on Chris Knox's 4-track and released on Flying Nun Records, and Beat Happening and the Olympia, Washington label K Records. In the early-mid 1990s, Lo-fi found a wider audience with the success of such acts as The Apples in Stereo, Beck, Sebadoh, Guided By Voices, Pavement, Liz Phair, Will Oldham, Yo La Tengo, Ween, David Kilgour (musician) and (later) Elliott Smith.

Often lo-fi artists will record on old or poor recording equipment, ostensibly out of financial necessity but also due to the unique aural association such technologies have with "authenticity", an association created in listeners by exposure to years of demo, bootleg, and field recordings, as well as to older pop studio recordings produced more simply. The growth in lo-fi coincided with the growth of extreme slickness and polish associated with the multitrack pop recording techniques of the 1980s.

Many artists associated with the lo-fi movement, such as Bill Callahan, or Bob Log III, have frequently rejected the use of finer recording equipment, trying to keep their sound raw instead, whereas others such as Guided by Voices and The Mountain Goats slowly moved to using professional studios.

The black metal genre embraced the lo-fi idea during the late 1980s and early 1990's as it strived to distance itself from pop music. Most bands recorded their albums on extremely low budgets, using four-track recorders and any other equipment they could use. The greatest example is the Darkthrone album Transilvanian Hunger, though almost all of their albums have an intentionally "lo-fi" sound quality. The band started as a clean , well produced technical death metal band before evolving their style and almost singlehandedly producing the low quality production style that would become common place in the black metal scene. The term "raw" is generally preferred to "lo-fi" in black metal circles.

Digital Lo-Fi

Lo-Fi music can also refer to low fidelity music crated with low end synths, 8-bit computers and circuit bending.

See also

• Cassette culture
• Indie rock
• List of Lo-fi bands
• High fidelity
• No Fi
• DIY culture
• Chimp rock

External links

• Allmusic entry for lo-fi
• Lo-Fi: In Search of an Honest Aesthetic by Jonathan Maier
• Lo-Fi music group at last.fm
• GetLoFi.com