Lo-fi music

Lo-fi is the opposite of High fidelity. Music educator R. Murray Schafer, in the glossary for his 1977 book The Tuning of the World, defined the term as "unfavourable signal-to-noise ratio."[5]

There was virtually no appreciation for the imperfections of lo-fi music among critics until the 1980s, during which there was an emergent romanticism for home-recording and "do-it-yourself" (DIY) qualities.[6] Afterward, "DIY" was often used interchangeably with "lo-fi".[7] By the end of the 1980s, qualities such as "home-recorded", "technically primitive", and "inexpensive equipment" were commonly associated with the "lo-fi" label, and throughout the 1990s, such ideas became central to how "lo-fi" was popularly understood.[8] Consequently, in 2003, the Oxford Dictionary added a second definition for the term—"a genre of rock music characterized by minimal production, giving a raw and unsophisticated sound".[8]

The identity of the party or parties who popularized the use of "lo-fi" cannot be determined definitively.[2] It is generally suggested that the term was popularized through William Berger's weekly half-hour radio show on the New Jersey-based independent radio station WFMU, titled Low-Fi, which lasted from 1986 to 1987.[2][9] The program's contents consisted entirely of contributions solicited via mail[10] and ran during a thirty-minute prime time evening slot every Friday.[9] In the fall 1986 issue of the WFMU magazine LCD, the program was described as "home recordings produced on inexpensive equipment. Technical primitivism coupled with brilliance."[9]

A third definition was added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2008: "unpolished, amateurish, or technologically unsophisticated, esp. as a deliberate aesthetic choice."[8] In 2017, About.com's Anthony Carew argued that the term "lo-fi" had been commonly misused as a synonym for "warm" or "punchy" when it should be reserved for music that "sounds like it's recorded onto a broken answering-machine".[2]

The notion of "bedroom musicians" first emerged in the 21st century following the rise of laptop computers in many forms of popular or avant-garde music.[11] Since then, there had been an increasing tendency to group all home-recorded music under the umbrella of "lo-fi".[12] From these developments came "bedroom pop", a loosely-defined music genre[13] referring to artists who record at home, rather than at traditional recording spaces.[14]

"Bedroom pop" has also been invoked to describe a distinct aesthetic.[15] Writing in 2006, Tammy LaGorce of The New York Times identified "bedroom pop" as "bloglike music that tries to make the world a better place through a perfect homemade song".[16] By the 2010s, journalists would indiscriminately apply the term to any music with a "fuzzy" production quality,[17]

Daniel Wray of The Guardian defined the term in 2020 as a genre of home-recorded music with a "dreamy, introspective and intimate" sound, and one which spans "across indie, pop, R&B and emo".[18] Jenessa Williams of The Forty-Five called "bedroom pop" almost synonymous with "lo-fi", having been traditionally used as "a flattering way to dress up homespun demos and slacker aesthetics" before being recontextualized in later years as "midwestern emo without the thrashing; Soundcloud rap without the braggadocio."[19]

Many of the associated artists have rejected the label.[20]

DIY music predates written history, but "lo-fi" as it was understood after the 1990s can be traced to 1950s rock and roll.[33] AllMusic writes that the genre's recordings were made "cheaply and quickly, often on substandard equipment. In that sense, the earliest rock & roll records, most of the garage rock of the '60s, and much of the punk rock of the late '70s could be tagged as Lo-Fi."[34]

The Beach Boys (pictured in 1967) recorded albums at Brian Wilson's home studio from 1967 to 1972.

Released in 1967, the Beach Boys' albums Smiley Smile and Wild Honey were lo-fi albums recorded mostly in Brian Wilson's makeshift home studio; the albums were later referred to as part of Wilson's so-called Bedroom Tapes.[35] Although Smiley Smile was initially met with confusion and disappointment, appreciation for the album grew after other artists released albums that reflected a similarly flawed and stripped-down quality, including Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding (1967) and the Beatles' White Album (1968).[36] Pitchfork writer Mark Richardson credited Smiley Smile with inventing "the kind of lo-fi bedroom pop that would later propel Sebadoh, Animal Collective, and other characters."[37] Editors at Rolling Stone credited Wild Honey with originating "the idea of DIY pop".[38]

In the early 1970s, there were a few other major recording artists who released music recorded with portable multi-tracking equipment; examples included Paul McCartney and Todd Rundgren.[39] Produced shortly after the Beatles' break-up, the home-recorded solo release McCartney was among the best-selling albums of 1970, but was critically panned.[40] In 2005, after an interviewer suggested that it was possibly "one of the first big lo-fi records of its day", McCartney commented that it was "interesting" that younger fans were "looking back at something like that with some kind of respect", before adding that the album's "sort of ... hippie simplicity ... kind of resonates at this point in time, somehow."[41]

Something/Anything? (released in February 1972) was recorded almost entirely by Rundgren alone. The album included many of his best-known songs, as well as a spoken-word track ("Intro") in which he teaches the listener about recording flaws for an egg hunt-type game he calls "Sounds of the Studio". He used the money gained from the album's success to build a personal recording studio in New York, where he recorded the less successful 1973 follow-up A Wizard, a True Star.[42] Musicologist Daniel Harrison compared the Beach Boys' late-1960s albums to Wizard, a record "which mimics aspects of Brian's compositional style in its abrupt transitions, mixture of various pop styles, and unusual production effects. But it must be remembered that the commercial failure of the Beach Boys' experiments was hardly motivation for imitation."[43] In 2018, Pitchfork's Sam Sodsky noted that the "fingerprints" of Wizard remain "evident on bedroom auteurs to this day".[42]

Among other notable examples, writers of The Wire credit Skip Spence's Oar (1969) as "a progenitor of both the loner/stoner and lo-fi movements", adding that the album "would not find a real audience for decades."[44] Record Collector's Jamie Atkins wrote in 2018 that many lo-fi acts would be indebted to the reverb-saturated sound of the Beach Boys' 1970 song "All I Wanna Do".[45] Pitchfork writer Madison Brooke crowned Peter Ivers, a 1970s Los Angeles musician, as "the weirdo king of bedroom pop, decades before the genre existed."[46]

With the emergence of punk rock and new wave in the late 1970s, some sectors of popular music began to espouse a DIY ethos that heralded a wave of independent labels, distribution networks, fanzines and recording studios,[47] and many guitar bands were formed on the then-novel premise that one could record and release their own music instead of having to procure a record contract from a major label.[48] Lo-fi musicians and fans were predominantly white, male and middle-class, and while most of the critical discourse interested in lo-fi was based in New York or London, the musicians themselves were largely from lesser metropolitan areas of the US.[49]

R. Stevie Moore (pictured in 2011) is frequently referred to as the "godfather" of home recording.[50]

Since 1968, R. Stevie Moore had been recording full-length albums on reel-to-reel tape in his parents' basement in Tennessee, but it was not until 1976's Phonography that any of his recordings were issued on a record label.[51] The album achieved some notoriety among New York's punk and new wave circles.[52] Matthew Ingram of The Wire wrote that "Moore might not have been the first rock musician to go entirely solo, recording every part from drums to guitar ... However, he was the first to explicitly aestheticize the home recording process itself ... making him the great-grandfather of lo-fi."[51] Asked if he supported the "DIY/lo-fi pioneer label", Moore explained that his approach resulted from "happenstance" rather than a calculated artistic decision, although he agreed that he "should be recognized as a pioneer".[53] When a 2006 New York Times reporter referenced Moore as the progenitor of "bedroom pop", Moore responded that the notion was "hilarious" in light of his "bitter struggle to make a living and get some notoriety, I scoff at it."[54]

In 1979, Tascam introduced the Portastudio, the first portable multi-track recorder of its kind to incorporate an "all-in-one" approach to overdubbing, mixing, and bouncing. This technology allowed a broad range of musicians from underground circles to build fan bases through the dissemination of their cassette tapes.[55] Music critic Richie Unterberger cited Moore as "one of the most famous" of the "few artists in cassetteland [that] established a reputation, if even a cult one."[47] From 1979 until the early 1980s, Moore was a staff member on WFMU, hosting a weekly "Bedroom Radio" show.[51] Berger's "Low-Fi" program followed thereafter and effectively established lo-fi as a distinct movement associated with the spirit of punk.[2] JW Farquhar's home-recorded 1973 album The Formal Female, according to critic Ned Raggett, could also be regarded as a forerunner to "any number of" independent lo-fi artists, including R. Stevie Moore and the underground Texas musician Jandek.[56]

Calvin Johnson (pictured c. 2000s), founder of K Records and co-founder of Beat Happening

In 1980, the Welsh trio Young Marble Giants released their only album, Colossal Youth, featuring stark instrumentation, including a primitive drum machine, and a decidedly "bedroom" aura. Davyd Smith of the Evening Standard later wrote, "It's hard to imagine a more lo-fi, unambitious sound."[57] Throughout the following decade, the indie rock spheres of the American underground (bands such as college radio favorite R.E.M.[58]), along with some British post-punk bands, were the most prominent exports of lo-fi music. According to AllMusic, the stylistic variety of their music often "fluctuated from simple pop and rock songs to free-form song structures to pure noise and arty experimentalism."[34] Similar scenes also developed among DIY cassette-trading hip-hop and hardcore punk acts.[55] One of the most recognizable bands was Beat Happening (1984–1992) from K Records, an influential indie pop label. They were rarely known as a "lo-fi" group during their active years, and were only noted for their pioneering role in the movement after the term's definition evolved in the mid 1990s.[59]

Elsewhere, WFMU DJ Irwin Chusid was responsible for inventing and popularizing the "outsider music" category — much of it overlapping with lo-fi.[60] Adam Harper credits the outsider musicians Daniel Johnston and Jandek with "form[ing] a bridge between 1980s primitivism and the lo-fi indie rock of the 1990s. ... both musicians introduced the notion that lo-fi was not just acceptable but the special context of some extraordinary and brilliant musicians."[61] Hailing from New Zealand, the Tall Dwarfs' mid-1980s records are credited with anticipating the lo-fi sound.[62] AllMusic wrote that Tall Dwarfs' home-recorded releases presaged "the rise of what was ultimately dubbed 'lo-fi' as the sound began to grow in prominence and influence over the course of the decades to follow."[63]

Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices (pictured in 2006)

During the 1990s, the media's usage of the word "indie" evolved from music "produced away from the music industry's largest record labels" to a particular style of rock or pop music viewed in the US as the "alternative to 'alternative'".[64] Following the success of Nirvana's Nevermind (1991), alternative rock became a cultural talking point, and subsequently, the concept of a lo-fi movement coalesced between 1992 and 1994. Centered on artists such as Guided by Voices, Sebadoh, Beck, and Pavement, most of the writing about alternative and lo-fi aligned it with Generation X and "slacker" stereotypes that originated from Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X and Richard Linklater's film Slacker (both released 1991) which led to the genre being called "slacker rock".[65] Some of the delineation between grunge and lo-fi came with respect to the music's "authenticity". Even though Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was well known for being fond of Johnston, K Records, and the Shaggs, there was a faction of indie rock that viewed grunge as a sell-out genre, believing that the imperfections of lo-fi was what gave the music its authenticity.[66]

In April 1993, the term "lo-fi" gained mainstream currency after it was featured as a headline in The New York Times.[22] The most widely-read article was published by the same paper in August 1994 with the headline "Lo-Fi Rockers Opt for Raw Over Slick". In contrast to a similar story ran in the paper seven years earlier, which never deployed "lo-fi" in the context of an unprofessional recording, writer Matt Deihl conflated "lo-fi" with "DIY" and "a rough sound quality".[67] He wrote:

Alternately called lo-fi, referring to the rough sound quality resulting from such an approach, or D.I.Y., an acronym for "do it yourself", this tradition is distinguished by an aversion to state-of-the-art recording techniques. ... In a world of sterile, digitally recorded Top 40, lo-fi elucidates the raw seams of the artistic process.[67]

The main focus in the piece was Beck and Guided by Voices, who recently become popular acts in the indie rock subculture.[68] Beck, whose 1994 single "Loser" was recorded in a kitchen and reached the Billboard top 10, ultimately became the most recognizable artist associated with the "lo-fi" tag.[69] As a response to the "lo-fi" label, Guided by Voices bandleader Robert Pollard denied having any association to its supposed movement. He said that although the band was being "championed as the pioneers of the lo-fi movement," he was not familiar with the term, and explained that "[a] lot of people were picking up [Tascam] machines at the time ... Using a four-track became common enough that they had to find a category for it: DIY, lo-fi, whatever."[70]

At the time, music critic Simon Reynolds interpreted the seeming-movement as a reaction against grunge music, "and a weak one, since lo-fi is just grunge with even grungier production values."[22] In turn, he said, lo-fi inspired its own reaction in the form of "post-rock".[22] A reaction against both grunge and lo-fi, according to AllMusic, was chamber pop, which drew heavily from the rich orchestrations of Brian Wilson, Burt Bacharach, and Lee Hazlewood.[71]

"Lo-fi" was applied inconsistently throughout the 1990s. Writing in the book Hop on Pop (2003), Tony Grajeda said that by 1995, Rolling Stone magazine "managed to label every other band it featured in the first half [of the year] as somehow lo-fi."[22] One journalist in Spin credited Sebadoh's Sebadoh III (1991) with "inventing" lo-fi, characterizing the genre as "the soft rock of punk".[72][22] Additionally, virtually every journalist referenced an increasing media coverage of lo-fi music while failing to acknowledge themselves as contributors to the trend.[22]

Several books were published that helped to "canonize" lo-fi acts, usually by comparing them favorably to older musicians. For example, Rolling Stone's Alt-Rock-a-Rama (1995) contained a chapter titled "The Lo-Fi Top 10", which mentioned Hasil Adkins, the Velvet Underground, Half Japanese, Billy Childish, Beat Happening, Royal Trux, Sebadoh, Liz Phair, Guided By Voices, Daniel Johnston, Beck and Pavement.[73] Richie Unterberger's Unknown Legends of Rock 'n' Roll: Psychedelic Unknowns, Mad Geniuses, Punk Pioneers, Lo-Fi Mavericks & More and "the community of like-minded critics and fans surrounding him" were especially pivotal in establishing modern notions of the lo-fi aesthetic. According to Adam Harper: "In short, Unknown Legends bridges the interests of the [1980s] and the [Cassette Culture] Generation and those of [the 2000s], providing an early sketch, a portent – a 'leftfield blueprint', perhaps – of 00s movements like hauntology and hypnagogic pop".[50]

The "lo-fi" tag also extended to acts such as the Mountain Goats, Nothing Painted Blue, Chris Knox, Alastair Galbraith, and Lou Barlow.[2] "Other significant artists often aligned with 1990s lo-fi", Harper wrote, "such as Ween, the Grifters, Silver Jews, Liz Phair, Smog, Superchunk, Portastatic and Royal Trux have been largely omitted owing either to the comparative paucity of their reception or to its lesser relevance to lo-fi aesthetics."[69]

From the late 1990s to 2000s, "lo-fi" was absorbed into regular indie discourse, where it mostly lost its connotations as an indie rock subcategory evoking "the slacker generation", "looseness", or "self-consciousness".[74] Pitchfork and The Wire became the leading publications on music, while blogs and smaller websites took on the role previously occupied by fanzines.[75]

Ariel Pink performing in 2010

The rise of modern digital audio workstations dissolved a theoretical technological division between professional and non-professional artists.[76] Many of the prominent lo-fi acts of the 1990s adapted their sound to more professional standards[74] and "bedroom" musicians began looking toward vintage equipment as a way to achieve an authentic lo-fi aesthetic,[77] mirroring a similar trend in the 1990s concerning the revival of 1960s space age pop and analog synthesizers.[75] R. Stevie Moore was increasingly cited by emerging lo-fi acts as a primary influence.[52] His most vocal advocate, Ariel Pink, had read Unknown Legends, and later recorded a cover version of one of the tracks included in a CD that came with the book ("Bright Lit Blue Skies").[50] At the time of his label debut, Pink was viewed as a novelty act, as there were virtually no other contemporary indie artists with a similar retro lo-fi sound.[2]

Previous lo-fi artists generally rejected the influence of 1980s pop radio that informed most of Pink's sound.[78] Afterward, a type of music dubbed "hypnagogic pop" emerged among lo-fi and post-noise musicians who engaged with elements of cultural nostalgia, childhood memory, and outdated recording technology. The label was invented by journalist David Keenan in an August 2009 piece for The Wire, which included Pink among his examples.[79] Pink was frequently referred to as the "godfather" of hypnagogic, chillwave or glo-fi as new acts that were associated with him (aesthetically, personally, geographically, or professionally) attracted notice from critics.[80] According to Pitchfork's Marc Hogan, each of those tags described what was essentially psychedelic music.[81] Adam Harper reflected in 2013 that there was a growing tendency among critics such as Simon Reynolds to overstate Pink's influence by failing to acknowledge predecessors such as R. Stevie Moore and the Cleaners from Venus' Martin Newell.[50]

In the late 2010s, a form of downtempo music tagged as "lo-fi hip hop" or "chillhop" became popular among YouTube music streamers. Several of these YouTube channels attracted millions of followers. The foundation of this style came mainly from producers such as Nujabes and J Dilla.[82]