Lo-Fi

By Matt Parish

Today, it really isn’t uncommon for homemade recordings to sell alongside everything else at record stores. In fact, it’s hard to tell the difference anymore – after the ProTools takeover in the ‘90s and the rapid development of cheaper and cheaper home recording setups and DAW software, bedroom production enthusiasts were suddenly making professional-sounding recordings on their own with just a few classes or even a bit of intuition.

But it wasn’t always that way. The genre “lo-fi” can best be pinned to a burgeoning movement of artists in the ‘80s who combined cheap home recording techniques – tape recorders and 4-track machines, particularly – to make for a homely body of work that quickly became associated with barebones musical authenticity. An early example of this group of artists is Daniel Johnston, the prolific songwriter whose career blossomed in Austin, Texas thanks to irreverent live appearances, a singular songwriting style and a constantly evolving discography distributed on hand-dubbed cassette tapes and recorded largely using two tape recorders used in tandem for multi-tracking.

As time progressed, the sound of artists like Johnston grew into a genuine recording aesthetic and became the calling card of many seminal indie rock bands like Guided By Voices, Sebadoh and Elliot Smith.

The aesthetic has stuck and, thanks to an audience that grew up with dubbed cassette copies of albums from their older brothers and muddy, hissy mix-tapes traded from summer flings, artists from every spectrum release work in lo-fi formats, whether they’re forgotten demos of songs or audience recordings of concerts. In one respect, what choice do they have? Their music is likely all over YouTube as is. Could it get any lower fi?