Sunday Morning Playlist: Lo-Fi - Page 2

And thus was born the lo-fi movement. The term lo-fi came to represent a particular type of record, with its own aesthetic, beyond just the actual recording quality. The punk D.I.Y. ethic informs the genre; as well as a resistance to mainstream trends or notions of commercial music. Even at its most melodic and pretty, lo-fi is made homely by its thin sound quality, hiss, and often inaudible, impressionistic and purposely obtuse lyrics. It is this homeliness in sound that gives this music its appeal.

Since the term "lo-fi" originally came from the recording technologies used and sonic ambience more than a musical direction, the early "lo-fi" bands ran a wide gamut of styles and sounds, so that there are many subgenres of and cousins to lo-fi, or genres of music that bore some lo-fi influence, including twee-pop, jangle-pop, noise pop, and ambient pop.

The obvious referents in the early lo-fi movement were the Forefathers of all Indie Rock, the Velvet Underground. Murky indie bands like Pere Ubu, noisemasters Sonic Youth, the fuzzy melodicism of early R.E.M. and the el-cheapo sound of the Meat Puppets also inform much of this music, in varying combinations and ratios. New Zealand bands the Chill and the Clean have also been cited as influences. While it is impossible to name the exact moment lo-fi became self-aware, and thus alive, one could point to the Fall's 1979 LP Dragnet, as an initial launching point. The album is a cheap-sounding mix of rockabilly punk and shouted art-poems, complete with intentionally echoed, murked-up sound and roughshod playing. An example of lo-fi aesthetic from that album is the live tape of the song "Spectre vs. Rector" playing in the background of the studio version of the same song.

The next step in the evolution of the lo-fi aesthetic was how most of the recordings were available; as homemade recordings on tape, traded or sold at underground record shops; the first label to take notice of this trend was K Records, of Olympia, WA, owned by Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening, which set up shop in the mid 1980's. K Records would become an important clearing house for lo-fi recordings. Via K Records, the playback medium of choice changed from cassette to vinyl record, years after vinyl records were presumed dead and gone.

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