Older Lo-fi vs. Newer Lo-fi

Lo-fi is supposedly back again, and obviously it isn't exactly what it used to be. I'm finding the Lo-fi resurgence to absolutely be a product of current trends. When in the 90s Lo-fi seemed to be more of a suburban, nonsense-free vibe (Uncle Wiggly, Guided by Voices, The Grifters, Pavement, etc.), the current scene seems to be a little more attitude and art-damaged style, where the Lo-fi element is added as an artistic statement; much more of a conscious effort to create this vibe that just came naturally to the originals (or was forced upon them due to limited recording abilities).

I was wondering what everyone thought about this. Personally I don't associate the current scene with the earlier one(s), and I prefer the lack of nonsense of those early acts.
Also, does anyone know any original current acts that share the sensibilities of the older bands?

I reply with a bad poem:
Lack of nonsense make no sense to me but perhaps if the sense of it were more nonsensical then it would make much more sense more sense moresensemore sensing some thing sense
less.

Anyhow. What do you mean by "Lack of Nonsense"? A lot of Guided by Voices are quite nonsensical I think. Certainly the lyrics are often surreal. Same with Grifters. Didn't they have weird nonsensical cartoons on their front covers? Whereas No Age, TNV, Eat Skull seem to lack the non sequiters and general strangeness etc.. I like them both though.

True, you're right- I take back the no-nonsense thing. But I get less of a self-conscious "how can we make this hipper" vibe from the older bands.
But yeah now that I think about it, there is that one GBV song with snoring throughout the entirety...

I think I am trying to say "less forced," rather. A lot of the current bands like Woods, Wavves, Times New Viking, etc. seem to be trying too hard maybe?
Not to say I don't like any of these bands though.

mike rep! swell maps! has there been any decent music this century, i just got out of bed

I haven't heard these bands. Are they guitar bands?

Yeah, the ones I'm talking about.

new lo-fi is a lot more lo-fi than old lo-fi, but i don't think that the newer crowd are any less natural about it. if anything they're more given to lo-fi recording, like they've taken it into account the whole time. i'm thinking of bands like the hospitals or times new viking who use the recording technique to sculpt their sound in a specific way, to what imo are great results.

Eat Skull, baby

When you're talking about lo-fi, do you mean "a lackadaisical approach to production" or "fastidious production with unconventional gear"?

i think old lo-fi is the former, while new lo-fi is more often pretty fastidious. right?

Yeah, samosa, that seems to be the case, since the old lo-fi bands don't seem to be so focused on creating the lo-fi atmosphere. The current scene is definitely very fastidious about it, thats exactly what I mean.

Do most people prefer the currently tacked-on use of lo-fi? I was saying the older lo-fi sounds more natural because it is not as intentional, therefore it works together with music as the final product in a more subtle way that creates, to me, a sort of "buried treasures" vibe, like something somebody found on a cassette tape in a box in somebody's garage one day. Today its more used to make them sound edgy or art-damaged or something. Some people say its to hide the fact that the songs aren't good enough to stand alone without the fuzz. I say instead its because they aren't comfortable with how straightforward their songs would sound without it.

Do most people prefer the currently tacked-on use of lo-fi?

i like both, really. i guess if i had to side with one i would go with the recent lo-fi scene, but that's more because of my age and my involvement and participation in the whole scene. i don't agree about new bands using it as a way of detaching themselves from their songs, or avoiding straightforwardness. when used correctly i think it can make a song alot more immediate and personal.

Today its more used to make them sound edgy or art-damaged or something.

i think this is true more of punk bands who record lo-fi today, but not so much the case for indie rock bands and other things.

"i think this is true more of punk bands who record lo-fi today, but not so much the case for indie rock bands and other things."

You don't think this is the case with Wavves?

But I agree with making the song more immediate and personal with lo-fi in general, but not necessarily when they try to drown their own songs out with fuzz and feedback like Times New Viking.
(Keep in mind I like Times New Viking, so I hope nobody gets too defensive)

I was saying the older lo-fi sounds more natural because it is not as intentional, therefore it works together with music as the final product in a more subtle way that creates, to me, a sort of "buried treasures" vibe, like something somebody found on a cassette tape in a box in somebody's garage one day. Today its more used to make them sound edgy or art-damaged or something.

But I think "lo-fi added to make them sound edgy or art-damaged" perfectly describes Slay Tracks era Pavement, and they got better as they got less lo-fi. The "buried treasures" vibe is more like mid-90s Mountain Goats and other Shrimper stuff, which I don't think is what people mean when they say lo-fi (but maybe should be.)

I really like Coachwhips, is that the kind of thing you have in mind? Partly because on the best tracks you have the feeling that the beauty-pop is right there inside the art-damaged crust, giving it shape. But this seems totally continuous with e.g. Bee Thousand, not a departure from what people were doing in the 90s.

i think part of the difference (as alluded to above) is that nowadays, with very little effort, computers allow musicians of any skill level to record music that is clean and significantly more "professional" sounding.. so to some extent, one has to deliberately "lo-fi-erize". the old argument that recording lo-fi is cheaper is highly debatable now. i noticed that the ol' Tascam $100 4-track was absent from the the latest musicians friend catalog, are they still making em?

now i just remembered the whole Elephant 6 thing, much of which consisted of highly deliberate attempts to sound arty/edgy (or more commonly, to avoid sounding like 90s rock). those folks totally fetishized old TEAC reel to reel recorders, etc

Yeah I thought about Elephant 6, and I feel like they were in their own category all-together, though they were lo-fi. Yes they were very deliberate with their lo-fi experimentation, and their emphasis on those techniques has made them very influential on current scenes.

Guayaquil, are you saying that Pavement intentionally added the fuzz for that reason (art-damage), or that it just fit nicely with the messiness of the early material?

Well there's "I can't afford decent equipment" lo-fi and there's "I choose to heavily process my audio" lo-fi. The first one mostly lives on as an affectation - non-shite mics and audio interfaces are available for pennies these days. I never got why someone like Odd Nosdam could be described as lo-fi, when he clearly has great equipment and he knows what he's doing with it.

On preview: what skeletor said

The other thing is old, vintage, lo-fi, are all totally separate concepts that get mushed together. Something that was crap in the 60's isn't suddenly vintage now - it's just old crap. On the other hand, those 2" tape machines and Neumann U47s and so on are just good products full stop.

sorry are wavves and times new viking not punk bands?

that was like, seven x posts.

The other thing is old, vintage, lo-fi, are all totally separate concepts that get mushed together. Something that was crap in the 60's isn't suddenly vintage now - it's just old crap.

i kind of disagree. was it really ever crap in the 60's? like in the 60's when garage rock bands recorded on cheap 4 tracks do you think they were like "if only we had the means to make pristine recordings," or did they realize that the gritty production complemented their sleazy and raucous leanings? i'm not saying that it's cooler now, as vintage, but just maybe it never wasn't cool.

What sounds good, sounds good, regardless of the kind of trousers the people who are making the sound might be wearing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HidM7vrL37E

Haha, the idea that Pavement was not very self-conscious about what they were doing . . . as it happens, I have Marshall McLuhan right here, and . . . no, wait, I'm reading a book called Perfecting Sound Forever, and just happened to read this passage about Pavement today:

The irony (and this band was big on irony) is that the group's would-be Spector felt like his hands were tied. Pavement's early records were made in Stockton, California in the modest garage studio of Gary Young, the band's drummer. He was also nearly two decades older than the only "real" members of Pavement, Scott Kannberg and Stephen Malkmus. Young found the band's whole recording aesthetic baffling -- its love of noise, fuzz, sonic obfuscation. "I never understood it," he told me in 1993, shortly after leaving the group. "I mean, I know how to make a band sound like Def Leppard." What Kannberg and Malkmus were after was the opposite of Def Leppard, and nearly the opposite of the Wallace sound, which by the time Pavement released its masterpiece, Slanted and Enchanted, in 1992, was becoming the sound of alternative rock, thanks to Nirvana.

From everything I've read, the use of fuzz and distortion in the 60's was totally conscious. Link Wray, The Sonics and The Monks knew EXACTLY what they sounded like.

Incidentally, Black Metal owns this this thread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAxr4cht8DA

i kind of disagree. was it really ever crap in the 60's? like in the 60's when garage rock bands recorded on cheap 4 tracks do you think they were like "if only we had the means to make pristine recordings," or did they realize that the gritty production complemented their sleazy and raucous leanings? i'm not saying that it's cooler now, as vintage, but just maybe it never wasn't cool.

See! You're doing it! Most of these "cheap 4 track" recordings were produced in decent studios with decent equipment in sessions helmed by experienced professionals. e.g. The Electric Prunes were on Reprise and had David Hassinger producing for their first album.

Maybe I muddied the issue by mentioning the 60's. Then, the barriers to entry were quite high, but the equipment quality was generally good too. Innovation after that generally consisted of making crap available for cheap, and in the last 10 years, improved quality control on the cheap stuff. Apart from digital though. That's a whole different post.

Choosing to heavily process your audio is ALWAYS a legitimate strategy as far as I'm concerned, regardless of the technical tactics.

Samosa - I wasn't sure if you were considering Wavves (and TNV) punk, so I couldn't tell based on the context of what you said, thats all.

Mario - Thats interesting I haven't read that. Pavement's sound had cleaned a bit as they went on, so I assumed it had to do with their early recording resources.

Also, I do believe that the older lo-fi bands embraced that sound, otherwise the discussion would end at "the old ones were forced to and the new ones force it," so I have been interested in the way these two (then and now, vaguely) different generations choose to use it. My point (as I develop it here) seems to be that the older bands tend to use lo-fi more collaboratively with their songs and less of an up-front statement- but I don't mean to generalize, which is why I was wondering if first you see where I'm coming from, and second if any of you know of any bands now that use lo-fi in the way the earlier bands did.

Another thing is that everyone has been calling it a "resurgence" of lo-fi, yet the styles of music exhibited by old and new seem to be pretty different in most cases... or at least their use of low fidelity in their recordings. It seemed like an interesting thing to compare and contrast.

i liked a lot of the nu-siltbreeze stuff precisely cuz it reminded me of the old stuff. it was nostalgia, but at the same time it was everything old is new again. amerindie stuff had become so dire that stuff like der tpk and psych horseshit and eat skull and tnv just sounded REALLY refreshing to me. same thing with some of the nu-pigfuck bands aping amrep/ jesus lizard sounds of yesteryear. it was time cycle-of-the-season-wise for that stuff to be reinvestigated and exhumed. there is usually a 10 to 15 year stretch from the original to the later admirers. the time was ripe.

"amerindie stuff had become so dire"

um, and has been dire for the last 15 years or so, but whatever...

But nostalgia aside, do you think on a compositional level, that the lo-fi sound is being synthesized collaboratively with the songwriting with these newer bands?
A lot of them these days seem to be going "look how lo-fi we are!", like they are accessorizing with it.

no

Ennnh, these sort of evaluations are best done in hindsight. Wavves uses Garageband because Wavves has Garageband. If Phil Elvrum lived somewhere far away from Dub Narcotic, "The Glow Pt. 2" would've been a very different record. Many of these production decisions are made just because of the gear that's available to a band at any given time. I don't think there's any "look how lo-fi we are" going on.

The majority of so-called seminal lo-fi recordings have been followed with more concerted hi-fi efforts. "Song Cycle" -> "Yankee Reaper", Felt's "Index" -> "Sunlight Bathed In Golden Glow", "Slay Tracks" -> "Crooked Rain". Sebadoh cleaned up, Iran cleaned up, Eric's Trip cleaned up, Jesus Lizard cleaned up, Mountain Goats cleaned up, Husker Du cleaned up, etc. etc.

What I mean is: unless you're genuinely into the sound of tape hiss, I don't know too many bands who could classify their entire oeuvre as "lo-fi". Lo-fi is just "the sound of the gear that you got".

always found the whole concept of "fidelity" extremely suspect but I guess that won't be news to anybody

i dunno, it's like most things, it either works or it doesn't. it either sounds cool or it doesn't. i like the energy. are the bands i mentioned great songwriters? probably not. they are also, for the most part, a lot younger than the late 80's/early 90's bands that i liked. i think that may make a difference. a lot of people, like mike rep or ron house or whoever worked their way through a ton of styles and bands over the course of decades. now, there are kids in their early 20's who start out doing noise/punk/pastiche/indie stuff based on 9 or 10 bands that they heard in the last five years or so. so, that right there is a difference. the old bands and the new bands come from different places. but i have no problem with people using the past to create present coolness. are any of the new bands as good as early pavement or whoever? maybe not. but i like their sloppy charms. it's good for now. they may get older and streamline and write real songs and start listening to more brian wilson records and make boring records, but i won't be there for that. i will be there for anyone who wants to make a racket now that sounds good to my old ears. when they quit the band and go to law school or get boring i will listen to something else.

x-post

Well, yes, rock music, like porno, is best made by people in their early 20s.

But Owen, Times New Viking apparently handed in the master of their new album to Matador on a VHS tape. They intentionally go for that sound. And Phil could have made his music sound different, at least by the time he made The Glow Pt. 2.

the other thing is umm one of the bands you name had an ongoing opportunity to stop using a cassette deck for approximately 6 years before he did, he just really liked the way the cassette deck sounded, and then he'd been doing it for some time so he said "that'll be enough of the cassette deck for now"

Yes, John, but what if you had a DAT machine instead of that ghetto blaster?

but the thing is I could have bought one. I didn't use the boombox for lack of access to other technologies. that was how I wanted my music to sound, at that time.

Yes, but if you decided you wanted to make Sweden a slick and shiny hi-fi 10CC homage, you couldn't have bought the SSL console and 2-inch tape reels to do so.

I'm not trying to say that lo-fi records are made by neophytes, or by people in their early years. Creators of lo-fi records are not babes-in-the-woods, enslaved by a lack of means. But musicians own gear, and that gear sounds like the thing that it is. Musicians make decisions to add dissonance to their records, whether it's cassette decks, coins on the strings, added 11th chords, mastering to VHS, etc. And the gear they own deeply informs these decisions.

TNV mastering to VHS, sure, you could assess that as being a "deliberately lo-fi" decision. But tonnes and tonnes of bands bounce their clean, digital recordings to tape to dirty them up, it's really not that affected a notion.

Well, yes, rock music, like porno, is best made by people in their early 20s.

the youngest member of acid mothers temple is like 612 years old iirc

I feel like band like The Swirlies mix varying fidelities within albums very well. You knew it was intentional because it varied by song, and it worked to enhance the atmosphere of the song the low fidelity was present; it contributed to the track on the whole. The contrast between songs made the higher fidelity tracks feel bigger. There is a real uniqueness to them in this respect, unless someone has a recommendation for me where this is done well elsewhere!

I think BECK did some of that mixing of fidelities in '94-'96.

A friend let me listen to a couple songs that he recorded on a portable cassette player while out on his boat during a storm. I don't know if it was a storm, but there was weather; You could here it. The things that made the songs so great were his enthusiastic guitar playing and his singing. However, the lo-fi recording and the windy conditions fit in perfectly with the songs somehow.

I think I just have an aversion to the phrase itself. Lo. Fi. It just seems to be the product of a bygone era whose values now seem quaint. I can picture a guy (and it is a guy) sitting on a leather chair, equidistant between his quadrophonic speakers, rubbing his chin, copy of Stereopathetic Soul Manure on the shag carpeted floor, muttering "hmmm, the fidelity of this recording by popular music artist Beck seems a bit low".

i think scott is the on the money-iest of us all so far. also i sometimes wonder whether hi-fi recording actually sounds more like real live music than lo-fi ones. definitely sometimes this is the case, but alot of the time it isn't, and many people have this idea that lo-fi is just the shittification of a recording. "oh the songs are good but why do they bury them in all that mess?" maybe tnv ran their album through a vcr because the original recording wasn't true to what they felt they actually sound like in their jam space.

I've heard them live, and you can make out the songs much better without all of the distorting they do on record.

Well, yes, rock music, like porno, is best made by people in their early 20s.

― Tourtière (Ówen P.), Friday, September 4, 2009 1:20 AM (17 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah i think this is less true now

what, you mean with the whole milf craze and all?

yeah milfs go hard

Hutch Harris of the Thermals agreed with me!

"Sure, lo-fi is all the rage right now, but for many of the current Pollard-come-latelys, the music tends to take a back seat to the (lack of) production and noise."

pfft, he would. nah i'm just kidding i think you are totally right and it's a dead-on observation. does that make the older bands better, though? as owen pallett pointed out upthread, earlier lo fi bands just took their production less seriously, it was a byproduct of their carefree ways. if production and noise come before songwriting for the new generation, well that's just because they now have a strong interested in creating that sound, it's what they're going for. i don't think it's uncommon for a texture or aesthetic to be an artist's fundamental inspiration for an album, and when it is i don't think that it necessarily compromises the quality of the songwriting. i'm sure once the aesthetic is established one would go about songwriting as earnestly as ever, and if anything having that predetermined vision would complement the songwriting.

Yeah, I didn't mean to vent so much about why I thought the older bands were better, I originally meant to just compare the old and new, where there are enough differences musically that "lo-fi" ends up usually being the only trait they seem to have in common. Where many have seemed to be saying "resurgence" when talking about the current lo-fi, I wanted to disassociate old and new because people shouldn't clump them together based on fidelity alone. (I am aware this goes for old and old and new and new as well).

Also, I was talking about priorities with the current bands, and as Hutch said:" the music tends to take a backseat"- but yes not necessarily. I obviously can't generalize and say everyone is doing one thing or another.
A texture or aesthetic can inspire an album and also include quality songwriting and composition/execution, but like with acts in all genres these days, I am finding lots of artists to be so self-conscious about their hipness, show-offy of their influences, attitude, style, and concern with having a unique (and hopefully alienating) trait, that the percentage of effort that goes into songwriting sometimes ends up to be the difference of all of the others.

This is most oblivious with AP magazine favorites that seem like they (at least!) split their priorities like this:

60% Youthful I-don't-want-to-grow-up rebellious attitude/hairstyles
40% Songwriting (what they think works...)

My 4-track was $700 CAD ten years ago. Jesus. That seems like a lot, even now.

early r stevie moore!

The way my ears equate Sound with Process is different for current recordings than it is for older stuff. That is... when I hear a slick, shiny new song with lots of loops, I realize that it was probably made in the same circumstances as Slay Tracks, but with Garageband or Ableton instead of a tape machine. Does that make sense?

It follows, too, that the most "hi-fi" recordings I've heard this year (Micachu, Mount Eerie), if they had appeared in the mid 90s, would sonically be associated with the lo-fi movement.

A potentially boring digression: I just listened to two forthcoming Tomlab records. A re-issue of an unknown soul singer who's records are muffled and odd sounding. The shiny new Junior Boys-produced record from Mantler. It occurred to me that if they took the slick record and called it the "lost classic from an unknown soul singer", and took the muffled sounding soul record and called it "the brand new Mantler record", then the press releases for both (excellent) records would benefit from the change of context.

Also, that "Only 20 year olds make the good rock music" comment was fwiw in response to Scott's strange but true "I eat music" thing.

^ Fun discussion.

no one cares abt lo fi music anymore

Like, totally, gawd.

it feels kind of shitty

Great thread. Rob brought GbV to DRC last week but he's not written it up yet; I'll link it when he does because we had a big discussion about lo fi.

Please do!