The Present Is the Past
A looped anime girl in a perfectly-disordered bedroom casually jots down an infinite series of notes, making no progress. A cat with its tail swinging lazily sits on the windowsill. A downtempo, muffled drum beat alternates with plucked strings or a retro synth, while ‘90s samples – Super Mario 64, Cartoon Network, Cowboy Bebop – crackle in and out. The description reads: “lofi beats to relax/study to.”
Lo-fi, or low-fidelity, began as a technological and economic necessity. Garage rock bands like The Sonics recorded quickly and cheaply, resulting in their signature tinny sound. It was only with the Beach Boys, who recorded a trilogy of albums in Brian Wilson’s makeshift home studio, starting with 1967’s Smiley Smile, who made lo-fi a choice. Paul McCartney followed with McCartney shortly after the breakup of the Beatles, a bestseller in 1970 but critically derided. It was only with R. Stevie Moore’s Phonography (1976) that home recording an aesthetic element of the recording itself emerged. McCartney and Smiley Smile sounded like low quality studio recording; Phonography leaned into the fuzz as part of the music, not an unfortunate consequence of the recording process. Moore also recorded every instrument himself, inaugurating the connection between DIY and lo-fi.
Image via
Moore’s DIY approach continued in the punk explosion, with bands such as the Buzzcocks making lo-fi a philosophical as well as aesthetic choice. Their deliberate outsider status made lo-fi a status symbol, a sign of disengagement with the mainstream – a chosen necessity. The indie movement of the ‘80’s soon followed punk’s lead, making lo-fi recordings a sign of authenticity, a rejection of the capitalistic record companies. REM, Sonic Youth and K-Records bands, especially their flagship band Beat Happening, made lo-fi pillars of their sound. Their popularity spawned lo-fi as, for the first time, a genre label in the ‘90’s. Pavement, (early) Beck, Guided by Voices and Sebadoh continued the tradition of staying off major labels, but with the popularity of Nevermind the mainstream acquired a taste for lo-fi. If lo-fi began as a necessity and evolved into a chosen necessity, after Nirvana it became simply a choice, a sound any band could adopt or, better yet, advertise as.
The aesthetic effects of lo-fi are seemingly contradictory. The imperfections foreground the recording process itself, the technological mediation separating the music from the listener; but rather than distance the listener and artist, the poor quality can make you feel closer to the artist. The materiality of the recording highlights the presence of the artist, not just the sound. Daniel Johnston’s Hi How Are You is a classic example. Johnston’s best known songs, from the early 1980’s, were recorded on a boombox in his brother’s garage; to call the sound quality “poor” would be generous. His distorted, childlike voice yelps, whines, and murmurs through his hermetic pop creations, made all the more insular by the alien sounds of the instruments.
It’s easy to attribute Johnston’s signature sound – both his at once naïve and worldly songs, and audio quality – to the desperation of his circumstances. It’s certainly true that his chronic mental illness, which severely limited his ability to function independently, and lack of money deeply impacted his music in ways he couldn’t control. But to ignore the intentionality of his best work, to attribute them, as is sometimes still done, to the innocent outpourings of a troubled man, is not only an insult to his competence despite his illness – it is to miss what is so great about his music. These songs reveal a student of rock moulding its conventions to his deeply idiosyncratic sound, including his use of his lo-fi.
Young Daniel Johnston in the garage (image via)
Johnston uses lo-fi to, as the aptly titled career-spanning collection puts, welcome us to his world. The poor audio quality enhances his material, makes it more whimsical (“Casper the Friendly Ghost”), tortured (“Desperate Man Blues”) or alien (“I am a Baby (In My Universe)”) when it wants to be. The sound of Hi How Are You is as claustrophobic as Johnston’s life at the time. There would be a disconnect between these songs and a glossy studio recording: it would impose a distance between the listener and Johnston which is paradoxically absent because of the heavy distortion (a notion confirmed by the awkward mesh between his songs and a capable backing band on later studio albums such as Lost and Found).
After a relative decline in the 2000’s, lo-fi is back to prominence with the rise of chillwave, a now ubiquitous genre which combines trip-hop drum patterns (courtesy of KRS-One), Vaporwave sampling techniques, cool jazz tempos – and lo-fi fuzz. But something has changed: where lo-fi used to be the result of imperfections from the recording process left in, either because of faulty technology, economic necessity, or simple choice, now the effects are digitally added in. The mistakes of analog are the anachronisms of digital. But the nostalgia is incomplete. Where analog lo-fi drew attention to the physicality of recorded sound, chillwave reminds the listener only of the absence of materiality. Unlike Johnston’s lo-fi, these added effects only reinforce the mediation between artist and audience. The recreation is ersatz; like the anime girl’s room, the chaos too ordered.
Early vapor wave album Floral Shoppe (image via)
The analogy extends even further: like the anime girl endlessly flipping the same page and making the same notes, with only the day and night cycles to mark the time, chillwave’s lo-fi effects and ‘90s samples suspend us in time. They are meant to evoke a certain period but don’t quite succeed, leaving us in a place out of time, neither the past nor the present. But this is no mistake – the relaxation comes precisely from the cultural nostalgia that evokes a time but doesn’t take us to it. The (literal) timelessness leaves us floating nowhere in particular; worldly anxieties are stuck in time.
Chillwave trades on the familiarity of the sound, on a nominal formal commitment to the past without the pesky philosophical burdens. Lo-fi does nothing for it but evoke the past. Of course, nostalgia is nothing new in music, but its popularity is always symptomatic. The question is always: What are we running from?
