A brief history of Lo Fi indie rock

A friend once asked me, “how come so many of your favourite records sound so shite? Its like they were recorded for 50p!” And he was right, they do. In fact, not only do they sound like they were recorded for 50p but at least one of them (‘Vampire on Titus’ by Guided by Voices) is so shoddily recorded it may as well have been screamed into a banjaxed Fisherprice tape recorder on a windy cliff. Well, its ‘cos a large chunk of my CD collection is devoted to the crackly magic and haphazard musical charms cast by lo-fi recording artists.

What exactly is lo-fi then? Well, if you were dreary and took the term at face value, you might say it simply means low fidelity, as in music that was recorded on equipment by bands who for financial or other reasons could not afford to record their music on high fidelity equipment. Lo-fi, you might then argue, has been around for as long as recording itself. You might argue that all the great bockety garage rock from the 60s and the scuzzy DIY stylings of punk were lo-fi because of the cheap way in which such music was recorded. But its not as simple as that. Otherwise lo-fi would be merely a style of music determined by practical necessity, whereas in reality it quickly grew beyond that to become an aesthetic for bands to wilfully aspire towards. It became a genre in and of itself that flourished and peaked in a whoosh of cassette tape hiss in the early to mid-nineties. Indeed, looking back to the genre’s early-nineties peak, practically all the best American indie records, including Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand and Sebadoh’s III, seem like they are barely held together by sellotape and pritt-stick. If these bands were plasterers they wouldn’t bother with polyfila because hey, the cracks in the plasterwork were more interesting. Lo-fi was also a bit political. It was a determined kick against the bloated belly of mainstream alternative rock, which in those days was all post-grunge MTV drivel padded out by millions of dollars worth of big studio turd polishing. As Stephen Malkmus aptly sang about some big grunge bands of the day on Pavement’s lo-fi call to arms, ‘Range Life’ “I don’t understand what they mean/ And I could really give a fuck.”

Unlike other more tightly defined genres like shoegaze, there is no real unifying lo-fi sound. Rather, it’s the way in which things were recorded that holds the genre together. The musical styles vary from the detuned and decidedly wonky guitar fuzz that ultimately makes Pavement such a sublime acquired taste to Calvin Johnson’s baritone singing over Beat Happening’s austere musical structures. However, for my money, if there is one band that could speak for them all and represent the genre in some sort of United Nations style musical Security Council (hah, imagine that!), then that band is Guided By Voices (Sebadoh fans are bound to disagree with this, but if they want to really work this out I am willing to meet them in the car-park of Whelans to sort it out properly). Here was a band of seedy looking thirty-something dudes with beer-guts who recorded most of their best material while they were blind drunk in a laundry room below one of their gafs. Led by The Who and Beatles obsessed primary school teacher Robert Pollard, Guided By Voices used some unbelievably ropey equipment to record music that at its best, climbs to the rarified heights of the best work from those 1960s bands he idolized so much. Although it takes some leap of the imagination to describe much of their polished later material as lo-fi, Guided by Voices’ blinding early run of four wonderful albums from ‘Propeller’ through ‘Alien Lanes’ are shot through with the idiosyncrasies and imperfections that make lo-fi such a love it or hate it genre. You see, one man’s imperfection is another’s accidental wonder. The fact is that Bee Thousand (to take one Guided By Voices release) sounds positively destroyed with tape hiss, badly overdubbed vocals, too much treble, out of tune guitar parts, unfiltered sounds of studio doors slamming, and (half way through one track) a band member snoring drunkenly. Yet these things only add to the record’s legend. Its hard to explain, but all that ramshackle madness eventually worms its way into how you experience the album, finally becoming as important a part of the listening experience as the fine music itself. It gives things textures, depths, and a unique sense of time and place that crackles and sparks. In fact, Bee Thousand is miraculous in that a huge part of its brilliance is wrapped up in how shite it sounds. As a musical statement it is a million miles from the edgeless studio polish and easy to digest radio-friendly mixes that characterize much so-called ‘alternative rock,’ which are little more than mushed up liga for your ear-drums.

Of course, lo-fi does not begin and end with Guided By Voices, Pavement and Sebadoh. The big three are a gateway drug into a scene crammed with dozens of lesser known but fascinating groups such as Silver Jews, The Mountain Goats, The Olivia Tremor Control and the grandaddy of them all, Daniel Johnston. On this side of the Atlantic lots of artists took the baton and ran with it too, most notably The Beta Band, Badly Drawn Boy when he was in his early bedroom phase (in other words when he was worth giving a frick about) and more recently, Graham Coxon and our own Jape. What ties all these groups together might not just be the homespun nature of their recordings but something else too. It’s the honesty that is inherent in recording music this way. Its impossible to cloak poor quality with the smoke and mirrors of studio trickery. Lo-fi brings the listener’s attention back to where it should be. Back to the song itself.

Darragh McCausland thought he invented the ice-cream float aged six. When news to the contrary was gently broken to him by his primary school teacher, he embarked on a drink and drugs binge that would put a young Drew Barrymore to shame and has never recovered.
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