Dazed: How Lo Can You Go (Sept 2009)
wAvves, BLANk DOGS, kUrT ViLe, PSyCheDeLiC hORseshiT... lo-fi sounds are back with a vengeance, but is it a movement or just a bunch of kids getting high? Kin woo travelled to the source to find out
““i can’t help but love
a good pop song, no
matter how fucked
up it comes out”
It may be a genre derided by some music critics, largely written off as a sound forged by and for lonely boys in their bedrooms, but from San Diego, LA, London and even Japan, freaks and geeks are crafting noisy, tinny songs in their basements with the shittiest gear they can get hold of, and the world is again taking notice.
But why, 20 years after Pavement first brought lo-fi to the masses, is this happening now? Is it a deliberate reaction to ultra-polished pop sounds or merely a two-fingered salute at an indie rock scene gone soft? Is the return to archaic recording formats designed to bring down music industry fat cats as CD sales
haemorrhage, or is all this nothing more than a clutch of bored kids getting high and bashing out discordant notes on their laptops? When we put the question to Matt Whitehurst from Ohio noise merchants Psychedelic Horseshit, we’re greeted with an answer, of sorts – “Can you call me back later? I’m still tripping on acid.”
If you try and pinpoint the origins of modern lo-fi, you could do worse than turn to Todd Patrick for help. Todd P, as he’s better known, is a 34-year-old music promoter who has made it his mission to curate the best of the underground scene in makeshift spaces all over New York, from private lofts to Ecuadorian restaurants and deserted churches. His free all-ages SXSW shows at Ms Bea’s have been key in getting bands such as Wavves, Woods, Blank Dogs and Thee Oh Sees international press attention.
““I drank too much, took
some pills, and ecstasy...
i wasn’t coherent by the
time i was supposed to
play” ”
I meet him at a local dive near his office in Queens, to sample his dry sense of humour and almost encyclopaedic knowledge of music. “The DIY scene has always been there,” he says. “It came out of noise and garage. It’s about people who stick to their guns. You can trace it back to the 50s and before that to blues. Neophytes can pick it up and do it themselves. Obviously grunge changed everything. What kept the spirit alive is that the kids who were going out to see shows decided to make music that nobody likes. It brought kids together at that entry point.”
For the record, Mike Sniper hates the term “lo-fi”. As owner of taste-making label Captured Tracks and maker of sinister no wave beats as Blank Dogs, he’s in a better position to comment on this than most. “I agree there is a cohesive thing happening,” he says grudgingly. “But when I think lo-fi, I think of Pavement, Guided By Voices...That was lo-fi. In my head that’s what it’s always gonna be. Is it an adequate term for what it is now?” He has a point. If it is indeed a scene, it’s a more varied one than its earlier 90s incarnation, encompassing as it does the fuzz-and-dread-soaked whisperings of Portland’s Grouper, Let’s Wrestle’s kitchen-sink dramatics, Dum Dum Girls’ 60s inflected harmonies and Matador’s newest signing Kurt Vile, who peddles a feedback-drenched take on classic American songwriting. Perhaps he sums it up best of all when he asserts: “I can’t help but love a good pop song, no matter how fucked up it comes out.”
“Some of the bands doing
lo-fi now were probably
disco punk a few years
ago!””
Back in July, Captured Tracks co-hosted a buzzy festival celebrating the joys of DIY. It took place, appropriately enough, in a dilapidated backyard in Brooklyn, where every so often the M train would pass by, lighting the place up beautifully. Sniper’s co-host at the festival was Jeremy Earl who, in addition to running the equally on-fire Woodsist label, is the singer in Woods. Comprised of Earl, Jarvis Taveniere, G Lucas Crane and Kevin Morby, they released Songs Of Shame earlier in the year – a rustic collection of melancholic campfire songs that sound like ancient folk gems.
Live, they are a different proposition altogether. Earl plays a bass tuned like a drum while singing through a harmonica mic, and Crane warbles through a headphone, weaving analogue tape effects in and out of the set. “That’s what’s funny about the word lo-fi,” says the affable Crane. “I keep hearing it as a genre term but
I would like to pull it back to being more of an aesthetic term, a feeling term.” Ben Cook from Toronto-based cave pop crew The Bitters thinks that some part of the lo-fi renaissance is due to rising unemployment figures. “The lo-fi movement makes sense to me,” he says. “I would like to somehow relate to it to the current state of the economy, musicians saving money by not using real studios any more, but I think people make art and music on no budget just because they can. I’m a huge fan of punk and DIY production, using whatever gear is lying around or left at my studio space. But I’m even more a fan of pop music and crafting a great song. Most acts in the lo-fi movement know how to make a sound, but not necessarily a song, which is why I usually don’t feel any association with it. With The Bitters, it’s all about the songs.”
Woods are more pragmatic about the role of money. “This part of Brooklyn is like a bubble,” says Earl. “I don’t think the recession is affecting us, really. It’s just that we don’t wanna blow all our money on a recording studio when we can make cool recordings at home.” Likewise, while John Dwyer of San Francisco band Thee Oh Sees extols the virtues of “making music ourselves or with a friend, that’s the most fun way to do it”, he shrugs off any easy labelling. “I do not consider us to be involved in the ‘lo-fi’ movement though, we’re just broke!”
But for some bands, such as swirling London duo Trailer Trash Tracys, it’s the imperfections of home recordings that are crucial to the end product. “When we first recorded our songs, it sounded quiet and weak,” explains guitarist James Dose. “But by overdriving everything and getting that crackle and tape hiss, it became this big sound we wanted. The reason we’re lo-fi is that we don’t know how to get that big
sound without doing it like that.” Production techniques are likely afterthoughts for Alex Shields, the main force behind labelmates A Grave With No Name. Enthrallment is what he’s after. His recent eponymous EP achieves the epic, sweeping effect of Spiritualized on a fraction of the funds. And he’s already on to grander things. For his next record, Shields is determined to overcome the limitations of his microbudget
to achieve the, er, sonic cathedral he has in his mind. “I’m really interested in melodies. Melodies that you can’t deny. The more you use sound, the bigger the picture you conjure up.”
After MTV’s surprisingly cogent documentary on the lo-fi scene late last year, there was excitement that this was a movement that could cross over in much the same that grunge did in the 90s. Mike Sniper laughs at this suggestion: “I don’t think the record sales reflect grunge! The bigger bands in this scene are very far from Nirvana. The thing about grunge is that it had this hard rock element that appealed to Middle
America. I don’t see Middle America radio airplay. But it would be cool!” One thing that marks out the new era of lo-fi is the hair-trigger sensitivity the fans have to the bands becoming too popular. The most visible example of this is the case of Wavves, probably the most polarising figure of the new guard. Nathan Williams was a skate rat from San Diego who hit upon the brilliantly simple formula of using the Garageband application on his Mac to weld gnarly post-punk scraps of songs, heavy on distortion pedals and classic doo-wop melodies. He hit the jackpot and Williams set upon a punishing tour schedule through America and Europe, culminating in a disastrous performance at Barcelona’s Primavera Festival, which Pitchfork later called “the most epic onstage meltdown a band of their small size could conjure”.
Following this sonic catastrophe, the band pulled the rest of their European tour dates. “Basically, I got too fucked up to play,” Williams recalled, in an interview I did with him at the time. “I drank too much, took some pills, and ecstasy... I wasn’t coherent by the time I was supposed to play. As far as ‘everything’ goes, I think people forget that I’ve not been playing live as Wavves for long... I’m bound to make mistakes. Primavera isn’t the first, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. I’m just some guy. I’m not perfect. I’m not going to make all the right decisions, that’s just what it is.”
The punk fraternity rejoiced at this spectacular act of hubris. “The backlash on Wavves is obvious,” says Sniper. “There’s this reactionary thing where people are pissed off that it was so easy and cheap for him. But from what perspective is that a negative thing? Especially from garage punk people, I mean isn’t that the whole point?”
Musical snobbery is not the only less than appealing aspect that the punk origins of the movement has yielded; another is latent misogyny, which has reared its head in the case of Vivian Girls. The Brooklyn-based all-female trio became overnight sensations among critics and underground rock fans with the release of their self-titled debut, but a video interview they did for the Uncensored website was roundly derided despite the band’s satirical intent. “Sexism in the music industry is something we try not to harp on too much,” say the band. “But what happened with the Uncensored interview is a great example of how it exists. We’ve been painted as one-dimensional, mean, dumb girls, because people want to hate and people want to stereotype. Nirvana did a lot of interviews with a similar feel to that one and somehow I doubt they got as much shit as we did.”
After Psychedelic Horseshit’s Matt Whitehurst finally crawls out of his acid trip, he talks passionately about what he perceives as poseurs infiltrating his scene. Nothing new there, then. “It’s not about the music any more. Now it’s like the floodgates have opened,” he says. “No one’s advancing the art or progressing it. It’s
like, ‘Come on, get real!’ You can tell the pure shit from the bullshit. I’m all for kids in their bedrooms making awesome music but it’s not about people being creative right now, it’s about ‘oh look, there’s this formula I can follow that people will think is cool’. There are so many lo-fi bands now that sound exactly the fucking same. DIY is still very real,” he continues, “it’s one of the purest ways to do it. The scene’s dying because it got flooded with generic shit. But the DIY shows we play in Columbus and elsewhere are fucking amazing – some of the best shows we’ve ever played.” “In Columbus, Ohio there’s this grand tradition to sit in your basement and record music,” agrees Adam Elliott of Times New Viking (of which Whitehurst is an unofficial
fourth member). Despite only being released at the beginning of 2008, their album Rip It Off already feels like a classic of this new movement. In it, Elliott, Beth Murphy and Jared Phillips turn pop inside out, burying it under a mountain of distortion. “I don’t know whether it was technique or lack of technique,” says Elliott. “We pretty much wanted to capture the songs as soon as they happened and to let accidents become part of the song. “Like Whitehurst, Elliott is very circumspect about what he perceives to be a fad – “It’s strange. You see kids in bands trying to sound this way and it just doesn’t seem right. The more attention means it’s more of a trend and more people try to do it. Some of the bands that are doing lo-fi now were probably disco punk a few years ago!”
There may be signs of moving on already. Times New Viking’s new album, Born Again Revisited, promises “more high-fidelity” while Mike Sniper says of the new Blank Dogs record, “I’m not trying to be reactionary or anything but with my new recordings, I’m trying to clean it up and get more separation and space.” “They will probably be the next to get a backlash,” sighs Todd P on hearing this. “Look, this is not going to sustain, I mean they never do. The scene’s already spinning out. The core of it will still be there though and people will always like it. But something interesting definitely happened. That’s kind of what a scene is all about, it’s not that it’s disposable – it’s that it’s about new ideas. The good news is that it created a moment when people were looking a little deeper. Nothing lasts forever but it’s worth it to have this little moment encapsulated.”
