LOFI, NOFI, AND DIY
6.5
Music
[ o ] CANDERSON
LOFI, NOFI, AND DIY
wordsby saelan twerdy and mark e. rich
The last several years have seen an explosion of bands recording their music with home equipment and releasing it themselves on tiny labels, from raw garage-punk to cassette-tape noise to fuzzy, scuzzy indie-pop, with frequently fantastic results that prove that creativity can’t be restrained by limited means. Meanwhile, the audience for DIY, home-recorded music seems to be expanding just as rapidly. You might ask yourself why, at a time when it’s so easy to make slick digital music, so many young bands would return to a deliberately grungy, low-tech sound. Consider these factors: the collapse of the traditional music industry is getting people interested in alternative merhods of distribution; people are getting burned out on digital-sounding, over-compressed modern music; and record-collector types are nostalgic for the cred that comes from discovering truly obscure, inaccessible music now that the internet has made real obscurity hard to come by. Perhaps most importantly, the internet has broadened everyone’s taste to the point where the average listener just wants something a bit more challenging now and then. Here’s our introduction to the best of the new lo-fi underground.
