History and Early Beginnings

Lo-fi first came about during the 1950’s as a new wave of amateur musicians began making recordings on shoestring budgets. Due to the less than ideal recording venues and DIY nature of it all, music produced this way would often contain “unnatural” distortions. The public at large came to love this DIY-style of music despite the lack of quality the records had, most likely due to the unique character these records would have. A great example of this is “My Song” by Johnny Ace, which was called a “fifteen minute job” by co-writer David Mattis. It was both written and recorded at a radio station, and upon listening to the track you can definitely get a sense that it was rushed and the quality of the recording suffered as a result. It definitely has that raw and almost impromptu sound that modern lo-fi artists tend to create artificially these days. Despite all of this, “My Song” took the number one spot on the Billboard R&B chart in 1952.

Somewhere along the line, the lo-fi aesthetic became strongly associated with youth and artists started recording tracks intentionally using low quality equipment in order to attract younger audiences. The Beach Boys helped establish lo-fi as the music aesthetic that we now know it as in the sixties with the “Smiley Smile” album, with some also crediting “Pet Sounds” as being an earlier influence of theirs.

It was during the 1980s and 1990s that the term lo-fi started being used to refer to a breed of underground indie rock groups that started recording their music at home using four-track machines. This style of lo-fi music was massively popularised by American garage, British punk, Norwegian black metal and New Zealand groups like the Chills and the Clean. These bands use of abstract lyrics, free-form structures and often experimental and artsy styles gave their music a different kind of sound, something different to what the mainstream was producing.

In the 1990s groups like Sebadoh and Pavement, who had garnered moderate cult followings in the USA and Britain, helped lo-fi as a genre really take off. Even mainstream artists like REM and Beck had started off with lo-fi beginnings, and even kept elements throughout their careers.