Comment by tastysandwich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tastysandwich | Hacker News Reader

This article associates lo-fi music strongly with hip-hop, and kind of implies it's a fairly new phenomenon. But just look to the indie scene and you'll see it dates back to the 80s, with bands like Beat Happenings and Guided By Voices. And much before then, too, I'm sure, but I feel like these bands popularised it.

I'm a huge fan of instrumental hip hop, like J Dilla, DJ Shadow (Entroducing...), Madlib, DJ/Rupture etc. I've never listened to these new YT channels the article mentions, though. To be honest, I never really thought of these artists "lo-fi". The term I hear a lot is "crate digging". These guys scour music stores for old records to find songs and sounds they can repurpose in their own music, creating something completely fresh. Are they recording much new sounds though?

Kind related, but I love early thrash metal. Slayer, Dark Angel, Morbid Angel, etc. In particular, I love that really raw production quality. Don't ask me why, there's just something about a lot of newer thrash albums, where everything is so clean and crystal clear, I just don't connect with it as much. I guess the rawness lends it that aggression which is so integral to thrash.

For the limited purposes of this article, "lo-fi" means "instrumental hip-hop playlists on YT" more or less. No doubt that plenty of other genres have experimented with the textures of cheap recording gear, whether that's Jandek[1] or King Tubby[2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jandek

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Tubby

> Kind related, but I love early thrash metal.

Metal birthed one of the greatest lo-fi genres: black metal. After hearing early Marduk, Mayhen, Emperor, Burzum, Darkthrone I was hooked. It was all done on shoe string budgets: Cheap second hand guitar, crappy amp, distortion pedal, drum machine, maybe toss in a keyboard. Then record the mess on an even crappier cassette recorder. The sound can be described as the guy drunkenly dropped his demo tape in the toilet, accidentally pissed on it, then tried salvaging it by dubbing the piss soaked tape to yet another piss soaked tape. The music is minimal with repetition being a theme and many bands were one or two guys recording in their bedrooms or someones basement. All complete crap and I absolutely love it along with all the weird sub genres and fusions it spawned. The synths in black metal even spawned its own genre: dungeon synth.

> kind of implies it's a fairly new phenomenon

Does it? The "Beyond Youtube" section articulates the exact opposite.

I mean IIRC the first distorted guitar sound was someone kicking in a speaker to make it sound shitty; low-fi and electric guitars are closely linked.

I can't speak to the first distorted guitar sound, but classic overdrive/distortion is just pushing the voltage of vacuum tube amplifiers out of the region where they amplify linearly ("over driving" them) to where the soft clipping introduces 2nd and 3rd and... nth order harmonics (harmonic "distortion") into the signal.

And that's why it's called distortion and overdrive.

It may be apocryphal but that story is generally credited to Venom, and accident rather than intention.

That story goes back much further than Venom. The version I've seen was from Ike Turner and his band, for the "Rocket 88" recording session in 1951 or so. From Deep Blues by Robert Palmer (page 222):

> "Everyone was excited and ready to record 'Rocket 88,' but there was a problem. Willie Kizart's guitar amp had been damaged when it fell off the top of the car and was emitting static and fuzz. 'When it fell,' Sam explains, 'that burst the speaker cone. We had no way of getting it fixed. I guess we probably could have hustled around some way, but it would have taken a couple of days, so we started playing around with the damn thing. I stuffed a little paper in there where the speaker cone was ruptured, and it sounded good. It sounded like a saxophone. And we decided to go ahead and record...'"

There's a whole myriad of genres and there are really a lot of them where distortion plays an important role in the sound. Thinking of it, probably every single track I played most involves use of distortion. I'm almost certain it has an explanation in psychoacoustics, it can't be a conincidence so many people like to go nuts on something which sounds off :) I can't pinpoint it exactly though, not sure if it has been researched.

Not just early thrash metal, I have a fondness of early hardcore punk like Minor Threat, early Raised Fist EPs etc

I think I find the raw energy just more credible than the hyper produced new stuff.

Also in that vein, oftentimes when I discover bands I slowly gravitate towards their older releases. Not always, but really most of the time

Seems pretty criminal to not mention Nujabes.

I mean, all recorded music was lo-fi before the invention of hi-fi (which is mostly a marketing term, but you can probably set it some time around the invention of full spectrum speakers, and electronic microphones and amplification)

I’m really bad at categorizing music. Where do you think Tangerine Dream fits?

Specifically, the Stratosfear and Phaedra albums. I’ve returned to those two albums for concentration music for about 25 years now.

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