Latest New Hip Hop Acts | muzikfreakradio Lo-fi music "Lo-fi" and "DIY music" redirect here. For other uses, see Lo-fi (disambiguation) and DIY (disambiguation). Not to be confused with Chill-out music or hip hop radio.
A minimal bedroom studio set-up with 1980s–1990s equipment Lo-fi or lofi (short for low-fidelity) may be a music or production quality during which elements usually considered imperfections of a recording or performance are audible, sometimes as a deliberate aesthetic choice. The standards of sound quality (fidelity) and music production have evolved throughout the decades, meaning that some older samples of lo-fi might not are originally recognized intrinsically . Lo-fi began to be recognized as a method of popular music genre within the 1990s, when it became alternately mentioned as DIY music.
Harmonic distortion and "analog warmth" are sometimes misleadingly suggested as core features of lo-fi music. it's characterised by the inclusion of elements normally viewed as undesirable in professional contexts, like misplayed notes, environmental interference, or phonographic imperfections (degraded audio signals, tape hiss, then on). Pioneering, influential, or otherwise significant artists include the Beach Boys (Smiley Smile), R. Stevie Moore (often called "the godfather of home recording"), McCartney (McCartney), Todd Rundgren, Jandek, Daniel Johnston, Guided by Voices, Sebadoh, Beck, Pavement, and Ariel Pink.
Although "lo-fi" has been within the cultural lexicon for about as long as "high fidelity", WFMU disk jockey William Berger is typically credited with popularizing the term in 1986. At various points since the 1980s, "lo-fi" has been connected with cassette culture, the DIY ethos of punk, primitivism, outsider music, authenticity, slacker/Generation X stereotypes, and cultural nostalgia. The notion of "bedroom" musicians expanded following the increase of recent digital audio workstations, and within the late 2000s, lo-fi aesthetics served because the basis of the chillwave and hypnagogic pop genres. Definitions and etymology At its most crudely sketched, lo-fi was primitivist and realist within the 1980s, postmodern within the 1990s, and archaicist within the 2000s. —Adam Harper, Lo-Fi Aesthetics in popular music genre Discourse (2014) Lo-fi is that the opposite of hi-fi. Historically, the prescriptions of "lo-fi" are relative to technological advances and therefore the expectations of ordinary music listeners, causing the rhetoric and discourse