I don’t understand what make a piece of music “lofi”, or what a “lofi” remix is. Please enlighten me.
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So, it literally means “low fidelity”. And that means there’s extra sounds besides just the music: recording hardware scratching, fingers moving on the instruments, static from electric pickups, etc. Perhaps echoes from around the recording studio, or shuffling noises as the performers adjust themselves. All these things *could* be ‘removed in post’ (edited out) or reduced with careful equipment management, so leaving them in is either a conscious choice or a lack of extra production.
What that translates into is a type of music that appears to have low production values, feels more homegrown, and has less *oomph* (for lack of a more precise word). Partially because high energy songs will usually drown out any lofi elements but perhaps because the lofi effects are familiar enough to be comfortable, a lofi sound has become a go to for relaxing soundtracks.
Thanks for your explanation.
I’m still unclear on why people would prefer the considered low quality production over the high quality. Is it because people nowadays usually put on the noise canceling headphones while working, which makes them feel uncomfortable if there is a lacking of natural, surrounding noise?
lo-fi isn’t a genre in itself, but a feature of indie music. lo-fi music exists because independent producers mixing music in the 90s-early 00s would have to average out the audio quality of their source recordings based on the mixing equipment they owned. Like how commercial quality videotape has a distinct aesthetic from cinematic film.
Nowadays, it’s a stylistic choice that broadens the gamut of sounds and samples a producer can use in a single song by equalizing tracks through lo-fi filters. Modern Lo-Fi hiphop is a genre where the softening of the original samples is necessary to capture a more relaxing vibe.
For example, in D.A.N.C.E by Justice, you can hear how lofi filters are used at the beginning and ending of the song and underlying instrumental tracks in order to draw attention to the main melodies and build hype and intensity without needing to drastically increase the volume or speed.
Slower dreamier hip-hop with no words, using heaps of filters over the sound. That’s lo-fi.
Lofi is a romanticized look back at an idealized pre-digital time that generation z or whatever imagines the cool kids were listening to on cassette while they were smoking cloves, paying $0.98 a gallon for leaded gas as they drove, not wearing seatbelts, to the home their parents paid less than $75,000 for, where they played vinyl records of their favorite band, the Ramones, who they were totally in to before it was cool to be in to the Ramones, and then stayed up all night to watch SNL with the original cast of Chevy Murphy and Will Farrell and Mr. Bill. Anyway, it was awesome riding bmx bikes and going off jumps with no helmets and stuff, and man, you really missed out, and you should have been here yesterday. Kind of like when it was 1982 and we were really into the Stray Cats and other bands from the ‘50s.
Music that doesn’t captivate you, but provides comfortable ambience while you are doing other things.
There’s two types of lofi. There’s the superior OG lofi that is literally low fidelity recordings on older analog recordings devices. This is the true essence of lofi, it’s noisy and messy and beautiful once you have a taste for it, it fully captures the emotion and energy of the music in a way that high production value music often cannot.
Then there’s this new genre that takes the term lofi and bastardizes it. Low effort instrumental hip hop that artificially attempts to employ bog standard DAW effects to trigger nostalgia or whatever so the artists don’t have to actually be creative at all. This new genre that’s being called lofi for some stupid reason is literally not low fidelity at all. I hate that it stole the name and now that’s what people think lofi music is.
To me it is a dumbed-down music which doesn’t steal my focus from what I’m doing, but at the same time gives a comfortable atmosphere to study or read. Basically elevator music for studying.
It’s about authenticity. Some people feel that the high production values of more mainstream music sounds, and feels, manufactured while objectively crappy productions feel more real. A great example is Daniel Johnston, who is an absolute legend and an inspiration to lots of other artists, even though the tracks themselves sound terrible. Also his singing and instrumentation is terrible. But he is super authentic and that is the appeal.
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