Lo-fi: records made at home

Low fidelity had been the flip side of hi-fi since the 1950s, the sound standard the industry sold along with turntables and speakers. It became the name of a kind of music in February 1986, when William Berger carved out a weekly half hour of his WFMU show in New Jersey for home recordings that listeners mailed in.^[1][2]

In 1967 the Beach Boys released Smiley Smile, cut largely in the makeshift studio Brian Wilson had set up at his house in Bel Air. Two years later the Wiggin sisters of Fremont, New Hampshire, recorded Philosophy of the World as the Shaggs; it vanished almost without a trace until NRBQ's Terry Adams reissued it in 1980.^[1][2]

Also in 1969, former Moby Grape guitarist Skip Spence made Oar in Nashville in a matter of days, playing every instrument himself. Columbia sold so few copies that it deleted the album within a year. In New Jersey, R. Stevie Moore had been recording in his parents' basement since 1968; his official debut, Phonography, arrived in 1976, the first of hundreds of self-released albums. Jandek debuted in 1978 with Ready for the House, issued on his own Corwood Industries imprint.^[1][2][3]

In England, punk gave the same permission to people who had never set foot in a studio. Television Personalities recorded the Where's Bill Grundy Now? EP in four hours for 22 pounds. What was still missing was a machine that put a whole studio on a tabletop.^[1]

That machine was unveiled in New York in September 1979: TASCAM's Portastudio 144, the first four-track recorder built around an ordinary cassette. Vocals, guitar, bass and drums could go down on separate tracks and be mixed at the kitchen table. The cassette, already the way people copied albums for friends, became a release format too.^[1]

Distribution came through the post. From 1979 to 1984, OP magazine in Olympia, Washington, printed the addresses of people making tapes at home, and readers around the world began trading copies. In the same town, Calvin Johnson founded K Records in 1982, whose first release was a cassette, and formed Beat Happening that year: a trio with no bass player, minimal drums and unvarnished vocals.^[1][2][3]

In Austin, Texas, Daniel Johnston recorded his songs on cassette and handed out copies around town. The cover of 1983's Hi, How Are You carried a frog he drew himself, and Kurt Cobain wore that drawing on a T-shirt at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, sending people who had never heard the tapes looking for them. In New Zealand, Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate formed Tall Dwarfs in 1981 and made the records Flying Nun released on four-track.^[1][2]

By the late 1980s the tape network was feeding labels with real distribution. Bill Callahan had been putting out cassettes as Smog on his own Disaster label since 1988; Sewn to the Sky followed in 1990 and was later reissued on CD and LP by Chicago's Drag City. Lou Barlow worked the same way, and Sebadoh's 1991 single Gimme Indie Rock! paired a studio A-side with a B-side made on a home four-track. That same year Liz Phair recorded three tapes on her own as Girly-Sound, which fans dubbed and traded for decades until Matador issued them officially in 2018.^[1][2][3]

John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats stripped the method to its bones, singing straight into a Panasonic boombox with no mixer or separate tracks, and releasing the results through Shrimper, a cassette label in Upland, California.^[1]

In April 1992 Matador released Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted, recorded cheaply at drummer Gary Young's home studio in Stockton, California. Two years later Guided by Voices, from Dayton, Ohio, reached the same listeners with Bee Thousand.^[1][2]

Around the turn of the century, the four-track cassette gave way to digital recorders and CD-Rs burned at home. Ariel Pink made The Doldrums between 1999 and 2000 on a Yamaha MT8 and passed it around on homemade CD-R until Animal Collective's Paw Tracks label released it properly in 2004. The muffled, washed-out sound of records like it prompted two press labels in 2009: hypnagogic pop, coined by David Keenan in The Wire, and chillwave, which began as a blog joke.^[1][2][3]

In the 2010s distribution moved online for good. Will Toledo posted twelve Car Seat Headrest projects to Bandcamp between 2010 and 2014, signed to Matador in 2015 and re-recorded some of those songs for Teens of Style. Mac DeMarco recorded Salad Days in his Brooklyn apartment and released it on Captured Tracks in 2014. In 2017 Clairo posted Pretty Girl, a song made in GarageBand with a video shot on her laptop webcam.^[1][2][3]

That same year a YouTube channel began streaming instrumental hip-hop beats with vinyl crackle around the clock under the name lofi hip hop radio. It is a separate lineage, running back to producers like Nujabes and J Dilla, and it uses noise as atmosphere rather than as a byproduct of recording at home.^[1]

Brazil built its own version from the same parts: home recorders, tapes, zines and small labels. In 1982 Baratos Afins, the record shop Luiz Calanca had run since 1978 inside São Paulo's Galeria do Rock, a downtown arcade of record and music stores, became a label with Arnaldo Baptista's Singin' Alone. The former Mutantes member played piano, guitar, bass and drums, sang, and handled the recording and mixing himself.^[1]

In Niterói, across the bay from Rio de Janeiro, Rodrigo Lariú started the Midsummer Madness fanzine in 1989; from 1991 it came with tapes. In 1994 it became a demo-tape label, and its first CDs followed in 1997.^[1]

The four-track was still in use in the 2000s. Pedro Bonifrate made his first EPs at home in Paraty, and with Supercordas recorded 2006's Seres Verdes ao Redor almost entirely at home, on a microphone that cost about 90 reais, with no soundproofing and frogs and crickets bleeding into the takes. Lulina, from Pernambuco, recorded eight homemade CD-Rs between 2001 and 2008, drew the covers by hand and mailed them out; her first studio album, 2009's Cristalina, re-recorded the best of those songs.^[1][2][3][4]

In January 2004 Lê Almeida started Transfusão Noise Records to release his friends' bands from the Baixada Fluminense, the working-class suburbs north of Rio. Its first headquarters was his cramped bedroom, nicknamed Interestellar Lo-Fi, with backyard recording sessions on weekends. The label has passed a hundred releases and in 2013 moved into an office near Praça Tiradentes in central Rio. In late 2016 Almeida formed Oruã, whose first songs were recorded on old cassettes.^[1][2]