low fidelity #1 millennial consumerism, .wav vs .mp3, making the right art
Feeling based listening to mainstream radio
In this series I will talk about music/making and give extended commentary around my pursuit of a low fidelity life (it’s not what you think it is)
This month in the lo fi:
Taking notes from this well-put article about “Good Taste”
Drinking coffee from ALDI which is $8 for a 500gm bag, through a plastic drip filter
Wearing five year old Hoka sneakers that are not a cool colour way, which I recently re-discovered as the most comfortable shoe I own
Happily succumbing to the format of lists which is currently copping so much flack across Substack
Driving along St Georges road at 10:30pm on a Tuesday night, listening to the radio through my car stereo. PBS 106.7FM is playing nondescript neo-soul. The music bores me and I press scan on the out-of-place touch screen in my 2002 Camry - a feature that was already installed when I bought the car. It lands on 101.1, KIIS FM, a recap of Kyle and Jacki-O (for any non-Australian readers, they would have been considered a household name in 2012). I listen to the entire twenty minute piece, soothed by the tinny audio, quick, jarring change between topics, and the over compressed sound effects building tension between. It is an oddly welcome reprieve.
In this moment I feel as though I could be anywhere in the world. The content itself is meh - apparently it’s noteworthy that all Jacki-O did this week was complain (that’s a whole other conversation). Between this I am reminded of times away, catching a taxi from the airport in Lisbon, and listening to the Portuguese mainstream. Their own version pumping through the speakers in Portuguese, Croatian or Greek - musings I don’t understand, yet find comfort in regardless. These tinny radio stations act as a connecting thread from country to country.
Listening to mainstream radio I feel based, but I am also reminded of my treachery. Turning my back on the humble realms of small town normalcy I grew up with. For being so quick to run away from it, and into the chin stroking hands of precisely tuned sub woofers.
Lo-fi is most well-known for this particular brand of music, which truly sounds like AI could make it (send me better examples if you know otherwise). This is what will come up first in a Google search of lo-fi, but it’s not where my interest lies. I’m concerned with the mindset of low fidelity versus high fidelity, also to be interpreted as indulging in activities perceived by some unnamed authority as ‘low brow’, or to the spiritually attuned, ‘low vibrational’.
When I first began DJing a wise elder told me that, despite popular rhetoric, it was ok to play .mp3s. That the difference in quality between a .wav and an .mp3 file was so minuscule through most club sound systems and that, unless you were listening in a perfectly treated room or on a lauded Funktion One, most people couldn’t tell them apart anyway. Once you’re in a club it is 99% about how much the track slaps, and whether or not it gets people moving and into their body. The crowd generally isn’t thinking about the quality of sound in technical terms, but emotional.
At some point since leaving high school I was conditioned to strive only to possess these definitively high quality objects (or at least those which look high-qual), that Kmart was bad but IKEA… somehow Good? Products of millennial consumerism, we curated our homes as though there is money in the bank, knowing full well it’s no more than 42 dollars and 34 cents. Bespoke objects for every need, even needs you never knew existed until you came across their resolution. Like those self-watering Mr Kitly pots we all rushed to collect, later realising they are ugly and we were only attracted to their nothing design and hollow promise of convenience. I never had a healthy plant in those, either.
When everything feels more expensive than ever, why are we still aiming for this Hi-Fi life? It goes beyond the count of how much money we make and how much we spend, and bleeds into every facet of existence. It’s our curated instagrams, nonchalant poses with perfect skin, a gentle hand holding open our own personal brand of inspiring book. These are tropes we think we can escape, but we cannot. The symbols only change shape, and appear in other mediums. Although, without tropes or trends to follow, how else are we supposed to find the people we resonate with? Or know if somebody is the same kind of cool/weird/based/brat as us?
Recently, I told a friend I had binge watched the new Emily in Paris. She looked at me awkwardly and said, ‘you know what the drama is there, right?’. As though I am unaware of how basic and surface level the show is, how much it offended the French, and the Americans, and the White people on behalf of the Chinese side-kick (note: even this Reddit thread shit-talking the show proves people love to hate it, and watch it anyway). I, too, felt appalled at first, but there was something so … palatable about the distaste. And when seasons 2 and 3 rolled around, I watched fervently. I had begun to free myself from the watchful eyes which, it turns out, can’t see what I do in the confines of my own home.
In 2019 I had a full time job. It was enough, though I wasn’t earning any large sum of money. Part of obtaining this job allowed me to enter into the bougie lifestyle. AKA lower-middle class people eating out like the rich. I never saved any money as I was too busy going to expensive restaurants every weekend, and buying bags of things I couldn’t afford.
I really believed in that time that the key to living a happy life was a matter of Perfectly Curating ones’ Existence according to what we thought the wealthy were doing. I later realised the wealthy were saving their pennies. They weren’t wearing overt symbols of designer brands (mostly), but were partaking in what us lay-people were soon to discover: quiet luxury. Gauche pastings of any name I could get my hands on - Prada, Louis Vuitton, Burberry - were never to be accepted by those I deliriously thought I might one day pass as.
The years which followed saw Covid happen. What was at first a curse became a blessing. There were no fancy restaurants to patron, and I wasn’t seeing anybody aside from my closest five. I was forced to re-assess my tastes from the confines of my petite appartement. In this time my younger sister had moved to Melbourne, drawing a thread back to the small town. She ate fast food, drank Coca Cola, and didn’t care about buying Aesop or P.A.M.. We bonded over our shared love of Lana Del Ray and I watched her play the ps5. She introduced me to the Marvel universe, and one night we got home late and watched blockbuster film Interstellar on her laptop in bed while the acid wore off.
This period set in motion a juggernaut of rejection of the things and scenes I had once held close. I was given a guitar to call my own and, from this bed free from pretence I began to write music - real music which felt like an extension of myself - as though nobody knew who I truly was until they had listened to these songs. For years I had placed importance on empty vessels that could never be filled, pouring parts of myself away only for them to be emptied out the leaky sides.
In this newfound appreciation for low fidelity living it was important to remove as much of the interface between myself and the world as possible. Having that first EP mixed was a process of taking away layers until all that was left was my voice. And, while it was frightening to be so vulnerable, I never once doubted that it was the right thing to do.
Recently, a friend proclaimed in her one woman show: the artist isn’t concerned with morals, but what is right or wrong for the art. This rang true. Listening to radio is a constant process of retuning as you travel in and out of range, similarly we must retune our practice and desires. This is why I began the blog, really. What started as a chronicle of my lonesome travels in the U.S., I see now is all in pursuit of circumventing the barriers between me and you. Finding these direct lines of communication amongst the internets’ current brand of obfuscation.
This is the ethos of low fidelity - acknowledging that most apparatus are vehicles or carriers for greater messages, and that each persons configuration of form and function will differ. I am happy with those Hokas in the ugly colour way because they mean I can run and, to me, therein lies the quality. I do not run for appearances, just like some people aren’t trying to look good while they play music. I will still fork out on plush sheridan-brand towels, summer fridays lip balm, and barista made coffee because I am not a cheapskate, but there are other expenses I opt-out of.