EVERY GENRE PROJECT - August 28 - Lo-Fi House

Genre of the Day - Lo-Fi House

Album of the Day - КОД-915913 by АЛ-90 (2015)

I see the genre name lo-fi house and immediately feel the weight skewing towards the word lo-fi. I imagine the international patron saint of students during trying times, Ms. Lo-fi Girl, sitting at her desk as low fidelity-softened hip-hop beats guide her academic journey. Among those who have been a high school or college student, I’d venture to say more than half have tried on a lo-fi beat for size in their studying or relaxing moments. In an abundantly high-fidelity, oversaturated Internet space, lo-fi is compellingly homey. Despite most of these songs coming as one-offs by anonymous producers, lo-fi hip-hop indeed slots the honor of having its own RYM genre. The hazy, lo-fi recording aesthetic has also successfully washed over house music, though, and we delve into its misty world today. 

As a nexus of dance music for decades now, to imagine house music’s euphoric power outside of the context of crowded gatherings seems implausible. Lo-fi house makes an inward, intimate turn, softening house’s grooves while accentuating its melodic and hypnotic capabilities. Low fidelity recording styles eschewing sleek perfection have long communicated DIY dedication and punk grit since the late ‘60s à la the Velvet Underground. The ‘90s saw shoegaze and indie musicians increasingly yearning for the pre-CD days, seeking the well-worn warmth and character of lo-fi recordings and cementing it as a conscious styling. 

Lo-fi house emerged in the mid-2010s as certain deep house producers ventured into more pensive and, counterintuitively, less danceable styles. It’s often connected to outsider house, technically its parent genre, and it aptly describes its sound as the sense of sonic distance created by many of the production techniques can make you feel like you’re standing outside the club. Producers like Mall Grab (an artist I discovered before this column), DJ Seinfeld, and Ross from Friends pioneered the style, and if the names weren’t a tell, a lot of the technological nostalgia is deeply situated in the ‘90s and the long-gone days of cassette and VHS tapes and how easily their sound would degrade. The combination of house momentum with the balmy nostalgia of genres like hypnagogic pop or psichedelia occulta italiana is a bewitching combination, one suited equally for movement and rumination. 

Russia’s АЛ-90 is uniquely poised to interpret house in a non-club setting, given that the act sends these sonic transmissions from above the Arctic Circle. This album comes like a frozen parcel, unthawing with a beauty that drips like the soft bells and detuned pianos of opener “Efimernaya Nenavist’.” its deep house-indebted samples range from the imperceptible as complimenting the delicate, underwater kicks and snares gently shaking in “Zavualirovanniy Signal” to the cleverly distorted familiar, such as Amy Winehouse (“Samoudovletvoris’ Suka”) and a weathered sophistipop classic (“Ona Hochet Eshe.”) The beauty of this iteration of lo-fi house is in the lack of immediacy that tends to drive dance music, allowing slowly unfurling melancholic melodies and icy rhythms to sweep over and percolate through the dance floor of the mind with a deeper intensity.