We'll Take the Lo Road

Excerpts from an article on the lo-fi music scene

By Brad Lips. Originally appeared in Option Magazine. November 1994.

“There’s something special about recording at home,” muses Dave Berman of the Silver Jews, a loosely configured “band” best known for including two members of Pavement. “At home you get accidents. On our first 7-inch (Dime Map of the Reef), the second side has no drums for the first two minutes. But that’s only because Bob Nastanovich wasn’t home yet from his bus-driving job. So Steve Malkmus and I just started playing and then he came home, got a beer, popped it open, and then joined in. All of that is contained in the recording.”

Silver Jew Dave Berman feels observers miss the point when they peg lo-fi artists as lackadaisical and apathetic; their recording choice, he stresses, is a conscious reaction to the unwritten rules of the music biz. “Why is it,” Berman asks, “that musicians are the only artists who have to travel to a fortress of machines to do their work?” “I wouldn’t like everything to have poor production,” says Dave Berman, “but there are very few studio albums that can capture loneliness. There’re exceptions, like Big Star’s 3rd, but it’s rare, because when everything’s in a studio, you know that it’s bankrolled by someone with business interests. When it’s music by someone at home, it’s an artifact from someone who, lacking money or connections or whatever, has no other outlet.”

Berman is quick to point out, however, that there’s a “romance of distance” inherent in the pleasure of lo-fi recordings.