This is a test.
Low-fi is something right now; the word “movement” would be too serious, the big word “genre” wouldn’t fit tightly around the small group of artists who are riding this wave, and I don’t think the word “trend” describes it right, because it implies a sort of monkey-see monkey-do phenonemon. But it certainly is exciting because I don’t think it’s deliberate. I had a conversation with Rob Garcia, one of the two members of Reading Rainbow, and asked if he thought the low-fi music wave was just a coincidence. He said he thought it was. Rob stated that his band records in low-fi (as an aside, some people think there is no such thing as low-fi, they ask, “what is low-fi?” like it’s a rhetorical question, but it really just means less precise recording and performing sound quality, like pointilism or impressionism) because they like the “aesthetic”. It’s incredible that a bunch of artists from across the country all like the same “aesthetic”. The question is, “Why?”. And maybe there is not a clear answer to that, maybe it has something to do with Hegel’s social evolution, maybe it is some incarnation of Plato’s divine inspiration on a massive scale, maybe it’s just mere coincidence, and maybe it’s not even important. But what this means is that art is changing, and that art continues to change, and that we have much to look forward to when art will rear itself, as is its custom, and - coincidentally or however - take all who hold onto it’s back riding into the future.
