Lo-fi singer-singwriter electronica

Originally posted Sunday, September 9, 2007

When Owen Ashworth started making lo-fi electronica under the name Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, he found the perfect angle for shocking avant-garde audiences: he abandoned irony. Casiotone’s first two albums, Answering Machine Music and Pocket Symphonies for Lonely Subway Cars, may have set hyper-literate lyrics to a beat that played like house music inside a tin can, but there was no knowing wink behind it all, no sense of the technician-musician manufacturing reactions from safe inside his electronic laboratory. Instead, Ashworth favoured the strong melodies, catchy rhythms, and emotionally accessible narratives of his folk-singer heroes Willie Nelson and Hank Williams. He just performed them on battery-powered children’s keyboards.The response surprised him: he found audiences prepared not just to look past the circumstances of the production, but to embrace them as part of the Casiotone’s charm.“I think people just liked it because they assumed it would be gimmicky, and were surprised when they found serious, sincere song-writing,” says Ashworth.These days, they might not be quite so surprised. Since Ashworth put out his first Casiotone cassette in 1997, a whole crop of minimalist electronica outfits has sprung up, bands like Xiu Xiu, Say Hi To Your Mom and The Books, who transpose the catchy beats of the dance floor and the beeps and bleeps of electronica into the private worlds of “serious, sincere” singer-songwriter material.Of course, these bands didn’t invent the notion of thoughtful, accessible electronic music – they owe an obvious debt to groups ranging from Radiohead to the Young Marble Giants -- but they differ from the electropop bands of the nineties and the New Wavers of the seventies and eighties in that they generally accept the old-fashioned values of traditional songwriting. Often, like Ashworth, they’re looking to give a new twist to those values, choosing instruments and spaces with painfully “dry” or non-resonant tones in order to evoke the highly personal atmosphere of self-reflection that has long been the domain of singer-songwriter folk. “The songs are absolutely supposed to reflect a claustrophobic, almost uncomfortable closeness, where the listener goes, ‘Yeah, that sounds familiar’,” Ashworth says. He cites influences that range from the Carter Family (“things that sound really personal and small”) to Riot-era Sly and the Family Stone (“where it all seems to be happening in a really close space and you can hear lips smacking and stuff”).The choice of medium has a pragmatic element as well. Ashworth says that his initial forays into electronic minimalism had more to do with the tools at hand than any significant aesthetic decision. He’d spent some time writing songs for friends’ bands, experimenting with beats and tones using the simple, inexpensive keyboards he had around the house. Performing them himself was just the next step, and since he couldn’t afford a Moog or high-end recording equipment, he stuck to his Casiotone and four-track. “I just found I could put the music out faster that way,” he says.Eric Elbogen, who records synth-and-drum-machine-tinged powerpop on his home computer under the name Say Hi To Your Mom, adds that the self-sufficiency of the process helps. “When I started Say Hi, it was my intention to do everything humanly possible on my own.…There would be no possible way that Say Hi would have been able to have put out four records in as many years, or have toured as frequently as it has, if more people were involved in the process.”Tom Steinle, who runs Tomlab, a Cologne-based label that emphasizes electronic music with a strong songwriting component, argues that the pragmatic considerations here are really the only ones – he believes that the notion of lo-fi as a genre is unnecessarily limiting. “This ‘movement’ is really more a necessity given the means of production we can afford right now,” he says. “The artists we’re working with are really talented and have a vision that points way beyond this sort of style.” Elbogen seconds this. “If I had the money, sure, I’d go to a studio,” Elbogen says. “But it takes me 2-8 months to record an album. It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a studio.”But for some, this means can also turn into a sort of end. Ashworth’s initial pragmatism turned into a kind of bargain with himself: he decided to put out three albums within these original limits. “I’d just come out of school, so there was this sense of giving myself these really specific, self-contained assignments in order to prove myself.” By the third album, Twinkle Echo, he started to get bored and decided “cheat” a little, adding strings and a few other instruments: “I added a guitar, which is like the cardinal sin.” By that time, Ashworth says, he was experiencing the initially artificial limits as a genuine form that forced him to focus more clearly on what he wanted out of a song. “I felt that I had to have a really good reason to cheat, and that made the process really interesting,” he says.Ashworth says that though he recognizes a tension between his often highly introspective song material and the upbeat, club-happy melodies, he sees this as part of the music’s strength: “I’ve always been attracted to songwriting that sounds honest and legit, and to me mixed feelings just seems more real than just a happy pop song.”Jamie Stewart, whose band Xiu Xiu combines confessional noise-rock with preprogrammed sample tracks, argues that the personal, emotional content isn’t even unusual in more traditional electronica: “There’s a lot of dance music that is almost like disturbingly direct. House music lyrics, they’re all about – I know this is a really gauche way of saying it – dancing the pain away.”In fact, pain dominates this music to a degree unusual even in an industry overrun by confessional singer-songwriters. Lo fi electronica, maybe even more than its folk predecessors, is the music of petty grievances and private misery. The ironies of the upbeat setting allow the performer to express sentiments that would seem overwrought in an acoustic ballad, while second-rate recording equipment and emphasis on mechanical white noise evoke a grinding frustration with the clichés of self-expression that a more polished production would smooth over.Seth Smith, frontman for Canadian indie rockers Dog Day, released a home recording of down-beat electronica under the name Hi Firey while the other band was between projects. Hi Firey’s Don’t Worry About the Future features distorted vocals (Smith used a telephone receiver as a mic in order to muffle the sound and "make [his] voice sound less embarrassing"), electronic “mistakes” that rub out the emotional climax of a chorus and catchy pop songs dissolving into white noise chaos. But Smith says his choices weren’t subversive – he says Don’t Worry About the Future was recorded during an “all-time low” in his life, and claims that the music came out sounding “dirty and stoned” because he couldn’t be bothered to clean it up (yet he acknowledges that not only did he use all the mistakes that arose in the process, he also added extra sounds and effects to showcase them). “I use Hi Firey as an outlet for music that doesn't to commit to accuracy, timing, tuning or professionalism,” he says. “Music has always been the best treatment for depression for me, so it comes out that way because of that, too.”Ashworth adds that he hopes the music provides the same kind of relief for the listener. “I think of it as comfort music for when things are really bad,” he says. “The kind of music you listen to on headphones, alone in your room in the middle of the night.”Ultimately, this kind of therapeutic model that places a high premium on sincerity may mean a fairly limited range of expression. “Electronica, especially lo-fi electronica is a trap,” Steinle notes. “Once you get classified in this field, every step you make outside it makes you seem like a traitor, or someone half talented trying to get recognised - an electronica artist who is now trying to do pop music. It’s like a 'nerd' sign glued to your forehead.”Elbogen says he’s often startled by the extent to which his music is expected by audiences to reflect his private life. He likes hearing that fans have made an emotional connection to him through a song, but always finds it slightly strange, since his work is almost entirely fictional. He adds that Say Hi To Your Mom typically irritates those who come to it expecting confessionalism and catharsis. “I had a show review where the writer said she didn’t believe a word I was singing, and I was thinking, ‘Okay, I’m not claiming these songs are about me or my emotions’. I mean, that particular show was really heavy on Impeccable Blahs, which is an album about vampires. And, it’s probably obvious that I’m not a vampire. So her logic kind of escaped me.”Ashworth, who beginning on Twinkle Echo began to make clear distinctions between himself and the troubled characters of his songs, is now starting to chafe against the formal restrictions of the genre as well. His fourth album, Etiquette, includes strings, back-up singers, and even a little rock guitar along with his trademark drum machine beats. He notes, though, that he sees more and more up-and-coming bands embracing the limitations.“When we started out, I really thought we were doing something different – I don’t know, maybe someone else was doing it, but I hadn’t heard about it. These days it seems like every time we play there’s another Casio-type band on the bill.”