On The Great Psychic Outdoors
Created: 2024-02-22 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-03 (18:06:48)Status: in progress
A geneaology of lo-fi music! Enrico Monacelli starts from the position that lo-fi music, in and of itself, is a radical practice. Lo-fi is deliberately poor and weird, it lets in sounds that should be filtered out. Against the perception that this makes the music somehow more natural or immediate, Monacelli argues that lo-fi is in fact more artificial, in that it involves a conscious analysis and deconstruction of the act of recording. He sees lo-fi as a radical practice, then, because it unearths and puts into question the otherwise hidden conditions and power-structures that shape the production of music.
If lo-fi is a radical practice, it is not an uncomplicated means of escape from capitalism. The book moves between artists more or less in the music industry like Brian Wilson, to outsiders like R. Stevie Moore and Daniel Johnston, exploring their generally fraught relationships to music production, recognition and recuperation. There are interesting parallels and counterpoints between, for example, R. Stevie Moore’s ardently expressed desire to be a superstar and make a lot of money, but only on his terms, and Daniel Johnston’s brief experience of, and repudiation of MTV fame.
And if lo-fi is a radical practice, the book is ambivalent about the types of politics to which it can align itself. The chapter on Ariel Pink specifically explores the paranoid dimensions of his music, in the way it seeks to reinforce and repeat existing structures of power and production, and connects this to his shitty “contrarian” politics. Despite this, Monacelli makes a clear, partisan case for lo-fi as a form of critique and as a form of engaged escape, as a “pathway to experience new intensities beyond our contemporary condition” (300).
Aside from all this, I’m grateful that this book introduced me to R. Stevie Moore and Marine Girls, and for the way it expanded my own musical vocabulary. At its simplest level, it’s possible to enjoy The Great Psychic Outdoors as something akin to a Lonely Planet guide, a map of the eclectic, contradictory worlds of lo-fi.
See also
References
- Monacelli, Enrico, 2023, The Great Psychic Outdoors: Adventures in Low Fidelity, Repeater Books
Endmatter
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