Pre-1980s
Lo-fi's roots can be dated as far back as a set of live cylinder recordings created in 1900–04 by Lionel Mapleson from a catwalk 40 ft (12 m) above the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. The sound quality of these "Mapleson Cylinders" is very poor (more so since they are one-of-a-kind artifacts that have been further worn down by being played over the last century); the aesthetic quality, though, partakes in the electric, authentic feeling of an unedited event being captured in real time. In the same historical period, commercial field recordings of folk music had begun to be created in many nations of the world, recorded catch-as-catch-can by early record producers such as Fred Gaisberg of HMV. The description of "lo-fi", however, would be slightly amiss, since the recordists used the best available equipment of the era in order to capture and reproduce the sound as faithfully as possible. With technology being what it was however, the resulting recordings would be considered quite crude, or "low-fidelity", by today's standards.
A later era, Buddy Holly recorded some songs in a converted garage. Some posthumous Hank Williams demos were also overdubbed for commercial release. In the 1960s and 70s visual artist Jean Dubuffet would also record improvisational pieces of spoken word and vocal and instrumental compositions to magnetic tape regardless of skill or technical quality. However, it was not until Bob Dylan decided in 1975 to officially release a set of The Basement Tapes, first recorded as music publisher demos in 1967, that the first lo-fi pop music milestone was reached. The music was really not originally intended for general release, the recordings, made on a consumer-quality Ampex quarter-track machine with two microphones set up for "dual mono", made a virtue of their flaws; with their asides, laughter and unselfconscious looseness, they defined the authenticity of the lo-fi experience. As a historical matter, in the years between the production and the official release, the popularity of these particular recordings also created the first market for pop bootleg records, which as a listening experience came to include seemingly every scrap of certain rock artists' off-the-cuff and unreleased work, including home recordings. Seminal early examples of this were the 1976 home-made debut album Phonography by pioneer DIY popster R. Stevie Moore and the 1976 debut album Carcass by lo-fi pioneer Sean Terrington Wright. Also, famed songwriter Lou Reed produced a version of the self-titled 3rd album by his band, The Velvet Underground. Its lo-fi, cramped sound became known as the closet mix. It was highly influential to up-and-coming indie lo-fi groups.
Lo-fi recordings became more commonly heard in the late seventies to early eighties with many electronic acts. In Monte A. Melnick's biographical book, On the Road with the Ramones, Thomas Erdelyi considers the band's first record to be a "great lo-fi album". Suicide's debut album is a large collection of lo-fi classics, which Bruce Springsteen took inspiration from on his 1982 lo-fi album Nebraska. Other classic lo-fi's to appear around this time include Throbbing Gristle's "United", Thomas Leer's "Private Plane", The Normal's "TVOD/Warm Leatherette" single, and The Human League's "Being Boiled". Another UK classic lo-fi band is the Young Marble Giants.
Read more about this topic: Lo-fi Music