Just as lo-fi was entering its decline, a new generation of artists was getting started. Audibly inspired by ‘80s lo-fi – Daniel Johnston in particular -, these new voices sounded more gentle than the sulky, cynical early ‘90s artists, but at the same time more crushed by the weight of the world.
The best of these artists was Mark Linkous’ Sparklehorse. Linkous had lived as a hermit in the woods of Virginia for several years, doing motorcycle repair for spare cash. He tells of locating a hidden stash of recording tape in a hollow tree. Other times the story is he inherited it from a Civil War ancestor. With these he built a sound lab and home studio in a shed, christens it Static King, and starts recording wistful countrypop laments and noise nuggets. At first these are passed round an inner circle of friends, but the circle steadily widens. Finally Sparklehorse is set out in the world.
The language of nature is everywhere. Linkous sings about rising early to watch bees leave their hive, about a motorcycle gas tank he spray painted black, about the most beautiful widow in town. Things would not end well in the bittersweet tale of Sparklehorse, but on 1995’s debut ‘Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot’ the future is still wide open.
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Meanwhile renegade dEUS guitaris Rudy Trouvé was still in exile in the UK. Refusing to mend his lo-fi ways, Trouvé sent a wave of lo-fi records across the channel. The records were released under crude aliases like Gore Slut, Lionel Horowitz & his combo and Kiss my jazz, but all were instantly recognizable by Trouvé’s self-made artwork. Finally pushed out of the music business (though he frequently threatens to return), he would set up his stall as a successful painter and graphic artist.
The records speak frankly about Trouvé’s homesickness, the political persecution, his refuge in alcohol and how much he dislikes Britpop. ‘Just awful, people getting together in the millions singing along to catchy pop songs recorded in professional studios. At least when I drink, I turn into a soppy, sentimental loner. There’s no room for that in Britannia. To these people alcohol is a social drug.’
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Elliott Smith’s third album ‘Either/or’ was his breakthrough. Recording off and on between commitments for his less-heard-than-ignored indie band Heatmiser, Smith had amassed and released a respectable volume of lo-fi work during the mid-‘90s.
His records reflected Smith’s serious side, lyrics all doubt and self-absorption, music all serpentine crossword puzzle acoustic guitar melodies with whispered, multi-tracked vocals. But there was also a playful side. Who can forget Smith singing his Oscar-nominated song ‘Miss Misery’ at the awards show in an oversized prom dress, the same dress he wore earlier at MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball? Many still recall his contributions for ‘Saturday night live’, such as the immortal valentine song ‘Acoustic guitar in a box’, or the time he appeared onstage with the Flaming Lips dressed as a dolphin.
Smith went on to bigger studios and recording budgets, recording some of the most lo-fi sounding work ever recorded at Sunset Sound and Abbey Road (on ‘FutureX/Osounds’ and ‘Figure 8’), before returning to his home studio for the sadly unfinished ‘From a basement on a hill’.
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‘We went up to Lou’s turkey farm, with just a couple of our friends. Was no trouble at all. We got all the tape we needed. At a discount,’ says Jack Yarber of the Oblivians.
Fearsome threesome from Memphis, the Oblivians brought lo-fi and garage rock together, resulting in the messy rebirth of rock’n’roll. Six handedly they continued the legacy in dozens of subsequent bands: the Compulsive Gamblers, Jack-O & the Tennessee Tearjerkers, Reigning sound, Detroit Cobras, the Parting gifts, Greg Oblivian and the Tip Tops, Mary Weiss’s comeback band, Jay Reatards’s Retards and so on.
The Compulsive Gamblers was the font. Then Jack Yarber and Greg Cartwright recruited Greg Friedl and started the whole damn thing all over again. First as Pontius Pilate & the Naildrivers, then the Gentlemen of Leisure, finally they settled on the Oblivians. Uniquely in garage rock they had no bass player. All three members took turns as vocalist, guitarist and drummer. Combied with the lo-fi recording aesthetic, this resulted in a primal din of noise with no top or bottom, exactly what rock’n’roll should be.
Wilder than any contemporary lo-fi and with a crazy glint in their eyes, no one dared oppose the Oblivians’ recording plans. And so a steady stream of released followed, ‘Now for the hard of hearing’, ‘Static party’, ‘Soul food’, ‘Go!Pill-popper!’ ‘The Sympathy sessions’, ‘Kick your ass’ and ‘Popular favorites’ among them. Little later, Lou informed the lo-fi community the price of tape had gone up due to rising security overhead costs.
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By 1996 the contours of the new government approved lo-fi became clear. Robert Schneider, an old fraternity friend of the Clintons, was tasked with the organization of a new counter-counter-culture movement, dubbed Elephant 6 (elephant for Hilary Clinton’s favourite animal, 6 for the jazz cigarettes not inhaled during creative workshops). They chose the symbolic location of Athens, Georgia, old home of successful government ducks in the music scene REM, and in conjunction with Lou Barlow’s tape supply they set to work.
The underground was flooded with ‘lo-fi’ releases under aliases such as Apples in Stereo, Major Organ and the Adding Machine, Frosted Ambassador, The Music Tapes, Circulatory system, Olivia Tremor Control, Sunshine Fix, Apples in Quadrophonic, Neutral Milk Hotel… (Two earlier Olivia Tremor Control EP’s, California demise’ and ‘The giant day’ are the work of another band entirely. Their fate has never been revealed.) But this was not the lo-fi we held dear: misanthropy, static and a healthy bite to the hand that feeds were replaced with sunshine fixes, motivational speeches and toy instrument orchestras. Standard bearing Olivia Tremor Control debut ‘Dusk at cubist castle’ was littered with seditious lyrics ‘There is an ideal and I’m going to reach for it / There is an ideal and I’m going to try’, ‘Nothing can be achieved without the willingness to succeed’, ‘We feel ok / which is how we feel most of the time’.
Understandably, even moderate voices inside the lo-fi community were outraged. But what could they do? Even inside the Elephant 6-movement trouble was brewing. Will Cullen Hart soon broke rank and admitted all of the songs were the work of professional songwriters like Goffin-King and Frey-Leadon. ‘We don’t even play on our own records and it’s making me sick.’ At a confrontation with Schneider a fist went through a wall, but the only effect was Hart’s swift security-assisted departure from Elephant 6-headquarters. The public was none the wiser, even as subsequent titles became ever more transparent (‘In the propaganda airplane over the US’, ‘Taking government grants to make music for people who get government grants’).
In recent times a cult following has reclaimed these records from obscurity, praising their warped sense of pop and government kitsch style. But with efficient precision the release schedule of Robert Schneider’s Elephant 6 led to today’s professional indie bands like the Shins.
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