2 posts tagged “lo-fi”

Hello.

Is this thing on? Test....test.

So it's been a while. I used to keep up with this whole daily MP3 thing on this here little Vox blog, but it's been *checks archives* just over a year since I actually did anything here. In fact, I was 27 when I stopped this. Now I'm 29.

A lot has happened and I'm not going to tell you about any of it. This is not the place for me to do that, and no one is here to read it anyways (if anyone is here to read this at all).

But I'm going to try it again. As a refresher: this is a pseudo-daily excercise in sharing music. One song a day, plus one to two paragraphs of commentary. New music, old music, long time favorites and fresh discoveries. Novelties, gems, guilty pleasures. Whatever. No promises, I may skip days or disappear completely (again). So we'll see where this goes.

To start off, here is a song by my favorite band from Bellingham. I only know one band from Bellingham (other than Death Cab For Cutie, who got their start there), but still. I can't imagine liking another one better than I Love You Avalanche. It's a solo-ish project that I saw opening for a Northen California band called the Americas last year. Everything I've heard from her/them is super lo-fi, covered in tape hiss and room noise, but the sweetness of the songs shines through, and the layers of vocals are perfectly wispy and tender. This song in particular kills me. It gets stuck in my head from time to time, and I find myself needing to listen to it regularly. The lyrics, the wavery vocal melody in the bridge, the Major lift into the chorus, the overlapping counterpoints towards the end....it's like this song came forth as a fully formed ideal of the solo female folk song. It's also a perfect song for my life at the moment, all about friendship and loss, exciting and bittersweet, painful and exhilirating all at once. I hope you love it as much as I do.

A surefire runner-up in the "bands with misleading names" competition, John Yoko is the side project of Valerie Trebeljahr (of Lali Puna) and Markus Acher (also of Lali Puna, as well as the Notwist and the Tied & Tickled Trio). So far, the duo have only released one seven inch, containing two stripped-down cover songs.

This track is a rather faithful take on a track from the Magnetic Fields magnum opus 69 Love Songs, "Papa Was A Rodeo." They've taken the tears-in-the-beer country ballad feeling of the original and dressed it up with some low-budget drum machine and organ sounds. The flipside of the record has a similarly lo-fi version of "The Morning Paper," by Bill Callahan (AKA Smog). The record is back in print now, after a brief period as a rarity. This particular rip is not exactly perfect, as there are a few skips (most notably in the second verse, eliminating a whole line of lyric), but it's difficult to find a good rip of this release. I may just have to make my own someday!

Oddly enough, when I was choosing this song, I had iTunes on shuffle, and when it was through playing, the next song was "Oh Yoko!" by John Lennon. Creepy. Between this and the recent power outage fiasco, I'm starting to think there's something weird going on...