Lo-Fi Indie

Lo-fi indie is indie rock and pop recorded with deliberately or necessarily limited equipment — four-track cassette recorders, home studios, cheap microphones — so that hiss, distortion, room noise and mistakes remain in the finished record as part of its meaning. The aesthetic descends from home-recording pioneers such as *R. Stevie Moore* and *Daniel Johnston* and became a defining indie value in the 1990s through *Guided by Voices*' "Bee Thousand", *Pavement*'s early records and *Sebadoh*. Later practitioners including *The Microphones* and *Ariel Pink* treated the home studio as an instrument in itself.