Notes on the lo-fi room

Lo-fi is the room I have to fight an algorithm for the hardest. There's an enormous amount of music with the right tags and the wrong feeling — generated, AI-adjacent, four-bar loops that never decide to be anything.

What I'm looking for is closer to the original meaning of the word. Lossy. Tape hiss because someone used tape, not because someone added it afterwards. A Rhodes that's slightly out. A drum that's a little too far back in the mix. The sound of a room, not a plug-in pretending to be a room.

The test is mundane: I play it at midnight while doing the dishes, or at half past one reading the same paragraph for the third time. If the track makes the kitchen or the desk feel like a place I want to be in, it stays. If I want to switch playlists, it doesn't.

Most things that meet the bar aren't called lo-fi by anyone except me. That's fine. The shelf label was always more about a mood than a genre.