Welcome to Digital LoFi
Keeping true to the name of the website, Digital LoFi is built with off the shelf open source website software, minimally customized. You can read more about the genesis here.
Site design, layout and writing are all in a state of flux, as I work on this in my spare time.
Other places you can find me
Soundcloud (do people still use Soundcloud?)
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- Written by: Puffer
Back to My Roots
In my inaugural post for this, Phase III of Digital LoFi, I wrote that I had originally launched this site to write about my interests and thoughts as someone who makes music in my spare time. And that I stopped when I realized I was writing more about making music than making music. This period roughly spanned 2006-2008. In maintaining the blog I was always casting about looking for some music news, technique, or software that caught my interest so I would have something to write about. What’s funny, in the last few months I’ve been going back through all the music I recorded and produced during that period and before and it’s become apparent how little I knew what I was doing while writing about it like I did.
I look back at that version of the blog now, with whatever wisdom late-middle age has afforded me, and see that it was me learning how to be someone who could produce music. But the angle I was coming at it from ended up with me trying to find an aura of authority that I didn’t earn. I don’t think I was bragging or thought that I was an undiscovered genius—I am not completely oblivious to my limitations. Just I still had so much to learn. And talking about music production like I had substantive knowledge to impart is pretty ridiculous in retrospect.
So why am I going through all my old music? There’s a couple of reasons, some practical, some creative. And to bring this blog back to its roots I’m going to start discussing it here.
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- Written by: Puffer
Back in 2023 I wrote a post about taking a deep dive on Romeo Void. Not to be self-flattering but I think it’s one of the better posts I wrote during that phase of the blog. It balances between my autobiographical nostalgia and covering an interesting and somewhat obscure subject.
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- Written by: Puffer
Yesterday/last Friday/some point in the past, I posted to Mastodon, “All right, it's time to move on from the J Warden era of digitallofi.com. Not sure what I'm going to write about... I wonder if I have anything in the tank.”
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- Written by: Puffer
Author’s Note
This is the essay I was working on when J died. As I’ve mentioned, a lot of this site had become a conversation between Jason Warden (ne Tom Q./SpaceAce/Robotron, or as I refer to him when speaking and writing, J1) and myself, talking about music via our vinyl record collections. While I was never going to be able to replicate his deep dives into obscure musical acts he thought deserved more attention, my autobiographical rambling had an engaged audience of at least one person. The records I’m discussing here would have another bonding moment. Not saying he would’ve liked all the bands, records I’m writing about, but he loved to talk shop. Also, we both lived through and came up in roughly the same era of pop, punk, and alternative/college rock—one of our early bonding moments was discovering a shared love and deep knowledge of Robyn Hitchcock.2 His taste was a lot more wide ranging than mine but we had so much in common musically. We got each other’s references.
Not only was I hoping to get him to contribute a companion post (discussed below in the Boston hardcore section), one of our shared jokes was the story in the first part of the Preface.
So I’m going to be directly addressing this to J. I hope the conceit isn’t ghoulish or strained. But, sincerely, most days I find myself thinking of conversing with him.
This one’s for you, J.
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- Written by: Puffer
In July of 2024 my esteemed co-blogger, Jason Warden, or Tom Q. per his nom de plume on this blog, or J as I refered to him in conversation, took leave of this plane of existence.
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Used the last Bandcamp Friday1 to grab a few releases that had been piling up in my wishlist.2 As much as this blog has been about experiencing music via vinyl records, there’s plenty of music I own digitally, on CD or as a digital file. CDs are what they are; I’ve written about them before and I’ll no doubt write about them again. But I want to talk about the music I own as digital files3.
