The Great Psychic Outdoors Adventures in Low Fidelity

Explores the weird world of lo-fi music to investigate its revolutionary potential and its ability to subvert what we think music can do.

Homemade records, tape-hiss worship and a taste for a very peculiar kind of psychedelia have carved themselves a weird niche in the contemporary musical landscape under the name of lo-fi.

This genreless genre, characterized by poor recordings and rough sounds, spanning from the most extreme heavy metal to the sweetest ear-candies pop can offer, has become a solid presence in our collective sensibility. And yet, it has largely been neglected: this staunch refusal of anything hi-fi and hi-tech has fallen under the radar of the categories we use to analyse ourselves and our times.

The Great Psychic Outdoors, dedicated to the most interesting and controversial artists in this movement, will rectify this injustice and vindicate the revolutionary potential of lo-fi music, engaging with this weird genre on its own terms and facing head on the contradictions and possibilities of this multi-faceted phenomenon. Confronting the aesthetic and conceptual stakes of this sonic craft, The Great Psychic Outdoors shows what lo-fi says about us, our lives under capitalism and the strange ways we cope with pain, madness and beauty.

Enrico Monacelli is a philosopher and cultural critic. He is a PhD candidate at the Università degli Studi of Milan and writes regularly for The Quietus. He was a founding member of the now-defunct occultural research unit Gruppo di Nun and worked with them on their Revolutionary Demonology (Urbanomic, 2022).