On March 10th, 1970, Alvin Lucier sat in his small rented apartment on High Street in Middletown, Connecticut and read a paragraph into a microphone. “I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now,” he began. It was the first step in a process that created the ur-text for understanding lo-fi music.
There’s a tendency to equate low production values with a certain type of intimacy. On it’s face, this is counter-intuitive; that poor sonic fidelity and less clean production create a recording that is more honest and sincere. Early Mountain Goats albums, On an Airplane Over the Sea, and pretty much all of the Corwood Industries catalog trade on this principle. The idea is partially rooted in our understanding of space. By retaining bits of sonic ephemera that were present at the site of recording — the tape hiss of John Darnielle’s boom box, the creak of Jeff Magnum’s chair at the end of “Two-Headed Boy Part 2” — the listener gets a more full and less mediated experience.
These imperfections could easily be scrubbed out in a studio, but keeping them gives the listener access to the site of creative activity. It’s a trick that gives recordings immediacy — it puts you right “there.” The construction is so incredibly pervasive that it’s no wonder we have a genre signifiers like “bedroom pop.” You and the artist share the same aural space, giving the entire recording a patina of intimacy.
After he finished reading the paragraph, Lucier hit rewind and played it back, recording the playback on another tape. He then repeated this process more than 30 times. I am Sitting in a Room is all these recordings collected and stitched together chronologically. With each copy of a copy of a copy Lucier’s original speech gets increasingly warped and distorted, the size and shape of the room emphasizing certain frequencies and absorbing others. After 45 minutes of tape, Lucier’s words are completely incomprehensible. What we’re left with is not his voice, but the sound of the room itself.
What stands out about the piece is how our relationship to Lucier changes in proportion to the prominence of the room’s presence in the recording. At the start, Lucier’s comes through clearly, his soft-spoken enunciation creating a sonic coziness. For the first few repetitions the closeness increases along with the slight distortion. As the clarity degrades and the words begin to blur around the edges. We hear Lucier speaking, as well as where he is speaking. We’re right there with him. However, as I am Sitting continues, the process quickly reveals diminishing returns. Within a few a few more loops, the voice sounds modulated and hollow, like HAL has taken over the reading. Soon, the human lilt of the speech disappears completely and all that’s left are pristine drones and harmonies: all room; no person.
Pull out some graph paper and draw it if you want. You get sort of a distorted bell curve, with peak familiarity somewhere near the beginning before dropping off completely. It’s the line all music working within the lo-fi framework must walk. You want to hint at the realities of the recording — the space, the tape hiss, the crackle of the mic — without drowning out the human aspect with the artifice of it all.
