This is a story about music, hacking and anti-capitalism. But it is also the exact moment when sounds and words and ideas resonate in so many ways at the same time that it becomes almost impossible to organise thoughts in the form of writing. These words should be simultaneous sounds. I have been constantly crashing against the limits of language for a long time. I need something more sensible, something that can physically touch, far beyond the ambiguity and the approximation of words. That’s the reason why I started messing with sounds (in a broad musical sense): out of urgency. And I did so as an outsider, without the proper knowledge and grammar, playing my limits to my advantage as much as possible to get me where I felt I wanted to go.

This is why I would love to skip over these words I’m writing, these approximations, and directly pass on to you the resounding and sense-making entangling of thoughts and sensations that’s moving inside my embodied and extended cognition (but I can’t, at least for now, not as directly as I would like).

I have just finished reading The great psychic outdoors. Lo-fi music and escaping capitalism by Enrico Monacelli (Repeater 2023) and it instinctively felt like it was the book I needed to connect the dots or, better, the lines my life has been following in the last years, between academic research and sonic practice.

The book is a genealogy of lo-fi music, that wants to highlight “how each thing that happened constituted a rupture, the incursion of something new” (p. 12) and it reflects on lo-fi as “practical subversion of sonic production under capitalism” (p. 14). Sonic hacking, defiant sabotage, breaking the music machine to make something different, not expected, out of the norm. The do-it-yourself method of lo-fi radically questions music (and cultural) production in neoliberal capitalist societies through direct practice: I do it on my own terms, the way I want it to be, poorly and roughly recorded, as true as it can be.

Messing with the machines, hacking them, getting inside them to know them and then use them the way we want and not the way they want us to. Hacking as a method can be applied to everything: not just digital technologies, but music production, language, academia, society as a whole, an aspect that I explored during my PhD research. Also: a conscious and critical relationship with the machine can lead to a deeper questioning and to the creation of new forms, to use the machine otherwise. This is even truer now that we are overwhelmed by “AI” services that are pushed on us at every click.

We live in an algorithmic society. The culture that is (algorithmically) produced (and proposed, through algorithmic recommendations) feels (and sounds and looks) flattened. There seems to be a high-resolution standardisation: more of the same, less of the diverse. Or at least that is what we experience on big streaming platforms and social media and this is what shapes people’s taste. It feels difficult to grasp and articulate the present (or there might not be a present to articulate at all, as suggested by Mark Fisher), not to speak about a future that just seems vanished. That is why this book is so important.

The artists that Monacelli includes in his genealogy, each one in their own way, break the codes, hack the music production, create something new, something different: Brian Wilson’s Beach Boys, R. Stevie Moore, Daniel Johnston, Marine Girls, Ariel Pink (in his full paranoid inward MAGA motion), Perfume Genius, Mount Eerie, Sematary and Grime Stone Records.

Page after page, I started to perceive and understand lo-fi as a gesture to “sabotage normality”, to break the habitual, to create new ways of expression that do not conform to a world where the cultural sphere is no longer somehow autonomous from the market. A quest for “the great unknown beyond”. A way to create true art in the everything store the world has become. A world where it has become harder and harder to keep the pace, to perform as requested, to align to socioeconomic imperatives of success, where life has become a commodity to be sold and bought and extracted. A world that creates suffering and fatigue, violentes fatigues (which I worked on in my sonic experiments – I told you that this book resonates in many ways!).

Pain does not exist in a vacuum, “human anguish is always something that has to do with humanity overall, in a given moment in time” (p. 29). That is why lo-fi music productions seems to be even much more than hacking the music machines, but also “a means to transfigure pop into ‘the environment of an organism which is no longer capable of adapting to the competitive performances required for well-being under domination, no longer capable of tolerating the aggressiveness, brutality, and ugliness of the established way of life'” (p. 64).

Mark Fisher, Herbert Marcuse, Maurice Blanchot, Deleuze and Guattari are quoted often in the pages of the book, which is at the same time a sound trip (that actually made me discover a few artists or, at least, taught me how to listen to them in a very different way, in the case of Beach Boys), a philosophical inquiry and a call for collective action, because, Monacelli acknowledges, “without an honest yearning for a communal struggle, any escape from normality is bound to be an ineffective quest, both on a wider, social scale but also on a more private, existential one” (p. 77).

Hacking as a method, a radical (and reckless) critique through (lo-fi) practice: this means acting differently in order to live differently, aware that it’s up to us to build fugitive ways to collectively escape capitalism and the suffering it imposes on us. Break the machines, hack everything!