ABSTRACT
A lightly humorous definition of the style on popular Hungarian news portal Index.hu goes like this: “[b]edroom musician (noun): a musician putting their music together at home, in their room, mostly with the help of a computer” (Index 2012). The term “Lo-Fi” or “bedroom pop” (hálószobapop) music was used for a group of bands that were, according to the musicians themselves, musically very different from each other, but still linked through aesthetic characteristics, an “attitude,” and shared practice: bands consisting of young people that typically used online music sharing platform Bandcamp to upload home-made music. All elements of this definition, namely young age, home recording, online platforms for the distribution/sharing of music, (unspecified) shared attitude, and aesthetics-more precisely, “bad quality” recording, a Lo-Fi sound indicating the home-made, DIY, non-commercial character of the music-were frequent in the respective subcultural discourse. For instance, Zsófia Németh defined Lo-Fi as “regular tracks recorded under irregular circumstances” (Németh 2014). Or, in the words of Zita Csordás: “apart from the fact that we record our songs in a bad quality, I don’t really know what Lo-Fi is-perhaps an attitude” (Csordás 2014).
