Kreitler is critical of low-fidelity recording as employed by a small coterie of recent indie rock bands, taking as examples the Vivian Girls, Wavves, and Times New Viking.¹ A little indiscriminately, he impugns their ability to play live:

Vivian Girls are about as amateur as a band could be without being children… Wavves’ Nathan Williams self-destructed during his second-ever European show… the Crystal Stilts’ live performances are more accurately described as “without qualities” than as “low-quality.”

It’s probably true that the Vivian Girls, like countless bands before them, only really got comfortable with their instruments after they had been on the road for a while. I’m not sure what the reference to the Crystal Stilts means—in any case, they’re seasoned musicians, one of whom has been recording since the 90s. But the assumption that he is working against—that some artistic legitimacy is conferred by the demonstration of technical skill—seems pretty quaint (like defending Picasso on the basis of his draftsmanship).

The next sticking point involves the question of what it means to be a “song.” Kreitler acknowledges that the debate about whether “the songs are in fact good or bad under the production” is problematic by its very terms—where does the song end and the production begin?—but then seems to accept those terms.

If what is being discussed is a particular recording—if that is what we mean by “song”—then there isn’t anything that can exist separate from its production, that can somehow be not-produced. If, on the other hand, we are supposed to be evaluating a song based on what can be notated on a piece of paper, that would render the differences in versions of “Mr. Tambourine Man” or, say, “My Funny Valentine” incomprehensible or irrelevant. A rather difficult position to entertain.

Kreitler doesn’t go that far, but he takes it that there is something being done here that has a non-musical end, and that something serves to obfuscate some other thing (“the song”):

So is the fuzz part of the song or something done to the song? My contention is that it’s a supplement in the Derridean sense. Derrida reminds us that supplement (at least in French) properly has two meanings: a supplement both supplements and supplants. That is, it not only adds to its object but also replaces it. It’s what Derrida called an “undecidable,” neither wholly one or the other.

He’s referring to Derrida’s reading of Rousseau, which appeared in Of Grammatology. This little interlude is probably unnecessary by the standards of his argument, but if taken to its logical conclusion, the same concept sort of uproots much else of what he says. Derrida argued that there always lingered in Rosseau’s usage of this word the supposition that the secondary matter, the supplement, was inessential, and that the first was self-sufficient and therefore superior, or privileged. So, for example, speech, to which writing was a supplement, occupied a privileged position. (In this construction: the “song,” to which “fuzz” is a supplement, is privileged.) But Derrida argued that, in parallel to its second meaning, supplement always also provides the missing qualities that the first was incapable of supplying on its own.

The listening experience is not just one of listening to a song, but discerning a song that is slightly buried, slightly elsewhere… We don’t just hear the song but in part imagine the song in the context its production suggests, that is, as something older than the contemporary, something mediated by time… In the instance of Wavves we are meant to imagine his garage and to believe that he could not possibly afford to record at a higher fidelity.

To deconstruct Kreitler’s deconstruction, one might say that here, “recording at a higher fidelity” is the privileged position—and he seems to think that doing otherwise is a kind of subterfuge. You could say this is embedded in the word itself, since “production values” is a term used to mean expensive, or high-tech. Lo-fi is, by most definitions, “low quality.” The “accuracy” of a recording is its default desideratum. In interrogating the motive for lo-fi recording, he reflexively turns to terminology of the wanting—“innocent,” “naive”—and asserts that through it, their “records do something to the music that is other than the music.” Building on an interview in which Cassie Ramone of the Vivian Girls jokes about shredding, he extrapolates an opposition between garage and “math” rock and assigns each a modus operandi: math rock is dedicated to formal innovation, whereas the Vivian Girls seek—no doubt to their surprise—“to retrace the very normalcy of [their] gestures.”

Development of “form,” then, is taken exclusively as conspicuous variation in time signature, density of playing, harmonic complexity, technical proficiency, etc., and not lyric mood, instrument tone, indeterminacy, etc.² In an aside, Kreitler adds that electronic music is “a musical lineage that was inscribed with a quest for the new from its beginnings.” I’m having trouble coming up with some modern “lineage” for which that statement would not be true. Anyway, electronic music is also a field in which the value of production is paramount, and the distinction between the production and the “song” is ever harder to determine—a genre in which the exact sound of the percussion can make or break a beat and the combined quality of overlapping sonics is tweaked to the last measure. And yet production, in the case of bands that play guitars, represents “retreat from the historical anxiety of the contemporary moment and the concealment of that retreat in noise.” I suppose if you’re already certain of what the “contemporary moment” is, you are liable to find ways to justify your judgment.

1. I find it a little odd—dubious, even—that he chose to ignore the history of this style, which follows pretty plainly from Guided By Voices, Black Tambourine, K Records, the Jesus & Mary Chain, and goes all the way back to White Light/White Heat.

2. One could argue that the quality of the “overall,” held as a principal virtue in painting by arch-formalist Clement Greenberg, is more akin to these latter qualities.