The 0dBFS Aesthetic

in search of smartdumb: Sleater-Kinney's "The Fox"; digital clipping; Stadium Arcadium; St. Anger; Apogee converters; Sleigh Bells; Merriweather Post Pavilion

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

(50)

Bless this feed for Stuart Berman alerting us that it’s been 20 years since Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods came out. I have a very clear memory of listening to the album on a rickety treadmill at that shady gym off Driggs Ave in Williamsburg (for a time, the only gym off the Bedford stop). I had exercised so infrequently in my life till then, that the second I stepped on the treadmill it was like I began to sweat profusely almost immediately, and I ended up getting shocked through one of my earpods within the first few minutes. I took this as a sign, got off the mill, and didn’t exercise for ten years.

(51)

There were a lot of things that were different about The Woods, though I didn’t have the vocabulary at the time. For Stuart, it was about the band pulling from a different set of reference points – more Led Zeppelin, more bombastic, less Gang of Four, less ‘arty’. In a word, it sounded dumber.

All I knew was that it was the first Sleater-Kinney album I actually liked. At the same time, it was a loud, fatiguing album — like going to a noise show in a small DIY venue without wearing ear plugs. (In fact, the only record that had ever made me feel that way was Sightings’ Michigan Haters on Load.) I didn’t know what this meant exactly, but had to listen to The Woods at half the volume I was used to listening. Even still, my ears felt like well-done steak.

(52)

When you make digital recordings, there is an upper limit for how loud the final file can actually be: -0dBFS. That’s the loudest you can go. If you cross that line, the recording “clips” – and historically, digital clipping was a very, very miserable, truly unpleasant sound for the human ear. This is different from clipping via a guitar amplifier or a microphone preamp, which creates interesting kinds of asymmetries and intensified harmonics we call 'distortion’ and ‘saturation’. But in the early 2000s, when analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters were still relatively new technologies, digital clipping was an absolute no-no. It physically hurt your ears.

As part of this album’s aesthetic, the producer Dave Fridmann and the band had embraced digital clipping, which is to say embraced hurting people’s ears. The decision was interesting because historically it happened at the same moment when “major label rock” (if you will) was trying to figure out a way to navigate the “loudness wars.” Sort of like an audio Pepsi Challenge, the broader public think music sounds better when it appears to be louder, at least initially. So labels started demanding mastering engineers compress and limit recordings to have more apparent volume, at the expense of overall dynamics and at the risk of/inevitability of digital distortion.

This is the era of Metallica’s St. Anger, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Stadium Arcadium, etc – and there was something not-so-quietly desperate about rock music competing for market share with pop and rap especially – more minimally arranged genres that can more readily and naturally sound louder.

Indie rock wasn’t on the radio like that, so this was very much a choice Sleater-Kinney made — to make a rock record that sounded, basically, like shit. I thought it worked (and still works) beautifully, especially against the often bizarre lyricbook. Following the monstrously chunky guitar freakout of “The Fox” you get: “On the day the duck was born…” This was not exactly the kind of music that was going to help American Apparel sell more catsuits.

It’s not a record you can pull out on the regular, but I’m not sure “can you pull it out on the regular?” is necessarily a good rubric for music, or really any aesthetic experience. I think it’s OK that you can’t exercise while you listen to this music, or do much of anything. You just have to take the beating.

(53)

A few years later, also in Williamsburg, my friend Derek Miller would pick up where records like The Woods left off. In his apartment, he had begun making the demos for a band that would eventually be called Sleigh Bells. The sound of the first Sleigh Bells album is, among many other things, the sound of first-gen Apogee Duet converters being clipped on the way in, and God what a beautiful sound that is. The character of Apogee converters clipping is very very different from the character of Digidesign (Pro Tools) converters clipping. Part of that was Apogee had designed a soft-limit feature so that sound would be stopped right before it crossed 0dBFS, and the sound of that soft limit to my ears had more of the curdle of slow-moving tape. Derek had figured out a way to make it sing. “Why doesn’t this feel how it feels when I play it live?” is likely the guiding principle. Derek is a masterful shredder and as a songwriter/producer, a master of extreme contrast. I don’t think you could get away with melodies like “Crown on the Ground” or “Kids” unless the instrumentals were as gnarled as they are. It’s such a fertile proposition – a very smartdumb proposition – and every Sleigh Bells album is a fun (and usually jealousy-inducing for me) moment to see where Derek and Alexis land inside the 0dBFS aesthetic.

I am in debt to Derek for many things, but for now: Derek was the one who eventually got me back into the gym after my post-Woods scare. No mirrors, no TVs, just results! Thank you.

(54)

There was a period in my production career when I was only making loud, noisy, blown-out rock records. But the physical fatigue of this kind of music is real, and after I finished Yvette’s Process – which, coincidentally, Stuart Berman wrote about on Pitchfork (8.1!) – I noticed a dip in the upper mids in my right ear and panicked and decided it was time to take a break from the hard-hitting, heavy-boozing 0dBFS Aesthetic lifestyle I was living. As the song goes, I sold all my guitars and amps for turntables and synthesizers. For a decade, I just made Yaz records.

Call it a midlife crisis: A few years ago I had been craving 0dBFS again. I think that’s what initially attracted me to Copenhagen’s MØ. Karen had massive radio records under her belt (“Lean On”, “Final Song”, “Don’t Leave”), but her beginnings were punk and DIY in Copenhagen, and she missed that sound and that Total Energy Thing type energy. The album we made together, called Plæygirl, came out a few weeks ago, is not a 0dBFS Aesthetic record per se, but is a pop record that draws on the feeling of the 0dBFS Aesthetic. It’s an emotional homecoming for her, and a creative recentering for both of us.

(55)

Tapping in on the tech: Creative clipping is just part of the gig of being a producer at this point, and there are hundreds of software options that emulate certain clipping responses, that accentuate certain “bad” clipping sounds, others deemphasize them, etc. But candidly I really hadn’t had to do much clipping for the rounder, deeper aesthetic of records I was making. So Plæygirl was first time I had to try to find some nuance in the 0dBFS aesthetic — which I guess isn’t a very 0dBFS aesthetic thing to say.

My problem with a lot of 0dBFS Aesthetic type music – from hyperpop to Load to Brat — is that as an artist it doesn’t give you a lot of next steps moving forward. It compresses your dynamic range of expression to hard cadence, tension and release, tension and release. In my bones I can understand why Sleater-Kinney called it for a bit after that one. The left-turn would have to be drastic to get out of it – like you’d have to make a freak-folk album or something. Do we want that? Does Sleater? I’m curious to see where Charli goes from here too; for what it’s worth, I do want a Charli freak-folk album.

This was also the first time I worked extensively with another mixer – another 0dBFS Aesthetic vet named Lars Stalfors (too many credits to list). Among a million other lovely qualities, Lars has an exceptional ear for clipping – when to clip, how hard to clip, what to clip with. I didn’t realize how much the Lavry Gold converters, when you clip them a few dB, simply are the sound of commercial American pop music the last decade and a half or so. It’s a character we might not be able to articulate but we just know, not unlike how the frequency response of an iPhone microphone has transformed how we hear the human voice.

In the past I would work so hard not to shred my low-end – bass response is one of the first casualties of clipping – and it was frankly amazing to see Lars find a way to get the shred without losing a certain essential character I find lives below 30hz. There’s just a lot more nuance to be had than I had initially thought.

Technically, streaming technology should have ended the need for records LUFSing in that -5, -6db zone. You’ve heard every old guy on audio internet say some version of this, how music sounds worse than it used to, hypercompression this, ear fatigue that. But I think the Rick Beatos of the world didn’t account for the possibility of 0dBFS not as a market directive but as an actual creative aesthetic. And I don’t think they accounted for people like Lars (or Skrillex, or Dylan Brady, or Charli, etc) making an art of the sound of nowhere else to go.

I don’t want to be so pat as to say music has to be this loud to compete against the clamor of other more distractions, to say nothing of the clamor of humanity. So many albums have been ruined because the band or the label wanted the album louder — and yes, I am talking about Merriwether Post Oblivion. There are plenty of people making music that isn’t loud too, and I swear there is nothing sweeter than the sound of headroom. I don’t think it’s a gender thing, and I don’t think it’s a young people versus old people thing. You could say the last 100 years of music has been about taking music to its breaking point – formally, materially, intellectually. The danger: Music is more fun to talk about than listen to.