"It's almost like, it's often the bad recording quality of things which makes them interesting"
About this Quote
Danielle Dax is pointing at a perversely modern truth: polish can sterilize. In a music culture that increasingly treats “good sound” as a moral virtue, she argues for the opposite kind of fidelity - not to the source, but to the experience of encountering it. “Almost like” and “often” matter here; she’s not romanticizing incompetence, she’s describing a reliable effect. Lo-fi isn’t automatically better, but it can be more alive.
The intent is practical and aesthetic at once. Bad recording quality throws a grainy filter over the material, forcing the listener to participate. When the hiss eats the high end or the tape warbles, you stop consuming sound as a product and start listening for clues: the room, the distance from the mic, the breath before the line. Imperfection becomes narrative. It suggests secrecy, urgency, amateur intimacy - the feeling that you’ve stumbled onto something not fully meant for you, which is a powerful engine of interest.
There’s subtext, too, about control. High production values are often the sound of committees: the mix engineered to offend nobody, the rough edges sanded down into market readiness. Dax, coming out of post-punk and art-pop traditions that prized texture and disruption, is defending the crack in the surface where personality leaks through. “Bad quality” is also a kind of timestamp: a document of tools, budgets, scenes, and constraints. In the era of endless remasters and AI cleanup, she’s reminding us that noise can be meaning - and that sometimes the defect is the doorway.
The intent is practical and aesthetic at once. Bad recording quality throws a grainy filter over the material, forcing the listener to participate. When the hiss eats the high end or the tape warbles, you stop consuming sound as a product and start listening for clues: the room, the distance from the mic, the breath before the line. Imperfection becomes narrative. It suggests secrecy, urgency, amateur intimacy - the feeling that you’ve stumbled onto something not fully meant for you, which is a powerful engine of interest.
There’s subtext, too, about control. High production values are often the sound of committees: the mix engineered to offend nobody, the rough edges sanded down into market readiness. Dax, coming out of post-punk and art-pop traditions that prized texture and disruption, is defending the crack in the surface where personality leaks through. “Bad quality” is also a kind of timestamp: a document of tools, budgets, scenes, and constraints. In the era of endless remasters and AI cleanup, she’s reminding us that noise can be meaning - and that sometimes the defect is the doorway.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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