LoFi In the Background
If I'm drawing or making something I can easily put on music with words in it. I can throw on a movie or tv show in the background and get to work. When I'm driving I'll have podcasts going without issue.
But if I'm writing...
The words I hear on the TV or in the music will override the words I am trying to hear in my head. I need to hear and see the characters act out the scenes first before I type them out. Sorry to those who can't visually/audibly perceive things in your head I don't know how yall function.
But I can't focus on it if someone else's words are rumbling around, competing for hearing space. Kind of like when you are trying to count and someone starts calling out numbers. So back in the day I would have to just write with no music on, or some sort of no-words techno. Depending on what I was writing the intensity of the music could affect my ability to zone out properly.
So in order to sit and write I'd need to block out distractions with stuff like synthwave, vaporwave, or the first two Florence + The Machine albums because I've listened to those so much I can filter them out. Anyway, aside from Historical Fiction (That I did publish.) and hacker thrillers (That I haven't published.) I needed something else to listen to.
Then during covid an artist friend of mine showed me NFT's. His buddies were doing a launch of project so I moved some of my doge coin to ETH and minted some things. I sold a few and minted some other things here and there for a few months and made a little side money. Just before the bubble popped in 2022 I had a system down to get waitlisted on a project in order to mint and flip.
Basically, if you owned an NFT from one project you could get added to the waitlist to mint for another project. There were about ten of these I did in the fall of that year that I made profit on that way. For some projects you would have to get waitlisted by joining their Discord and winning a spot during a random giveaway. This was all set up to build hype before the project minted and ensure the price would go up after it minted out. Several of these were rug pulls and you had anywhere between 2 hours to 2 months to sell the NFT before it tanked and the devs would get in a fake fight and abandon it.
What does this have to do with LoFi? Hold on, don't start scrolling on your phone. I'm getting there.
So in some circles, the devs would get ahold of a well known artist for their project. That also boosted the project and made it harder to get on the list to mint ensuring the value went up. Others would have an artist do a concept design and then hire someone else to create all the hats and eyes and shirts and stuff for it. This often caused problems later when the guy who was hired to manually draw out all the components of the project gets paid a small one time fee and everyone on the team makes a constant % of the sales volume. I watched this tank a handful of projects when the production artist would go on twitter and let everyone know they didn't get paid properly.
A project called Weather Report was one of these. They had an IP dispute between the developers and the artists involved. But for about a month before the project was set to mint it was one of the hyped up super difficult to get on the list type projects. If you could get on the list and mint one, you were basically guaranteed to profit on the flip. My problem was I no longer held the NFT to get me on the list early so I joined the Discord for it and attempted to win a slot during their daily giveaways. Farming for waitlists in Discords is how I got my Lemon Friends and Wonderpals. (They are worth less than mint cost today.)
So I tried to get on the list by hanging out in the discord. WFH FTW. I was in probably 50 project Discords at that point and most had various channels to hang out in. Typically these were audio channels for gaming or whatever. Weather Report had a music channel run by a bot called Chillbot. You just had to join the channel and music would stream from it. But this one was streaming something I had read about but not actually heard - LoFi Hip Hop.
LoFi had been around a while at this point but I was late to the game on it. I played it all day. I ended up using the Discord channel as a personal radio station for weeks. Long after the mint ended. Long after the project collapsed. Long after I had sold 90% of my jpegs. Before leaving the group itself I added the bot to one of my own personal Discords that I use to store links and ideas.
If a song came on while I was working that I really liked I would check the bot to see what it was called and search for the artist. I found a handful on Bandcamp and now have their cassette tapes. At the time I was letting it run while I was doing front end development but soon I realized that the LoFi music was great for writing as well.
Unlike techno which is great for doing workouts or writing thrillers and car chases, it's not super conductive to writing anything that requires you to take your time and focus. LoFi still has a beat and casual tempo to keep you engaged in what you are doing, but not in a way that makes you feel rushed or stressed. Kinda like, infant nursery rhyme music to put babies to sleep but instead serves as a relaxation base for adults.
Once in a while someone will start talking in a song but it's rare. Older stuff that leans heavier on the hip hop aspect tends to do this. This was also pre AI so the music was actually created by a person. Songs would have overlays of crispy record grooves, intentional slowdowns, and other ambient sounds mixed in. It made you feel like you were some place else and at at time when we had all been stuck at home for months.
The modern stuff made by AI is too clean, too polished. It has no analog crunch. No sun warped cassette feel. I still listen to it when writing to give the characters a bit of background feel while I play them out in my head. I can't stand white noise, it hurts to listen to. My kids have sound machines and stuff and they make me feel like someone pulled a fire alarm. Screaming cricket sounds. Why.
But the casual ambient little piano blips and muted brushed snares in an empty street are my absolute jam. Bonus points if like, a car drives past on wet pavement or spoons hit a ceramic cup in the background. Throw in incandescent bulb sounds and you have something that I can write 100k words to.