DJ Seinfeld - Ruff Hysteria

Pitchfork 69

Armand Jakobsson is a house producer from Sweden who operates under two aliases: DJ Seinfeld and his twin ego Rimbaudian. For just over a year, he’s been going at a clip, sharing dozens of tracks on SoundCloud and pressing the best of them to vinyl for labels like Lobster Theremin and Endotherm. The musical distance between his two projects is almost negligible, yet it’s as DJ Seinfeld that he’s ended up becoming a figurehead for what has been called, improbably, the “lo-fi house” movement.

DJ Seinfeld and Rimbaudian share a penchant for primitive, distorted drums paired with simple, emotive melodies spelled out in reverb-laden vocal and piano samples. This continues on Seinfeld’s recent four-track Ruff Hysteria EP. It’s a straightforward recipe, and one that’s been servicing dancefloors well for years in the hands of artists like Anthony Naples, Omar S, Legowelt, and their acolytes. But look at the other artists leading the “lo-fi scene” and you’ll notice a shared aesthetic. In the UK, Ross From Friends and DJ Boring both dabble in ’90s nostalgia—the latter’s 2016 single “Winona” samples an old TV interview with the actress—and a mood of playful, ironic detachment. Other artists who’ve been called their peers, like Montreal’s Project Pablo and Australia’s Mall Grab, may share an off-the-cuff, unserious presentation, but otherwise have no more in common than they do with any house producer looking to classic styles and analog machines for inspiration. So “lo-fi” is a sub-genre with no edges; the current “scene” has no home turf or artistic manifesto.

Jakobsson’s bright and breezy formula typically melts a silky vocal from Sade or Janet Jackson over saturated drums for a heart-pounding, peak-time rush. The four-track Ruff Hysteria EP, pitched as “too unsavoury for public consumption,” is grittier stuff; on the sleeve, Jerry Seinfeld’s face melts like candle wax over a rictus grin. But the gory humor doesn’t bear out in the music, which tends towards warmth and melody even at its roughest. “Vaping Lyf” bleeds messily, with squashed hi-hats cutting into a one-note melodic squiggle. Like all of Jakobsson’s tracks, it’s structurally linear and totally functional—although with drums this far into the red, all but the best sound systems could turn it to sludge.

“Ruff Hysteria” and “What Kind of Sandwich Is This?” are bleary-eyed nocturnes that recall the hazy shuffle of Moiré, with beefy bass melodies dominating foggy piano drifts and distant vocal samples. The outlier is “Wombat Bounce,” a wonky tribute to vintage rave—wedges of saucer-eyed synths interrupt the breaks and hi-hats melt like they’ve been left out in the sun. Aside from the bottom-heaviness, this is accessible, DJ-friendly material—hardly the stirrings of a new movement. As it happens, Jakobsson creates his analog-fancying sound inside his computer. Nowadays you can recreate the crunch of aTR- 909 with a cracked DAW and a few decent plugins. It’s totally free, and what could be more lo-fi than that?