So long as there are young people working in shitty, low-paying jobs, there will be snotty garage-punk bands in which they will bitch about them. Fortuitously timed for the current global economic crisis, the past few years have seen a groundswell of crudely rendered rock ’n’ roll emanating from Atlanta (Black Lips), Memphis (Jay Reatard), Chicago (The Smith Westerns), Brooklyn (Vivian Girls) and all points in between; representing Toronto in this global garage-rock network is Telephone Explosion Records, presumably named because many of their lovably lo-fi releases — issued in proudly old-school formats like seven-inch singles and cassettes  — sound like they were actually recorded through an exploding telephone.

Initially founded by Jon S. and Steve S. as a base of operations for their own band of Stoogey swingers, Teen Anger, Telephone Explosion has in the past two years proven itself a reliable repository for bad kids who just can’t get with the sensitive-beardo nature of much contemporary indie-rock, but still like partying too much to turn to the avant-garde. And the label’s highly collectible, limited-run singles have earned it enough break-even leverage to open up the lines of communication to like-minded acts from San Francisco (Ty Segall) to the UK (Black Time). On the eve of Telephone Explosion’s second anniversary party and the recording of Teen Anger’s first full-length album, Jon spoke to EYE WEEKLY about life after lo-fi, and the difference between garage bands and GarageBand.

Telephone Explosion releases span garage-rock, hardcore punk and psychedelia. What do you see as the unifying quality between your bands?
We just look for bands that are doing their own thing. There are a million bands out there doing ’60s-revival stuff, which we’re totally not into — we lean more toward the evil-sounding stuff. We naturally don’t have a taste for the poppy stuff. Maybe that’s our only guideline.

Please defend the cassette as a viable recording medium in the year 2009.
We don’t really put out tapes anymore, but I still like the basic idea that any band can put out a cassette. It’s actually a really great way to capture demos and raw music, because what else are you going to do? You can’t do CD-Rs — that was a very late-’90s thing when everyone was, like, “five dollars for a CD-R!” If you’re a new band that’s only been together for six months, and you just want to record some songs, you’re not going to dump three grand into putting out an LP. Cassettes give bands a chance to let people hear their music outside of MySpace — it’s still a tangible object. And they sound pretty cool for some styles of music — not everything, obviously, but for demos and stuff, it’s super cool.

Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, bands made lo-fi recordings because that’s all they could afford. Now, lo-fi has become a pre-meditated aesthetic that bands try to replicate on computers….
People definitely try for it…. I think there’s lo-fi done good and there’s lo-fi done bad. I’m personally getting pretty sick of what we call “sound-card specials,” where bands are obviously recording into GarageBand [on their laptops] and it’s digitally distorting — which is just gross — and then they put a reverb effect called something like “Reverb Tank Rocker No. 2” up to 10 on everything. It’s cool for a while, but all those bands like [Brooklyn garage-rocker] Blank Dogs, those recordings make me want to tear my face up a little bit. Maybe I’m getting old, but I want mid-fi to become cool. Like, Cramps records and Gun Club records and Wipers records. I don’t consider those to be hi-fi, they’re mid-fi.

Well, in those situations, you had punk bands who finally had enough money to go into a real studio for the first time….
But it wasn’t a good studio! They didn’t have enough money to be there for three weeks; they were probably there for three days. I think that [first] Gun Club record [Fire of Love] sounds amazing. It’s dirty enough that it’s exciting, but it’s clean enough that I can hear everything. Records like that will last — people will be interested in them in 20 years. Whereas some of the stuff that’s coming out now, people in 20 years will be like, “What were these people thinking — this sounds like shit!”