In defence of the badly recorded demo
Everything worth hearing in the last forty years arrived on a tape that sounded terrible. That was never the problem — it was the point.
There is a particular sound a cassette makes when it has been copied one time too many. A softening at the edges, a hiss that sits underneath everything like weather. For roughly thirty years that sound was how most people first heard most music worth hearing.
The fidelity trap
Somewhere around the point that everyone got a decent interface and a laptop, we collectively decided that the demo was a rough draft — a thing to be improved upon, tidied, re-recorded properly once the money arrived.
That is precisely backwards. The demo is not a worse version of the record. It is a different object, and frequently the better one, because it was made before anybody had time to decide what the song was supposed to be.
The take that gets used is almost never the take where everyone played it right. It is the one where somebody played it wrong in an interesting way.
What gets lost
What a proper studio removes, mostly, is evidence. Evidence of the room, of the hour, of the argument that happened immediately before the red light went on. The badly recorded demo keeps all of it, because it has no mechanism for taking any of it out.
We have built an entire archive out of this principle, which is either a coherent editorial position or a convenient excuse for our equipment.