Steve Albini, iconoclastic rock musician and engineer, dies at 61 : NPR

Steve Albini in his Electrical Audio studios in Chicago in 2023.

John Semley/WXPN

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John Semley/WXPN

Steve Albini in his Electrical Audio studios in Chicago in 2023.

John Semley/WXPN

Steve Albini, famend for many years as a particular musician and recording engineer, died Tuesday night time of a coronary heart assault. Employees at his Chicago recording studio, Electrical Audio, confirmed information of his demise with NPR. Albini was 61 years outdated.

As a performer, he fronted Shellac and Massive Black, two indie-rock bands that pushed punk and noise previous absurd and abrasive limits. Albini famously didn’t wish to be referred to as a “producer,” however he labored on — by his personal estimate — “a pair thousand” information as a recording engineer, together with classics just like the Pixies‘ Surfer Rosa, Nirvana‘s In Utero and PJ Harvey‘s Rid of Me.

Born July 22, 1962 in Pasadena, Calif., Albini’s household moved round typically earlier than settling in Missoula, Mon. As a teen, he was launched to punk rock. “I used to be baffled and thrilled by music just like the Ramones, The Intercourse Pistols, Pere Ubu, Devo and all these contemporaneous, inspirational punk bands with out eager to attempt to mimic them,” he advised The Quietus in 2017.

After taking part in in lots of early bands, Albini initially began Massive Black in 1981 whereas nonetheless a pupil at Northwestern College, the place he was learning for a level in journalism, ultimately including guitarist Santiago Durango and bassist Jeff Pezzati, each of Chicago punk band Bare Raygun. On information like Atomizer and Songs About F******, Massive Black would notice Albini’s imitable sound: a terse and treble-heavy clang of guitars throttled by grotesque bass strains, with darkly humorous and threatening lyrics screamed. The band’s drum machine, which gave Massive Black’s austere punk an industrial sheen, was at all times credited as “Roland.”

“One of many issues that received me first was simply the guitar taking part in,” Annie Clark advised NPR in 2011. Her band St. Vincent coated Massive Black for a celebration of Michael Azerrad’s e book Our Band Might Be Your Life. “It is simply this lacerating noise, this factor that sort of expresses, for lack of a greater phrase, all your suburban angst and rage. It is sort of bodily painful in a very great approach.”

By 1987, when Massive Black was breaking apart, Albini had already spent years recording “my associates after which my good friend’s associates, after which associates of my good friend’s associates,” as he advised Free Press Houston in 2018. “It was a really small circle of people who I used to be making myself helpful to as a peer, part of the punk scene.” So it wasn’t till the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, launched in early 1988,that Albini started to work exterior his bubble, but he continued to construct a clientele that skewed underground: Urge Overkill, Tar, The Jesus Lizard and Pussy Galore, to call a number of.

Albini’s recording methods themselves won’t have been revolutionary, however his dedication to them might really feel prefer it was. Grounded in that punk ethos, he favored a pure room sound — the texture, the echoes, the atmosphere of a studio all captured by cautious and sometimes creative mic placement. He knew the bounds and expectations of kit, however would experiment to attain the sudden. Mclusky‘s Andy Falkous, who recorded a pair of albums at Electrical Audio within the early 2000s, put it extra plainly: “The wonderful thing about him, and it sounds ridiculous, is the drums sound like drums, bass feels like bass, guitar feels like guitar.” Digital recording was verboten — there are too some ways to over-correct and manipulate a efficiency. To him, solely analog tape gave superior sound high quality and dynamic vary to a recording. Albini gave you the sound of an artist unfiltered.

That unfiltered high quality was precisely what Kurt Cobain was after. He deemed the sound of Nirvana’s Nevermind, a world phenomenon, as too business. “I am embarrassed by it now,” Cobain stated. “It is nearer to a Mötley Crüe file than it’s a punk rock file.” So when Cobain reached out to the particular person listed within the credit of his favourite Pixies album, Albini responded with a four-page letter in late 1992. “I am solely focused on engaged on information that legitimately replicate the band’s personal notion of their music and existence,” he wrote to the band. “If you’ll commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I’ll bust my ass for you.”

After he recorded Nirvana’s In Utero, his profile modified, however whilst rock stars like Bush, Jimmy Web page and Robert Plant courted studio time, Albini at all times picked up the cellphone at any time when an artist wished to e book a session at Electrical Audio, which he based in 1997. “I strive very arduous to not say no,” he advised World Cafe in 2023. “There’s a particularly small listing of circumstances that might trigger me to say no a session. There are some folks which are simply extraordinary creeps that I do not wish to work with and there is some artwork I do not wish to take part in.” Albini additionally by no means accepted royalties for engaged on an album, which he spelled out brilliantly and brutishly in a 1993 essay titled “The Drawback with Music.”

Within the midst of an already busy studio profession, Albini began Shellac in 1992 with fellow recording engineer Bob Weston (bass) and Todd Coach (drums). All three members contributed vocals and continued the caustic aesthetics of Massive Black, however with an elevated sense of rhythm and tune construction. Albums like At Motion Park (1994) and 1000 Hurts (2000) have been meticulously minimalist, rife with riffs that have been taut, tangled and tattered, but by no means gave in to chaos; as a substitute, Shellac dared you to pay attention … and perhaps even chuckle. The band’s sixth studio album, To All Trains, is ready to be launched on Could 17.

Between Massive Black and Shellac, Albini fashioned the short-lived Rapeman. The stunning identify was the purpose. For a lot of his profession onstage and off, Albini was an uncompromising, opinionated and antagonistic determine. His jokes — nevertheless tongue in cheek — might be misogynistic, homophobic and racist. His most provocative lyrics demonstrated discomfiting and excessive energy dynamics in intercourse. Given the period of punk he grew up in, a specific vein that prized provocation as a way to peel again probably the most grueling nature of humankind, maybe this all tracks. However an inner interrogation was overdue.

Within the final decade or so, Albini can be fast to name out problematic habits on-line. And, more and more, he’d flip the mirror on himself. He detailed preliminary intentions for a few of his extra controversial songs in a revealing interview final 12 months with Evelyn Morris. “It’s crucial for an artist to be sincere, to respect the inventive impulse, wherever that will go,” he stated. “Something much less is simply ornament or inconsequential buzzing. Typically the ensuing artwork is repugnant, however I consider the world is healthier for it, that it’s made richer by having these ideas explored.”

However he would not let himself off the hook for any hurt he may need created or perpetuated. In an attractive and susceptible profile in The Guardian, he mirrored on the ugliness of previous sins: “I am unable to defend any of it,” he stated. “It was all coming from a privileged place of somebody who would by no means must undergo any of the hatred that is embodied in any of that language.” Albini did not wish to be excused from any function he performed; he wished to come clean with his faults, and inform anybody who revered him — or used to — why he was mistaken.

In a approach, how Albini performed himself within the studio, onstage and on-line correlates together with his evolution as an individual — a philosophy that might be pragmatic in addition to principled. “I nonetheless see my function as being a service one,” he advised World Cafe in 2023. “Like, I am offering a service to individuals who wish to make information.” And, but, that utility had important worth to a large swath of artists, notably beginning within the 2000s working with Low, Screaming Females, Danielson Famile, Magnolia Electrical Co., Nina Nastasia, Zao, Laura Jane Grace and The Breeders. With Albini, these musicians discovered a sound that was as brutally sincere as the person who helped them shepherd it into being: stark, gorgeous and, in his brightest moments, unusually stunning.