Steve Albini, a revered rock musician and studio engineer who played a singular role in developing the sound of alternative music in the ’80s, ’90s and beyond – recording acclaimed albums by Nirvana, PJ Harvey and Pixies, along with hundreds of others – while becoming an outspoken critic of the music industry, died Tuesday at his home in Chicago. He was 61 years old.
The cause was a heart attack, said Taylor Hales of Electric Audio, the Chicago studio founded by Mr. Albini in 1997.
With a precise vision of how a band should be recorded – as raw as possible – and an even sharper language for anything he deemed mediocre or compromised, Mr. Albini was a visionary in the studio and one of the minds the most acerbic in rock.
Single-handedly he fronted the bands Big Black and Shellac, both of whom worshiped loud, abrasive guitars and snarling vocals. In those bands, and in virtually every project he worked on, Mr. Albini clung to punk’s provocative DIY ethic with an almost religious tenacity.
He also long maintained a mischievous zeal to provoke and offend. Big Black’s most acclaimed final album, from 1987, has a generally unprintable title, and he once rejected Nirvana – the band that later hired him to record the album “In Utero” (1993). , at the height of his fame – like nothing. but “REM with a fuzzbox”.
A sharp and prolific critic of the music industry’s exploitative extremes, Mr. Albini wrote a widely cited 1993 article, “The Problem With Music,” detailing how naive bands are lured into contracts with major labels that , in most cases, left them broke and in debt.
In that article, published in The Baffler, Mr. Albini presented a hypothetical ledger for a rock group that had signed a $250,000 recording contract, but whose work, according to his calculations, earned the label $710,000 and to the producer $90,000 – and only $4,031.25 for each member.
“The band members each made about ⅓ of what they would make working at a 7-Eleven,” Mr. Albini wrote, “but they were able to travel on a tour bus for a month.”
However, in the 1990s, when his work as a sound engineer – he scoffed at being called a producer, believing that the term implied control over an artist’s work – was in high demand, Mr. Albini did not hasn’t apologized for accepting big checks for a major label recording. -acts of labeling.
His recording approach, for underground bands like Jesus Lizard and Slint, captured their muscular power with clarity and brought out a drum sound you could feel in your gut.
These groups also worked with Mr. Albini at their own risk; around this time he was known for ridiculing bands he recorded after the fact.
“I have never seen four cows so eager to be led by their nose rings,” he wrote after recording “Surfer Rosa,” the seminal 1988 album by the Boston-based quartet Pixies, which is became one of the defining classics of 1980s alternative music. -rock. (Even so, Mr. Albini remained close friends with Kim Deal, the bassist of that group, and recorded her other project, The Breeders.)
But to those who followed Mr. Albini closely, he was much more than a two-dimensional character. He became a poker champion winning more than $196,000 at the World Series of Poker in 2022 – and has embraced social media, answering questions at length and often with revealing honesty.
In recent years, he has also surprised many of his supporters and detractors by revisiting his often obnoxious past persona with a sense of contrition.
“Many of the things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly horrible and I regret them,” he said. wrote on Twitterthe platform now called X, in 2021.
Steve Albini was born in Pasadena, California on July 22, 1962, and grew up in Missoula, Montana, where his father, Frank, worked as a wildfire research scientist.
He described his young life in Montana as mundane until, as a teenager, he heard the first album by the Ramones, a model of punk rock released in 1976. Its aggression, simplicity and childish sense of humor appealed to him. opened a new world. him.
“It was the first time I felt like part of the culture represented irreverence, awkwardness and the kind of mania that my friends and I displayed,” Mr. Albini told the Guardian in an interview last year.
He enrolled at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, near Chicago, and began developing his approach as a provocateur and independent musician. As part of an art project, he once stood behind a plexiglass window and encouraged the audience to throw whatever they wanted at the barrier.
At Northwestern, he recorded Big Black’s debut EP, “Lungs” (1982), almost entirely himself on a borrowed reel-to-reel tape recorder. It had cold, synthetic, resonant rhythms, and outlined a dark, nihilistic worldview in its opening lines: “The only good policeman is a dead man/The only good laws are not enforced.” »
Big Black quickly became a band in its own right – although it continued to use drum machines – and the group’s output came to define a particularly raw form of the post-punk avant-garde. At its best, on songs like “Kerosene” and “Jordan, Minnesota,” the band presented a nightmarish vision of America, populated by arsonists, killers and child molesters, to a soundtrack incredibly intense and screaming.
At the same time, Mr. Albini made a name for himself as a splenetic commentator on music. His written work, published in various fanzines, could be compared to a form of insult comedy. He dismissed the Replacements’ beloved 1984 album, “Let It Be,” for example, as “a sad, pathetic end to a long descent.”
In the late 1980s, he reached perhaps the height of his provocation with a new group he called Rapeman; the name, he said, was borrowed from a Japanese comic book, although he never denied that it was intended to goad the public. At some concerts, the band faced protests. “What was really annoying,” he once said, “was that the majority of people on the picket line were precisely the kinds of people we would have liked to have attended the concert. »
After making “Surfer Rosa,” which caught the attention of the Pixies, Mr. Albini became an in-demand producer for underground groups like Boss Hog, Superchunk and Urge Overkill. He recorded PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me” (1993) with jagged guitars and – unorthodox for a major album – vocals particularly low in the mix.
He was quickly courted by Nirvana for the follow-up to “Nevermind”, the album which became a worldwide success and sparked a revolution in the music industry. Before agreeing to work with the group, he sent its three members a letter giving advice and outlining his conditions.
“Release a record in a few days, with high quality but minimal ‘production,’” he wrote, “and no interference from the front office ball heads.” He also told them, “I’d like to be paid like a plumber,” meaning he wanted a flat fee and not “points” or a percentage of sales, a common practice among top record producers which Mr. Albini disdained as unethical. .
But once the album was completed, the band’s label, DGC, pushed for changes, and several of its tracks were remixed by Scott Litt, who had worked with REM. “They ran a publicity campaign to try to shame the band into making the album. again,” Mr. Albini once told Tape Op, an audio recording magazine.
He said his reputation was damaged by the incident, although it was resurrected when Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and Robert Plant recruited him for their 1998 album, “Walking Into Clarksdale.”
Since then, he has continued to work as a sound engineer and producer for countless bands, often at Electrical Audio, his studio; in a 2018 interview, he estimated that he had recorded “probably a few thousand” albums so far. Among the most acclaimed of these are records by Joanna Newsom, Nina Nastasia, Neurosis and Will Oldham.
His survivors include his wife, filmmaker Heather Whinna, and his mother, Gina. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
When asked by the Guardian last year how he would like his career to be viewed if he retired at that time, Mr Albini replied: “I do, and that’s what matters to me – the fact that I can continue to do it. he. That’s the whole basis of it all. I did it yesterday, and I will do it tomorrow, and I will continue to do it.
He added, with an expletive, that he didn’t care.
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News Source : www.nytimes.com
