We were not allowed to call him ‘Producer’; he thought that was a dirty word. He was a recording engineer, a recording engineer. And now he’s dead: Steve Albini. Yesterday, May 7, the American underground hero – also a musician in Big Black and Shellac, among others – died of a heart attack, aged only 61.
Photo Jan Rijk (Gray area 2019)
Steve Albini only really came to the surface when he produced In Utero, the third Nirvana album, in 1993 (because let’s just use that term). A job for which the band had roped him in without the Geffen record company knowing about it. They completed the job in just two weeks, after which a row soon broke out: Geffen found the recordings ‘too rough and too demo-like’ and absolutely not suitable for consolidating the commercial success of Nevermind.
Ultimately, In Utero was slightly ‘corrected’ during the mastering process, the Nirvana members provided some refined remix work and Geffen still gave permission to release it.
However, Albini had already been a household name in underground circles for over ten years. Loved by some, feared by others. The latter mainly because of his cynical attitude towards what he sees as an unreliable and opportunistic music industry, and his gift for expressing things eloquently in the media.
His first band, Big Black (1981-1987), was an influential noise trio in which he was able to express his almost obsessive predilection for the morbid and violent sides of life – which he was confronted with daily in the slums of Chicago – through his lyrics. The music was correspondingly loud, vicious and mechanically driven by a drum machine. Their first full-fledged album Atomizer (1986) remains a classic in the genre to this day and contains a major cult hit with Kerosene.
When Big Black disbanded, Albini founded a new trio with two ex-members of the group Scratch Acid (predecessors of The Jesus Lizard), which he casually named Rapeman, after a Japanese manga comic. Controversy was everywhere: in England their performances were accompanied by fierce protests against the group name, some performances were even canceled and in the British media Albini and public opinion came to blows.
Shortly afterwards, Rapeman disbanded (they left behind one album, Two Nuns And A Pack Mule), after which Albini founded noise trio number three a few years later: Shellac. He remained active until his death: the release of their sixth album To All Trains is scheduled for May 17.
Albini’s career as a producer/technician mainly reads like a long list of names, the best known of which are Nirvana, Pixies (Surfer Rosa), The Breeders (Pod), PJ Harvey (Rid Of Me), Low, Slint, The Jesus Lizard and Bush. He also worked with many hundreds of other acts and also with a handful of Dutch ones: The Ex, Caesar, Cords and Gore.
Albini’s base was his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, where he recorded analogue on principle (how principled is evident from the quote on the cover of the Big Black album Songs About Fucking: ‘The future belongs to the analogue loyalists, fuck digital’). In an essay published in 1993 entitled The Problem With Music, he further explained his views on studio technology, criticizing the excessive use of equalizers and compression, which he said made everything sound like it was for a beer commercial. .
To end on a personal note: at the end of 1999 I spent a few days in Albini’s Electrical Audio studio, for a report on the Amsterdam band Caesar (who then recorded their album Leaving Sparks there with Steve). I particularly remember from that occasion how engaging, sharp, kind and witty Albini was, and how extremely passionate and precise in his work. Furthermore, he turned out to know absolutely everything about… billiards (the Flemish great Raymond Ceulemans was his hero).
Good. The new album by his unsurpassed band Shellac will be released on May 17. That has now, suddenly, become a swan song. Almost unreal.
Atomizer (Remastered) by Big Black
