Steve Albini, anti-industry legend, indie rock “engineer” has died | Music

Steve Albini, indie rock icon as a producer and sound engineer, from Nirvana to PJ Harvey, and as a musician, in Shellac, Big Black and Rapeman, has died. He was 61 years old and could not survive a heart attack that struck him on Tuesday at his studio, Electrical Audio, in Chicago, United States, reports the Pitchfork.

Albini’s death comes a week before the release of To All Trains, Shellac’s first album in a decade. The band had a concert scheduled for Primavera Sound in Porto, on the 8th of June, fulfilling the tradition, started in 2006, of performing at that festival and its Barcelona counterpart. Primavera Sound was practically the only festival where they performed, as Albini was critical of what he said was the commercial drift of these events. This acidity also marked his view of the large music industry, which he saw as exploiting musicians.

His resume as a producer and sound engineer includes classic albums such as In Utero (1993), where Nirvana shouted against the mainstream into which they had been placed, Pink Surfer (1988), by the Pixies, and Rid of Me (1993), by PJ Harvey. His raw Midas touch and the punk ethic he never abandoned also made albums by Slint, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Breeders, Jesus Lizard, Low, Dirty Three, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Superchunk, and ex-Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, among many others.

In more recent years, his vast and ever-expanding CV has included albums by people as diverse as Electrelane, Gogol Bordello, Nina Nastasia, Neurosis, Trash Talk, Mono, Ty Segall, Sunn O))), Black Midi and Code Orange.

“Known for his naturalistic recording philosophy and meticulously analogue working methods”, as the site of his Electrical Audio, ​Steve Albini didn’t see himself as a producer because he said that his job consisted of capturing artists in their essence. “When you produce something, you are co-responsible for the record. On the records I make, the band is 100% responsible for the decisions”, he explained to Ípsilon, in 2010, in an interview regarding one of Shellac’s visits to Portugal.

In the book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981–1991Michael Azerrad describes Albini’s work in Pink Surfer, of the Pixies: “The recordings were simultaneously very basic and very rigorous: Albini used few special effects; achieved an aggressive, often violent guitar sound; and made sure the rhythm section beat as one.”

This attitude towards sound and his craft in the recording studio articulated well with the critical view of the industry he maintained. I refused to receive royalties for studio work – he earned a fixed amount per day, which varied depending on the size of the band. He produced several multinational albums, but always recorded, at low cost, a large number of artists. undergroundmaintaining the umbilical connection to the scene that gave us the delirious Big Black and Rapeman.

“There is an element of self-awareness” in the desire to operate on the margins of the industry, he recognized in this conversation with Ípsilon. “If you’re a musician and you’re making a record for other people, you can’t help but participate, in one way or another, in the music business, even on a small scale. You should appreciate the language of that world, but you don’t need to accept things in a conventional sense. You must create your own vocabulary within that language.”

A provocateur underground

Steve Albini was born on July 22, 1962 in the Californian Pasadena but grew up in Missoula, a small city in Montana, “in a kind of cultural isolation”. There he discovered the Ramones’ punk rock (an epiphany) and had his first band, the unknown Just Ducky. Only later in Chicago, Illinois, would he complete his “apprenticeship as a musician”. In 1981 he was in Evanston, in the same North American state, immersing himself fully in the punk scene – he did fanzines (he wrote about music in an iconoclastic way, an attitude that lasted until his death) and programs on university radio stations (from which he would be shunned because he wanted to play particularly noisy music first thing in the morning).

He quickly began to gain attention as a musician underground. Big Black, who had among their “members” a drum machine (“Roland” was actually a Roland TR-606, with which they made that strange and influential industrial rock), talked about murders, sexual abuse, misogyny, telling stories from the executioners’ perspectives; Lungs (1982), the first EP, featured gifts such as condoms, money and pieces of paper with blood on them. And the Rapemans? They stole the name from a popular Japanese comic book in which the protagonist spent his time raping women. He would regret using that name.

In Shellac, the holy trinity of guitar, bass and drums (and voices, including Albini’s) founded in 1992, perfected their angular way of playing (or attacking) the six strings, in line with the best post-punk rock. He said in the same interview: “My inspirations were bands like Wire, Gang of Four, Public Image Ltd, Chrome, Pere Ubu… They created a way of playing guitar that made sense to themselves, unique. I didn’t want to emulate these people – although there is a bit of emulation. My guitar playing is rudimentary. I’m not a gifted guitarist, according to a conventional perspective, but I’ve developed my guitar vocabulary, and that satisfies me.”