Steve Albini, indie rock icon as a producer/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 couldn’t survive a heart attack in his studio, Electrical Audio, in Chicago, United States, according to Pitchfork.
Albini’s death comes a week before the release date of To All Trains, Shellac’s first album in a decade. The band had a concert scheduled for Primavera Sound, in Porto, in June, fulfilling the tradition of performing at that festival and at its Barcelona counterpart.
On his resume as a music producer/engineer, classic records such as In Uterowhere Nirvana screamed against the mainstream where they were placed, Pink Surferby the Pixies, and Rid of Meby PJ Harvey.
“Known for his naturalistic recording philosophy and meticulously analogue working methods”, as the Electrical Audio website says, Steve Albini did not see himself as a producer because he said his job consisted of capturing artists in their essence.
“When you produce something you are co-responsible for the record. In the records I make, the band is 100% responsible for these decisions”, he explained to Ípsilon, in 2010, in an interview regarding Shellac’s visit to Portugal.
His crude Midas touch and ethics punk made records shine Slint, BreedersJesus Lizard, Low, Dirty Three, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Superchunkamong many others.
I refused to receive royalties for his work in the studio – he received a fixed amount. In this way, she recorded a countless 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.”
Big Black, who had among their “members” a drum machine (with it they made that strange and influential industrial rock), talked about murders, sexual abuse, misogyny, telling stories from the perspectives of the executioners; Lungs, from 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.
In Shellac he improved his angular way of playing (or attacking) the guitar, in line with the best post-punk rock. He told Ípsilon: “My inspirations were bands like Wire, Gang of Four, Public Image Limited, 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”, he says. “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.”
