The death of the American guitarist and record producer Steve Albini, due to a heart attack at the age of 61 and announced on Wednesday afternoon, was a moment of great collective emotion for thousands and thousands of people around the world who knew the enormous role and influence he had in define the sound and the ethical approach of a certain way of making and understanding alternative music. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Albini played in some much-loved bands, including Shellac and Big Black. But above all, as a record producer – or better yet as a sound engineer, as he preferred to define himself – he put his hands in dozens of records that were fundamental to the history of different genres, but united by a certain idea of what music should be and what it should be. Not it should be.
Albini personally dealt with hundreds of bands over the course of about forty years, and thanks to his personal recording techniques he allowed them all to record records exactly as they wanted and exactly as they sounded live, without interfering or adding anything. He was strongly convinced that that was his role: “I don’t consider it my job to tell you what to play or how to do it” he wrote to Nirvana in the famous letter in which he offered to record what would become In the Uterus (1993). «I like to leave room for accidents and chaos. (…) I prefer to work on records that aspire to something great, such as originality, personality and enthusiasm.”
He didn’t write hit singles, he never went on television. But what made him a legendary character and an inspiration for several generations of musicians and music lovers was his ironclad ethics, anchored to the founding principles of punk philosophy and Do It Yourself and in open hostility with the major music system. He perfected and transmitted a series of practices and standards that are still a reference model in the production of music on independent circuits today.
«I would like to be paid like a plumber» he also wrote in that letter to Nirvana, «I do my job and you pay me what it’s worth». Albini didn’t want any royalties for the records he recorded, that is, he didn’t ask for any percentage on sales: «I think that paying royalties to a producer or a sound engineer is ethically indefensible. The band writes the songs. The band plays music. The band’s fans buy the records. It’s the band that’s responsible if it’s a good record or a bad record. The royalties go to the band.”
The record company would have expected him to ask for around 1-1.5% of the album’s revenues, Albini wrote in the letter to Nirvana. «If we assume three million copies sold, it makes around 400 thousand dollars. Like I’d take that much money. I wouldn’t sleep there at night.” In the Uterus it would go on to sell 15 million copies worldwide.
– Read also: “In Utero” and how Kurt Cobain left
In his Electrical Audio, the recording studio he founded in 1997 in Chicago, the city where he lived (he was born in California in 1962), Albini always maintained extraordinarily low rates, clearly indicated on the site. For himself he asked for 900 dollars a day, a laughable fee for one of the most famous and respected sound engineers of all time, who thus gave the opportunity to many emerging bands to work with the legendary engineer of In the Uterus.
In forty years Albini worked with hundreds of unknown bands but also with some of the most famous in the history of alternative rock, from Slint (with whom he recorded Tweez1989) to the Jesus Lizard (Goat1991), by PJ Harvey (Rid of Me1993) to the Pixies (Surfer Rose1988), by Low (Things We Lost in the Fire2001) at the Breeders (Pod1990), by Fugazi (In on the Kill Taker, 1993) to Neurosis (Times of Grace, 1999), from Mogwai (“My Father, My King”, 2001) to Godspeed You! Black Emperor (Yanqui UXO, 2002), by Sunn O))) (Life Metal2018) to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, 1992). And he also recorded Italian bands such as Uzeda, to whom he was very personally attached, Zu and 24 Grana: he also had Piedmontese origins, he said in an interview.
Technically, what Albini did as a sound engineer was to capture the sound of a band as faithfully as possible, without adding or taking away anything in post-production and trying whenever possible to record the musicians while they played together, positioning dozens of microphones in the room and avoiding overdubs. The way he reproduced the sound of the drums, capturing the natural ambient reverberation and making listening an immersive experience, became a model for any sound engineer of the nineties. As well as the way he made the electric guitars sound – sharp, explosive, rough – and the way in which, on many records, he recorded the vocals without necessarily making them the central element of the mix.
Albini disseminated all these techniques and ideas with great generosity throughout his life, always following the punk philosophy of sharing knowledge, in order to grow the American alternative and independent music scene. Just as he was full of opinions, always peremptory and caustic, on the state of the recording industry and on the threat represented by the majors’ way of acting. In a famous essay published in 1993, entitled The problem of musicexplained how scouts from major record labels convinced emerging bands to sign binding contracts by pretending to serve their interests.
Forced to make records different from how they wanted them, followed by intrusive producers and without technical and engineering skills, the band members ended up getting a few thousand dollars in compensation for a record that would then earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for the label, and dozens for the producer and manager. Effectively remaining indebted to the major label and thus forced to record other albums over which they would have had even less control, and in which their creativity would have been further bent to commercial needs.
His integrity and obstinacy made Albini a respected and loved character like few others in a musical context that had an enormous influence, that of American alternative music of the 1980s and 1990s, which developed into various subgenres such as post-hardcore , noise, math rock, doom metal, industrial. The bands that animated that scene were inspired by the music of the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, and carried out musical research that tended towards the avant-garde, rejecting the taste, conventions and dynamics of mainstream rock. The records and bands that marked that period of American music, from the most famous ones such as Sonic Youth, Fugazi, Swans, Slint and Hüsker Dü, up to the many more obscure and niche ones, still exert an influence today very strong and are the main reference for those who make music with guitars in the most alternative and independent contexts.
Steve Albini was one of the noble fathers of this musical context, someone who was continually cited with affection and esteem by those who had worked together but also by ordinary enthusiasts. With Shellac, whose most famous album is At Action Park of 1994, had been performing for almost twenty years at every edition of Primavera Sound, the famous music festival in Barcelona, in what had become a fixed event for many fans of the band. They were also included in the program of the edition which will take place at the end of the month. It should be released on May 17th To All TrainsShellac’s first album in ten years, which is why it is on the cover of the June issue of the magazine The Wire.
In recent years Albini had brought part of his activism to Twitter, where he assiduously wrote peremptory and acid opinions on the music industry and current events. He had taken strongly progressive positions, admitting and denying certain offensive and disgraceful things said and done in his youth, when he and a generation of “white men” were “convinced that the great battles for equality and inclusiveness had been won, (…) and therefore no one would be harmed by being contrary, provocative, sarcastic and ironic.”
But what represented a kind of literary genre were his anecdotes and his opinions on music, often expressed in epistolary form. In a letter he wrote to a DJ asking if he could sample a Shellac song, which was later printed on a giant billboard, he wrote: “I’m absolutely the wrong audience for this kind of music. I’ve always hated mechanized dance music, the stupid simplicity of it, the clubs they play it in, the people who go to these clubs, the drugs they do, the shit they like to talk about, the clothes they wear, the battles they have fought among themselves. Basically, everything about it, I 100% hate every bit of it.” Nonetheless, he wrote to the DJ, he could do what he wanted with his piece of him: «I’m against what you like, I’m an enemy of where you come from, but I have no problem with what you do».
This kind of categorical and mocking opinions marked his public image, building him a reputation as an asshole, but also made him loved, authoritative and charismatic, not only among lovers of independent rock and punk but more generally for those who recognized themselves in the culture alternative. The site Resident Advisorspecialized in dance music, https://twitter.com/residentadvisor/status/1788263591415562323 what kind of fascination he exerted by writing that “he hated electronic music, and for this reason he was even more loved by a generation of electronic music enthusiasts”.
Neither the music of Big Black, the hardcore band in which he played between 1981 and 1987, nor that of Rapeman (1987-1988, a band whose name – “the rape man” – he publicly regretted years later), nor that of Shellac is available on Spotify, «a terrible company that we don’t want to have anything to do with» he wrote on the Blue Sky social network. However, he was not prejudicially against the ways in which the internet has changed the music industry, and indeed at a certain point, about ten years ago, he was convinced that it could have solved the famous “Music Problem”, making it more democratic and less dependent on will of the majors.
Albini often changed his mind, but never gave up his extremism and his radical visions. “I will forever be the kind of punk who insults Steely Dan,” https://twitter.com/electricalWSOP/status/1622607202094657537 last year on Twitter, referring to one of the bands most distant from his way of conceiving music. His black t-shirts, his guitar supported by a hook at his waist, his thick glasses and his very normal haircut had made him a stylish presence in her uncoolness. Other aspects of his personality, such as his habit of chatting with fans after concerts and his generosity in giving interviews, increased her affection for him.
On the Guardian, journalist Jeremy Gordon recalled a long interview he did with him last year. Before saying goodbye he asked him if he had thought about how his career would be remembered if he retired the following day. «I don’t give a shit. I do, and that’s what matters to me. The fact that I keep doing it. It’s the basis of everything. I did it yesterday, and I will do it tomorrow, and I will continue to do it.”
