Steve Albini
Steven Frank Albini was an American musician and audio engineer. He founded and fronted the influential post-hardcore and noise rock bands Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac, and engineered acclaimed albums such as the Pixies' Surfer Rosa, PJ Harvey's Rid of Me, Nirvana's In Utero and Manic Street Preachers' Journal for Plague Lovers.
Albini was born in Pasadena, California, and raised in Missoula, Montana. After discovering the Ramones as a teenager, he immersed himself in punk rock and underground culture. He earned a degree in journalism at Northwestern University, Illinois, and wrote for local zines in Chicago. He formed Big Black in 1981 and recruited Santiago Durango and Dave Riley. Big Black attracted a following, releasing two albums and four EPs. In 1987 he formed Rapeman with David Wm. Sims and Rey Washam, releasing one album and one EP in 1988. He formed Shellac with Bob Weston and Todd Trainer in 1992, with whom he released several albums, including At Action Park and 1000 Hurts ; To All Trains was released ten days after his death.
After Big Black's dissolution, Albini became a sought-after recording engineer, rejecting the term "record producer". He recorded several thousand records, collaborating with acts such as the Breeders, the Jesus Lizard, Page and Plant, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Joanna Newsom, Cheap Trick and Slint. He refused royalties on albums he worked on, operating fee-only. He founded the Chicago recording studio Electrical Audio in 1997, dedicated to recording a live sound at a cheap price.
Noted for his outspoken and blunt opinions, Albini was critical of local punk scenes and the music industry, which he viewed as exploitative of artists. He was an adherent of analog recording, and praised the independence in music created by the Internet. He was also infamous for authoring transgressive art as a reaction to artistic compromise, which he expressed some regret for in his final years. He died of a heart attack in 2024.
Early life
Steven Frank Albini was born in Pasadena, California, to Gina and Frank Addison Albini. His father was a wildfire researcher. He had two siblings. In his youth, Albini's family moved often as a result of their father's profession, before settling in the college town of Missoula, Montana, in 1974. Albini was Italian American, and some of his family are from the Piedmont region of Northern Italy.Albini was introduced to the Ramones by a schoolmate when he was 14 or 15. He bought every Ramones recording available to him and credits his career to their first album. He said, "I was baffled and thrilled by music like the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Pere Ubu, Devo, and all those contemporaneous, inspirational punk bands without wanting to try to mimic them."
At 17, Albini was involved in a severe road accident, being struck by a car while riding his motorcycle, which resulted in a serious leg injury. During his recovery, he taught himself to play his first instrument, the bass guitar. During his teenage years, Albini played in bands including the Montana punk band Just Ducky, the Chicago band Small Irregular Pieces of Aluminum, and another band that record label Touch and Go Records explained "he is paying us not to mention".
After graduating from Hellgate High School, Albini moved to Evanston, Illinois, to attend college at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University where he earned a degree in journalism. He said that he studied painting in college with Ed Paschke, someone he calls a brilliant educator and "one of the only people in college who actually taught me anything".
In the Chicago area, Albini was active as a writer in local zines including Matter, and later Boston's Forced Exposure, covering the then-nascent punk rock scene, and gained a reputation for the iconoclastic nature of his articles. About the same time, he began recording musicians and engineered his first album in 1981. He co-managed Ruthless Records with John Kezdy of the Effigies and Jon Babbin of Criminal IQ Records. According to Albini, he maintained a "straight job" for five years until 1987, working in a photography studio as a photograph retouch artist.
Musician
Career
1981–1987: Big Black
Albini formed Big Black in 1981 while he was a student at Northwestern and recorded their debut EP Lungs, released on Ruthless Records. He played all of the instruments on Lungs except the saxophone, played by his friend John Bohnen. The Bulldozer EP followed on Ruthless and Fever Records.Jeff Pezzati and Santiago Durango, of Chicago band Naked Raygun, and live drummer Pat Byrne joined shortly after, and the band—along with a Roland TR-606 drum machine — released the 1984 EP Racer-X after touring and signing a contract with the Homestead Records business. Pezzati was replaced on bass by Dave Riley, with whom the group recorded their debut full-length album Atomizer. The band also released The Hammer Party while signed to Homestead, which was a compilation of the Lungs and Bulldozer EPs.
Big Black signed to Touch and Go in late 1985/early 1986, and released the EP Headache and the 7-inch single Heartbeat. Later that year they released the live album Sound of Impact on the British label Not/Blast First, a former imprint of Mute Records. In 1987, Big Black released their second and final full-length album Songs About Fucking and the single "He's a Whore / The Model", both on Touch and Go. They disbanded that year after a period of extensive touring. However, Songs About Fucking became a defining record in the decade’s U.S. punk scene. Also, it caught the attention of Robert Plant, who later chose Albini to produce Walking Into Clarksdale, his album with Jimmy Page.
1987–1989: Rapeman
Albini formed Rapeman in 1987, with the name taken from a manga series. The band consisted of Albini on vocals and guitar, Rey Washam on drums and David Wm. Sims on bass. Both Washam and Sims were previously members of Scratch Acid. They broke up after the release of two 7-inch singles, the EP Budd and the album Two Nuns and a Pack Mule. In 2023, Albini said he had become embarrassed by the name.1992–2024: Shellac
Albini formed Shellac in 1992 with Bob Weston and Todd Trainer. They released six studio albums in his lifetime: At Action Park, The Futurist, Terraform, 1000 Hurts, Excellent Italian Greyhound and Dude Incredible. Albini died ten days before the release of their seventh studio album To All Trains.Influences
Albini said that "anybody can play notes. There's no trick. What is a trick and a good one is to make a guitar do things that don't sound like a guitar at all. The point here is stretching the boundaries." He praised guitarists including Andy Gill of Gang of Four, Rowland S. Howard of the Birthday Party, John McKay of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Keith Levene of Public Image Ltd, Steve Diggle and Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks, Ron Asheton of the Stooges, Paul Fox of the Ruts, Greg Ginn of Black Flag, Lyle Preslar of Minor Threat, John McGeoch of Magazine and the Banshees, and Tom Verlaine of Television.Sound engineer
Albini became widely known after recording the 1988 Pixies album Surfer Rosa. According to the Rolling Stone journalist Rob Sheffield, Albini gave the album a "raw room-tone live crunch, especially the heavy drums and slashing guitars". The journalist Michael Azerrad wrote: "The recordings were both very basic and very exacting: Albini used few special effects; got an aggressive, often violent guitar sound; and made sure the rhythm section slammed as one."Albini did not see himself as a record producer, which he defined as someone completely responsible for a recording session. Instead, he described himself as an audio engineer. He left creative decisions to the artist and saw it as his job to satisfy them. Albini felt that putting producers in charge often destroyed records and that the role of the recording engineer was to solve technical problems, not to threaten the artist's creative control, and he never sought album sleeve credit. Instead of "producer", Albini preferred the term "recording engineer". He felt that his involvement in recording was unimportant and sometimes created public relations problems for acts, or could distract from the record. He refused to accept royalties, preferring to charge a fixed fee. At the time of his death, Albini charged $900 a day, less than a quarter of the rate a producer of his experience would typically charge. He would occasionally work unpaid if an act ran out of money, preferring not to leave work unfinished.
Albini was a vocal critic of major labels and artists, but would work with anyone who requested his service regardless of their style or ability. He required no audition, only an expectation that the act would take their work seriously. He said he was willing to work with "anyone who calls on the phone... If someone rings because he wants to make a record, I say yes." In The Vinyl District, Joseph Neff wrote: "When enlisted by the big leagues, Albini took his job just as seriously as when he was assisting on the debut recording from a bunch of aspiring unknowns."
In 2004, Albini estimated that he had engineered 1,500 records. By 2018, his estimate had increased to several thousand. He worked with artists including Nirvana, the Breeders, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai, the Jesus Lizard, Don Caballero, PJ Harvey, the Wedding Present, Joanna Newsom, Superchunk, Low, Dirty Three, Jawbreaker, Neurosis, Cloud Nothings, Bush, Chevelle, Page and Plant, Helmet, Fred Schneider, the Stooges, Nina Nastasia, Cheap Trick, Motorpsycho, Slint, mclusky, Labradford, Veruca Salt, and the Auteurs.