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Intense in manner and ascetic-looking, Steve Albini represented a sound and an ethos. “I like noise,” he explained. “I like big-ass vicious noise that makes my head spin.”
The record engineer and musician, who has died aged 61, was a key figure in the rise of US alternative rock in the 1980s and 1990s. He released records with his own bands, most significantly Big Black, and produced celebrated albums by Pixies and Nirvana. The noise he unleashed was pointed. “We’re so dilapidated and crushed by our pathetic existence”, he argued, “we need it like a fix.”
Born in 1962, Albini was raised in Montana. His father was a wildfire researcher. Starting metaphoric fires became the son’s speciality. Albini wore teenage feelings of being a social misfit with contemptuous pride. A love of punk rock, triggered by discovery of the Ramones, sharpened his gift for hate.
Chicago’s underground rock scene was an early target for his sharp tongue. Having moved near the city to study journalism at Northwestern University in the early 1980s, he took delinquent pleasure in tearing down bands in the local music press.
Albini’s own band, Big Black, distilled his confrontationalism to its purest form. Founded in 1981, the trio had an impact that outweighed their sales. Big Black’s music was visceral, a monstrous thing of concentrated guitar distortion and drum machine beats that hammered away like the remorseless churn of a Chicago abattoir. Albini played guitar and recited lyrics in a hard-boiled drawl or shrieked them with spittle-flecked obsessiveness.
Like other bands of the time, Big Black pushed loudness to extremes. Unlike other noiseniks, however, the wiry, bespectacled Albini didn’t fortify himself with drink or drugs. The point was to pay unflinching witness to what William Burroughs once described as being on the end of every fork: flesh and death, the grisly nub of the matter.
Albini was fascinated by the worst human behaviours. His songs drew inspiration from snuff movies, hardcore pornography and child abuse. A 1985 single was named after Benito Mussolini. His lyrics were criticised for misogyny, racism and homophobia. He maintained that he was confronting the hypocrisy of a hateful world. Outrage spurred him on, a perverse fuel. In Big Black’s best-known song “Kerosene”, the son of the wildfire specialist recounted a nihilistic tale of small-town boredom and arson: it’s “something to do”.
There was a reprehensible dimension to Albini’s character, for which he recanted as he got older. But it went with a fierce attachment to the idea of inner integrity. “Operate as much as possible apart from the ‘music scene’,” was Big Black’s credo. This precept carried over into Albini’s production work. He refused to take a percentage in the profits of the albums he produced for other acts.
Making his own records gave Albini the expertise to become a recording engineer. He specialised in an unfiltered analogue sound, without digital effects. “Everything had to be full throttle,” the Pixies’ Kim Deal said after he produced the Boston band’s 1988 breakthrough Surfer Rosa. When grunge figureheads Nirvana turned to him for their abrasive 1993 album In Utero, he wrote them a letter outlining what they should do — “bang a record out in a couple of days with high quality but minimal ‘production’ and no interference from the front office bulletheads.”
“Steve is a good recording engineer, but terrible at mixing,” Kurt Cobain said afterwards. Albini wouldn’t have dissented. He preferred to think of himself as an engineer, finding the best way to capture sounds, rather than as a producer manipulating them. When Robert Plant and Jimmy Page hired him for their 1998 album Walking into Clarksdale, the Led Zeppelin grandees did so for his old-fashioned expertise at microphone placement.
Albini’s own music became infrequent after Big Black split up in 1987. That year he formed the appallingly named Rapeman, after a Japanese manga character, for which he later apologised. Marriage to Heather Whinna, whom he met in the 1990s, was credited with erasing his “edgelord” provocations. His longest-lasting band Shellac made a sporadic series of high-quality records, as tensile as Big Black but without the macho brinkmanship.
Their new album was about to be released when Albini died of a heart attack in his Chicago recording studio. He exited life in the same way that he made music, with maximum overload and all the needles on red. The noise lives on.
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