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Steve Albini, a rock musician and revered studio engineer who performed a singular function within the growth of the sound of other music within the Eighties, ’90s and past — recording acclaimed albums by Nirvana, PJ Harvey and Pixies, together with a whole lot of others — whereas turning into an outspoken critic of the music business, died on Tuesday at his dwelling in Chicago. He was 61.
The trigger was a coronary heart assault, stated Taylor Hales of Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio that Mr. Albini based in 1997.
With a pointy imaginative and prescient for a way a band needs to be recorded — as uncooked as doable — and a good sharper tongue for something he deemed mediocre or compromised, Mr. Albini was a visionary within the studio and one in all rock’s most acerbic wits.
On his personal, he led the bands Big Black and Shellac, each of which honored loud, abrasive guitars and snarling vocals. In these teams, and in just about each undertaking he labored on, Mr. Albini clung to punk’s defiant do-it-yourself ethic with an nearly non secular tenacity.
He additionally lengthy maintained an impish zeal to impress and offend. Big Black’s final, most acclaimed album, from 1987, has a sometimes unprintable title, and he as soon as dismissed Nirvana — the group that later employed him to document the album “In Utero” (1993), on the peak of their fame — as nothing however “R.E.M. with a fuzzbox.”
A withering and prolific critic of the music enterprise’s exploitive extremes, Mr. Albini wrote a extensively quoted 1993 article, “The Problem With Music,” describing in scientific element how naïve bands are lured into major-label offers that, typically, go away them broke and in debt.
In that article, which was revealed in The Baffler, Mr. Albini laid out a hypothetical ledger for a rock group that had signed a $250,000 document deal, however whose work, based on his math, netted the label $710,000 and the producer $90,000 — and simply $4,031.25 for every member.
“The band members have every earned about ⅓ as a lot as they might working at a 7-Eleven,” Mr. Albini wrote, “however they received to journey in a tour bus for a month.”
However, within the Nineties, when his work as a recording engineer — he scoffed at being known as a producer, considering that time period implied management over an artist’s work — was in highest demand, Mr. Albini made no apology for accepting large checks for recording major-label acts.
His recording strategy, for underground bands just like the Jesus Lizard and Slint, captured their muscular energy with readability, and introduced out a drum sound you could possibly really feel in your intestine.
Those bands additionally labored with Mr. Albini at their very own threat; in these days, he was identified for ridiculing the bands he recorded after the actual fact.
“Never have I seen 4 cows extra anxious to be led round by their nostril rings,” he wrote after recording “Surfer Rosa,” the seminal 1988 album by the Boston-based quartet Pixies, which grew to become one of many defining classics of Eighties alt-rock. (Even so, Mr. Albini remained a detailed pal of Kim Deal, the bassist in that band, and recorded her different undertaking, the Breeders.)
But to those that adopted Mr. Albini intently, he was way over a two-dimensional character. He grew to become a champion poker participant — profitable greater than $196,000 on the World Series of Poker in 2022 — and embraced social media, answering questions at nice size and infrequently with eye-opening honesty.
In current years he additionally shocked a lot of his followers and detractors alike by revisiting his often-obnoxious previous persona with a way of contrition.
“A variety of issues I stated and did from an ignorant place of consolation and privilege are clearly terrible and I remorse them,” he wrote on Twitter, the platform now known as X, in 2021.
Steve Albini was born in Pasadena, Calif., on July 22, 1962, and grew up in Missoula, Mont., the place his father, Frank, labored as a wildfire analysis scientist.
He has described his younger life in Montana as unremarkable till, as a youngster, he heard the Ramones’ first album, a blueprint of punk rock that was launched in 1976. Its aggression, simplicity and puerile humorousness opened up a brand new world for him.
“It was the primary time I felt like there was any a part of tradition that represented the irreverence and goofiness and type of mania that my pals and I had been displaying,” Mr. Albini informed The Guardian in an interview final yr.
He enrolled at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., close to Chicago, and started to develop his strategy as a provocateur and a self-reliant musician. As an artwork undertaking, he as soon as stood behind a pane of plexiglass and taunted the viewers to throw no matter they wished on the barrier.
While at Northwestern, he recorded the primary Big Black EP, “Lungs” (1982), nearly fully by himself on a borrowed reel-to-reel tape machine. It had chilly, echoey, artificial rhythms, and it sketched out a darkish, nihilistic worldview in its opening traces: “The solely good policeman is a dead one/The solely good legal guidelines aren’t enforced.”
Big Black quickly grew to become a full band — although it continued to make use of drum machines — and the group’s output got here to outline a very uncooked type of the post-punk vanguard. At its greatest, on songs like “Kerosene” and “Jordan, Minnesota,” the band introduced a nightmarish view of America, populated by arsonists, killers and youngster abusers, set to an impossibly intense, screeching soundtrack.
At the identical time, Mr. Albini made a reputation for himself as a splenetic commentator on music. His written work, revealed in varied fanzines, might look like a type of insult comedy. He dismissed the Replacements’ beloved 1984 album, “Let It Be,” for instance, as “a tragic, pathetic finish to an extended downhill slide.”
In the late Eighties, he reached maybe the peak of his provocation with a brand new band he known as Rapeman; the title, he stated, was borrowed from a Japanese comedian guide, although he by no means denied it was meant to goad the viewers. At some exhibits, the band confronted protests. “The actually annoying factor,” he as soon as stated, “was that almost all of the folks on the picket line had been exactly the type of folks that we might have favored on the gig.”
After making “Surfer Rosa,” which introduced Pixies to broad consideration, Mr. Albini grew to become an in-demand producer for underground acts like Boss Hog, Superchunk and Urge Overkill. He recorded PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me” (1993) with serrated guitars and — unorthodox for a serious album — vocals set notably low within the combine.
He was quickly courted by Nirvana for its follow-up to “Nevermind,” the album that grew to become a worldwide smash and ignited a revolution within the music enterprise. Before agreeing to work with the group, he despatched its three members a letter giving recommendation and laying out his phrases.
“Bang out a document in a few days, with prime quality however minimal ‘manufacturing,’” he wrote, “and no interference from the entrance workplace bulletheads.” He additionally informed them, “I want to be paid like a plumber” — which means that he wished a flat payment and never “factors,” or a share of gross sales, a typical observe amongst prime document producers that Mr. Albini disdained as unethical.
But when the album was accomplished, the band’s document label, DGC, pushed for adjustments, and a number of other of its tracks had been remixed by Scott Litt, who had labored with R.E.M. “They waged a publicity marketing campaign to attempt to disgrace the band into doing the document once more,” Mr. Albini as soon as informed Tape Op, {a magazine} about audio recording.
He stated his fame had been broken by the incident, although it was resuscitated when Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin recruited him for his or her 1998 album, “Walking Into Clarksdale.”
Since then, he had continued to work as an engineer and producer for numerous bands, typically at Electrical Audio, his studio; in a 2018 interview, he estimated that he had recorded “in all probability a pair thousand” albums to that time. Among probably the most acclaimed of them are information by Joanna Newsom, Nina Nastasia, Neurosis and Will Oldham.
His survivors embody his spouse, the filmmaker Heather Whinna, and his mom, Gina. Complete info on survivors was not instantly out there.
When requested by The Guardian final yr how he would love his profession to be seen if he had been to retire then, Mr. Albini answered: “I’m doing it, and that’s what issues to me — the truth that I get to maintain doing it. That’s the entire foundation of it. I used to be doing it yesterday, and I’m gonna do it tomorrow, and I’m gonna keep it up doing it.”
He added, with an expletive, that he didn’t care.
