Tuesday marked the passing of Steve Albini, the engineer and record producer responsible for platinum-selling rock albums by Nirvana, the Pixies, and PJ Harvey. At the time, he was 61.
Electrical Audio, Albini’s recording studio in Chicago, verified Albini’s demise on Tuesday, citing a heart attack, via a representative. The representative lacked an additional statement and a roster of survivors at their disposal.
Albini has been a pioneer in experimental and punk rock music since the 1980s. Nirvana chose him to produce (or, as he preferred to call it, “engineer”) their final studio album, “In Utero,” due to his uncompromising, unvarnished aesthetic.
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PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me” and the Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa” evoked a sense of peril and urgency, respectively, and continue to motivate contemporary rock youth with their ferocious vitality and rejection of conventional pop aural norms.
Albini’s Early Years
Raised in Missoula, Montana, Albini inherited his engineer father’s fastidious nature as a result of growing up with a rocket scientist father. With the help of music publications, the astute young Albini, who was fed up with the traditional values of his community, learned about punk and discovered a haven for outcasts.
He became well-known as an artist in the scabrous ensembles Big Black and Shellac, which developed from the fertile post-hardcore underground alongside bands like Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, and the Minutemen, after relocating to Chicago to pursue journalism studies at Northwestern University.
Underground, Albini rose to fame by snarling and sneering through large eyeglasses, but he was also combative, ambitious, and uncorruptible. “What number of boys would like to be spanked by Steve Albini’s guitar?” Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth told the Village Voice in 1988.
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Albini maintained a workmanlike professionalism as a studio producer, Electrical Audio, while concurrently striving for the most vicious and arresting noises conceivable. It was common knowledge that he attended sessions in a jumpsuit reminiscent of a mechanic, an overt declaration of his perception of his position.
He ardently championed the cause of artists. An acclaimed essay titled “The Problem With Music,” which appeared in the Baffler, exposed the inefficiencies of the major-label system. This system was still in a feeding frenzy for young rock artists after Nirvana.
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