The New Yorker:

The producer unwaveringly opposed the commercialization of music. That might seem today like a Gen X relic—or it might seem kind of awesome.

By Amanda Petrusich

This past Tuesday, May 7th, the engineer, producer, and musician Steve Albini died, of a heart attack, at his home in Chicago, where he has run a recording studio, Electrical Audio, since 1997. Albini was sixty-one. It’s almost impossible to quantify his impact on underground music. It’s also almost impossible to quantify, in a more literal way, the precise number of records he worked on, though he once estimated it to be in the thousands. When I was a teen-ager coming of age, in the late nineties, “Steve Albini” was more of an idea than a person, a pair of words—melodious, mysterious—stamped onto every other record I loved or was terrified by. He led two heavy and careening punk-rock bands (Big Black and Shellac), but his discography as a producer and engineer is stunning: Nirvana’s “In Utero,” PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me,” the Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa,” Joanna Newsom’s “Ys,” Palace Music’s “Viva Last Blues.” Albini was sought after for his ability to demand and protect spontaneity in recorded music, a pursuit that sometimes felt at odds with evolving technology, and sometimes felt at odds with the idea of recording itself. Albini never made an album that seemed as though it were happening somewhere else, at some other time. These were not fixed and polished documents. Everything he worked on felt raw, urgent, instantaneous, live; it was always occurring for the first time, just then, just for you.

My sense is that Albini thought of himself as a shepherd, and regarded the work with a corresponding humility. He was not a sentimental guy. He was snide and withering and judgmental, sometimes grossly so. He could be incredibly mean. The line between righteous provocation and poisonous needling is thin, and Albini occasionally misjudged it. (In 1987, he formed a band called Rapeman, which dissolved two years later; he once complained online about an encounter with the rap group Odd Future, repeating a racist word, and later excused it by saying, “I was simply describing their behavior and language.”) Sanctimony and spitefulness can be an acidic combination, and, in 2021, Albini underwent a kind of spiritual reckoning, posting an apology of sorts to Twitter: “A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them,” he wrote. “Life is hard on everybody and there’s no excuse for making it harder. I’ve got the easiest job on earth, I’m a straight white dude, fuck me if I can’t make space for everybody else.” In an excellent and wide-ranging interview with Jeremy Gordon, published in the Guardian last summer, Albini again copped to his mistakes. He knew enough not to ask for forgiveness: “I’m embarrassed by it, and I don’t expect any grace from anybody about that,” he said.

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