Steve Albini, rock musician and producer, died at age 61 of a heart attack on the night of Tuesday May 7 to Wednesday May 8 in his recording studio, according to his team at Electrical Audio, cited by the specialized site Pitchfork.
Founder of the group Big Black, singer and guitarist of the group Shellac founded in 1992, but also producer, he contributed to the creation of notable works, such as the album In Utero by Nirvana (1993), Surfer Rosa by the Pixies (1988) , Rid of Me by PJ Harvey (1993), or Yangui U. X. O., by Godspeed You (2002). He has also collaborated, among others, with The Breeders, The Jesus Lizard and Mogwai. His band Shellac was due to release their first album in a decade next week, To All Trains, for which he was planning a tour.
“RIP Steve Albini” (Rest in peace), soberly wrote the official Pixies account, publishing a photo of him posing in the studio in front of a mixing console.
Caught up in the Chicago punk scene
Steve Albini rejected the term “producer” and refused to receive royalties for the albums he worked on. He asked to be credited with the words “Recorded by Steve Albini”, a reference that has become legendary on his collaborations.
Steve Albini was born in 1962 in Pasadena, near Los Angeles, California, grew up in Montana and fell in love with the Chicago punk scene while studying journalism at Northwestern University in Illinois. As a teenager, he played in punk bands and wrote in college for a music fanzine called Forced Exposure.
While at university in the early 1980s, he founded the post-punk band Big Black, known for its biting riffs and violent lyrics, as well as using a drum machine in place of a real drummer. This was, already, a controversial innovation at the time, from a man whose career would be marked by risky choices. The song Kerosene, lasting six minutes and taken from the album Atomizer (1986), symbolizes the group’s rabid identity particularly well.
Uncompromising
After leading the short-lived group Rapeman, whose name (The Rapist) and song titles were controversial, in the early 1990s he formed Shellac, a fierce noise rock outfit, always punctuated by percussive guitar sounds and aggressive voices.
In 1997, opened his studio, Electrical Audio, in Chicago. “The recording is the part that matters most to me: I create a document that preserves a part of our culture, the work of the musicians who chose me,” he told the Guardian last year. I take this very seriously. I want music to survive us all. »
Known for his avant-garde productions, his uncompromising irreverence and his acerbic sense of humor, Steve Albini denounced what he considered to be exploitative practices of the music industry, in a 1993 essay called The Problem with Music.
He was also a famous poker player, winning two coveted World Series of Poker tournament bracelets and hundreds of thousands of dollars in winnings.
