“They say ‘Time waits for no one’; they couldn’t be more wrong. Time is patient like a hunter, waiting for you to come along.” — “Tattoos”
The sad and deflating finality of Steve Albini, musical artist and recording engineer, passing away at the age of 61 last week felt like someone muscling their elbow onto a record running on a turntable, emitting a gnawing audio gash that temporarily silenced the cynical and savvy until cooler heads could reset the record arm. Death tends to be unplanned, but Albini’s came at a particularly odd moment — the band that he had sung and played guitar in for more than three decades, Shellac, had announced in March the release of their first piece of recorded music in a decade. That long-player, To All Trains, comes out today (May 17); its every shriek, thunk, and intoned turn of phrase now weighted with the import of Albini’s demise.
To All Trains is typically, for Shellac, a quick spin, dry and crisp, with countless unplanned-sounding skronks left in the mix. It will surprise no one that you need to turn the stereo up if you want to understand what the band are singing, and even then the result will be way less lyrical epiphany and more ceiling-shaking The-Fall-covering-ZZ-Top stilted guitar boogie. It gets dark and gloomy but at least 40 percent of it sounds good if you dub it on a cassette and blast it in your car with the windows down on a sunny day, especially if you pass by kids on tricycles and nice-looking people crossing the street with their dogs to get to the park. Kind of like Albini existing as a never-ending font of interesting takes in this life, it’s over far too quickly and you realize you didn’t really understand everything that was going on.
If you have heard of Albini, the odds are that his name rings a bell as a record producer of a certain notoriety — especially if your taste in music and culture is Gen X-adjacent. If you know of him as a guitarist/singer, it is likely from having heard Big Black, his proto-industrial shock-rock unit from the ’80s. Since 1997, he owned and operated Electrical Audio studios in Chicago, where he recorded literally thousands of records for superstars and complete nobodies alike, day in, day out. In the margins of his workaday responsibilities, he found time for his band Shellac (comprised of Albini, bassist/vocalist Bob Weston, also a recording engineer of great repute, and drummer Todd Trainer), with the occasional brief tour or the even more occasional record release; I don’t think in his life he would have been offended too much if someone referred to the band as a hobby.
One thing to keep in mind here regarding Albini, Shellac, and his engineering career is that he, if he chose, could have been infinitely more famous, more renowned, more celebrated; especially in the early-to-mid-’90s, when “underground” turned to “indie” and “college rock” turned to “alternative”. When Big Black broke up, they were at the height of their popularity; more importantly, the band’s particular style of guitar-and-drum-machine aggro-assault would, in just a few short years from the band’s split, become one of the defining sounds of the next decade of popular music. Moreover, Albini’s caustic wit and abrasive public persona would have been so easy to plug into the media world of the coming ’90s; Albini could have so easily done what other artists do all the time in order to survive a competitive world: Give the people what they want, when they want it. He had offers to record Depeche Mode; he could have probably signed with any label, come up with a new project that would have blown everyone away when Lollapalooza bowed a few short years later. There is definitely some alternate realities that involve Albini, MTV beach parties, Ministry, firecrackers, Lollapalooza, energy drinks, and nu-metal having been invented several years earlier. Think of him dueting with Snoop Dogg; think of him riding a skateboard across the MTV video awards; think of him feuding with Dylan on 90210 — the variations are endless.
If this all sounds preposterous, it’s because it is; but only because Albini was who he was, and that was that. He didn’t want the money, he didn’t want the fame, and he saw the absurdity in bands allowing their desire to have other people take care of things for them obscure the reality of the business that they were getting themselves into. He let everyone know, in clear terms, in 1993 when he penned “The Problem With Music,” a screed that expounded on some of his lifelong themes and obsessions: Mainly, that the enterprise of being in a band and releasing recorded music should, ideally, be done without the involvement of anyone outside of the band unit. The essay gets its hands dirty with hypothetical figures and names being named, primarily in service to its central thesis that a band that decides to sign on the line that is dotted will almost certainly be left, at the end of the day, with little but debt and indentured servitude to show for their hard work. The final sentence of the screed says it all, in terms of delineating Albini’s perspective: “Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.”
“The Problem With Music” is an odd piece that supposes that the reader has friends in bands that are so successful that major labels are courting them with large advance payments; in my time in the trenches of “local” “music” my exposure to people in this situation was statistical zero. When Albini opines, near the end of the piece, that a hypothetical band run through the hypothetical major label grind would have less money to show than if they’d worked at a 7/11 “but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month,” I can’t have been the only person reading this in the ’90s who thought, deep down, that it still didn’t sound so bad; it beats kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown, as the song goes, right?
“The Problem With Music” is an important work of late twentieth-century music writing, but mostly as a piece of veiled self-criticism. Albini is talking about his friends; Albini is talking about his musical prospects; Albini is hyping himself up for the next phase of his life and career, one based not just on the principles laid out in the piece, but on an honest assessment of his options, and a commonsense approach to work, art, and life. He wanted to live within his means, build things that were realistic, strive for things that could actually happen without catastrophic failure and/or disappointment. Within a few years, he had broken ground on what would become Electrical Audio studios, and he would be several records deep into the discography of Shellac, the band that would occupy the final three decades of his life.
It is, in a way, a hubristic assumption to think that you can be purely a musician and the rest of the world will pay you for the privilege of hearing your music. I think that that’s little bit naive in some cases and grossly overstating your importance in other cases. In any case, it makes it harder for you to do things that you’re comfortable and happy with if you have to use your art as a way of generating your income; you’re inexorably linking your lifestyle and your personal comfort with the decisions that you make for your art. But I see music as something like, say, skiing or painting, something that you can enjoy doing for its own sake — and you should — but very very few people should expect to do it professionally. Very few people should expect to do it as a career. And most of the tension within any artistic endeavor comes from the mistaken presumption that anyone who wants to can be a professional artist — and that’s where a lot of discontent comes from. A lot of people’s dissatisfaction with how they’re treated comes not from fact that they weren’t treated fairly but from the fact that they carry expectations about how they should be treated – and the easiest way to avoid that disappointment is just to maintain a realistic perspective on music, or art, or whatever it is that you do as your creative expression; maintaining a perspective on that allows you to enjoy doing it. — Steve Albini, 2002 interview
So if you are listening to, say, the new Shellac record, you are listening to, ideally, a weighty hunk of vinyl, hearing sound created electrically entirely in the analog domain, recorded in a studio that the band members in part built themselves with their own hands, with guitar and bass sounds emitting from hand-made custom one-off amplifiers. You are hearing guitar and bass played on custom aluminum-neck instruments, with very little in the way of signal augmentation or even effects pedal usage (as far as I can tell, the only pedal that Albini ever used in all his years of playing in Shellac was the Interfax Harmonic Percolator, a ridiculously obscure fuzz box with strange even-order harmonics that produce a uniquely jarring distortion when engaged). The band’s first seven-inch single, from 1993, included an information sheet that not only informed you that there were “no overdubs” and what the lathe used to cut the metal master was, but gave a detailed run-through of every microphone used on the recording, grouped by brand, with further notes on the configurations used. It was a lot of info for a batch of three songs that sounded a bit rushed (as would become almost a running gag with the band, two of the three songs are “_____ Song”, as if they didn’t get around to coming up with a real non-working title for the songs.)
Everything about Albini entailed a certain degree of fetishism; when he turned his back on mainstream fame in the ’90s, he began cultivating a different kind of cultish fame instead, with some interesting rituals that revealed him to be more aesthetically cognizant than he sometimes let on. For example, he maintained a somewhat strict dress code within Electrical Audio whereby all studio employees wore official Electrical Audio jumpsuits, complete with enormous oversized front pockets where one could, say, fill said pocket with pens and pencils like the most stereotypical nerd from an ’80s movie. These jumpsuits were worn over one’s street clothes, so that when you were done with work, you removed the jumpsuit and went on with your evening, post-work. This disrobing was on display any time Shellac played a show; Albini would haul his gear onstage wearing the jumpsuit, then remove it when the work of engineer was done so that he could front his rock band in his non-work attire. Many, many bands over the years have worn uniforms, but pretty much none made such a sartorial display of being their own roadies the way Shellac did. It was theatrical, it was interesting, and oddly endearing. A recent piece with Conan O’Brien last October, where Albini revisited one of his watershed ’90s engineering jobs with a celebrity band, saw him answering serious questions on primetime television in his Electrical Audio jumpsuit, no explanation given or needed.
Even with his passing, it’s remarkable how much difficulty people have in understanding Albini’s angle; for instance, nearly every piece on his death refers to him as a “producer”, even though his entire career was set up in opposition to a world where records needed producing. To him, a musical artist made music, and converting that music to electricity so that it could be contained within recorded sound required the presence of a trained engineer. Beyond that, you were either wasting time or being dishonest. This perspective on recorded sound centers the intent of the artist, who in the absence of a professional becomes the de facto producer. What this meant in terms of Albini recordings was that if you went to his studio, the session would be efficient, with an enviable room sound and a highly attuned ear for the way a voice or an instrument sounded in the room at that moment.
I can attest that numerous bands made the trek to Electrical Audio in Chicago, booked time with Steve Albini, and came back with a reel-to-reel that was ultimately shelved. Albini famously did not involve himself with a recording beyond the actual engineering of the session; once a track was mixed down, he was utterly ignorant as to what would happen next. Sometimes, a band realized they needed a more sympathetic partner in creating the recorded version of their music; in the same way that it took a certain bravery for Albini to create his studio and lay down his rules for doing things his way, so it is that a certain amount of bravery is required of an artist to commit to a recording that may play up a warts-and-all aesthetic. In a sense, a lot of this was due to Albini’s strange musical ear — he just didn’t hear “mistakes” the way many other people did, in the same way that he didn’t really hear “music” the same way that other people did either.
Albini himself famously had a number of musical blind spots: He was on record numerous times declaring to not get or not have time for basic things like “jazz,” or “backing vocals.” Albini saw all recording options as simple tasks of setting the musician in a room and recording the music emitted by the musician; but within that simple task, he saw endless tasks within tasks, such that recording a drum set, or a rock guitar, was a matter of deeply-nested complexity. Listening to Todd Trainer’s powerful thudwork on To All Trains reminds the listener that Albini is one of only a handful of true innovators in the field of recording rock music with drums. Essentially, there are three watershed moments in rock drums in the studio: First, there is Felix Pappalardi mapping Ginger Baker’s kit across the stereo spectrum on Cream’s Disraeli Gears so that, for perhaps the first time, you are listening to a record that sounds like you are right there in the middle of the band. Second, there is Andy John’s ingenious mic technique at Headley Grange with Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album. And third… you have your pick of a variety of Albini’s drum sounds for a variety of projects. Personally, I think that the three-decade relationship he had with Todd Trainer, not just playing in a band with him but recording him, really redefined what rock drums could sound like.
“Something something something, when this is over I’ll leap in my grave like the arms of a lover / If there’s a heaven I hope they’re having fun cuz if there’s a hell I’m gonna know everyone.” — “I Don’t Fear Hell”
Thomas Alva Edison famously helped invent recorded sound; he did not see this invention as useful for passing on musical content, but rather considered that “we could use it in a private manner, to preserve religiously the last words of a dying man, the voice of one who has died, of a distant parent, a lover, a mistress.” As a spiritualist, Edison pondered the thin membrane between life and death, and spent most of his final decade trying to invent a machine to communicate to those in the beyond. “If we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved or manipulated – whichever term you want to use — by our personality, as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something,” he wrote of his quest to see what part of the human experience could be converted to electricity and held in perpetuity.
In the popular culture of the last few generations, Steve Albini has probably been the single greatest proponent of the concept of the sanctity of the capture of sound into electricity. It’s, first and foremost, in the names of the two projects he dedicated the second half of his life to: Electrical Audio, obviously, but even “shellac” refers to the compound that pre-vinyl records were made of. Albini’s distrust of digital, in all storage types and permutations, is in many ways tied to his veneration of the electrical signal, of keeping the path as simple and pure between the sound and the playback. In the end, viewed end-to-end, his endeavors show that he didn’t care for the fame, the notoriety, the money, or any of the other myriad reasons that people get into a career in rock and roll.
Albini was one of the rare people involved in popular music who understood that music is time, time is a measurable unit of precious life, and that the best music is an expression of intention from the artist to the listener, a practice handed down since time immemorial. Music is the voice of a moment that is gone speaking to the living; you hear it in passing while life is having its way with you and it can cut you to your core until you feel the hand of death itself, tickling you somewhere deep, deep within.
REQUIESCAT