161–170 of 191 posts
In my mind, Albini holds a plain speaking American slot besides Hunter S. Thompson, for the similarity of these remarks: "I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit." - Steve Albini "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negati…
Hard to overstate Albini's influence, both as a musician and producer. Big Black? No one was doing stuff like that in the mid-80s. His production on PJ Harvey's Rid of Me took her compositions to a new level. He also produced a lot of very fine albums in the 80s and 90s by the Pixies (Surfer Rosa), Nirvana (In Utero) and various albums by The Jesus Lizard, Superchunk, and others. Yes, he was cantankerous. Marched to…
Surfer Rosa was probably the most influential album on my musical life. Albini also has an excellent Nardwuar interview: https://youtu.be/1Vjn8u7HP1o
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> ”you can’t think about it, really, because if you do then you go crazy, stark gibbering spitting and pissing in your pants crazy, so you don’t think about it. but once in a while you do think about it, and there’s all this weird shit going on and you can’t believe it can all really be like this. you think of all the bad, bad things you do to yourself out of some weird need. you go places, bad places, to fulfill some gnawing need, and you do ugly things to yourself and other people not because of the ugliness–well, sometimes because of the ugliness, i guess–but usually because there’s something else there and you’d do it no matter what. there are people who do. no matter what. they fuck their children, for shit’s sake. a whole town. bus drivers, school teachers, cops, storekeepers, housewives, little boys, little girls. very little, they play games with it, like very special hide-and-seek, and very special spin the bottle and very special poker, and every day the little boys have to get up and walk to the bus stop with the daddy who mouth raped them the night before, and they have to get on the bus with the bus driver who rubbed his shit in their hair, and say “yes maam” to the lady who made them lick her the night before, and then they have to go home, you know, where daddy and mommy have been making martinis for the little get together later on, and go hide under the covers where they know they’ll be found anyway and day in and day out for the rest of their motherfucking lives and then they grow up and they have babies and like i said, you don’t think about it because you go crazy."
These are not the words of a pedophile.
In 2009 my band traveled from Nashville to Chicago for the honor of recording with Steve at Electrical Audio. We loved his drum tones and his use of analog tape in a live band setting. He was quirky, brilliant, quiet, and kind of hilarious to work with. He wore disheveled blue coveralls with a lowercase "e" on the back for 5 straight days. They fed us as many lattes we could stomach for all hours of the day, and he d…
Besides working with analog tape, what else in his process was either surprising or a revelation? In the interview with Conan and Dave and Kris that someone linked to earlier ( https://www.earwolf.com/episode/dave-grohl-krist-novoselic-a... ), he really tries to disabuse Conan of the notion that he is wielding "magic" ... he basically says it's Dave setting up a regular set of drums in a room that has good acoustics,…
There was a few tricks, but no magic at all. You more or less summed it up well.
He believed he should capture band's sound as it is heard by the band itself. On the contrary to most modern music production where each instrument is recorded in isolation, sound is transformed multiple times before it even hits "tape" and in later production you try to recreate a feeling of particular place/equipment/"playing live" synthetically. Which often doesn't work that well - it's like taking bands live energy out of equation to add it back in post processing (good luck).
He despised that approach. Claimed the musician knows how he want's to sound and he is in no position to change that vision. He helped to capture the track more like the musician hears it in the recording/rehearsal/concert room.
He cared about capturing well basic tracks and claimed modern production (mastering) is insanely overhyped and meddles with vision that band had. Which is completely true :)
So in the end he cared a lot about choosing right hardware and microphones (had a collection of several hundreds) while always chose the ones which musician liked. Even if he thought they were terrible in that setting. Because that meant a musician feels that it sounds more to what musician himself hears when he plays. But - the further in the production stages the less he interfered. Instead of messing with ProTools plugins for days, he captured what band found natural and kind of simplified the rest.
He developed plenty of techniques ranging from simple planning (at first step he gave bands a notebook and asked to write down what they want to hear), or not to get underfoot (kept opinions more to himself and chose what musician preferred - which he learned the hard way).
On technical side, he chose to capture more of the room sound of the instruments (especially drums). He also used a lot of microphones placed far in the room to help musicians hear themselves more like they usually hear themselves during practice/concert. For instance, he used sound from such far placed mics into monitors (what musician hears). And delayed them slightly, to give the recording drummer a feeling of actual room size/echo (In spite of his ears being isolated form that). Or did a trick of flipping phase of vocalists microphone when he seemed not confident. In hope to find a setting when bone conduction sound is in phase with headphones sound, so that musician has more natural comfort and simply performs better. Apparently this happened sometimes and I can fully related into "not feeling it" while using studio monitors, despite being few feet from an amp.
Those things indeed make it feel much more like a real band playing next to you. Mostly because the band felt tighter and actually played live together, and not track-by-track.
My favorite recordings of my (amateur) bands were always just single microphone placed in the back of the room, capturing more like it really sounded in there. Very satisfying experience and so different from modern recording and bedroom production.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
context?
People kept flagging threads announcing Kobe's death when it happened back in January 2020, claiming they were irrelevant to HN. In the end, I think they all got deleted. In contrast, Terry Jones got his own black bar a few days beforehand. For some reason, he was deemed extremely relevant to HN. I appreciate that keeping HN from devolving too far into angry shitposting requires subjective moderation, but I thought a…
I paused at the name because there was a great scientist and engineer named Frank Albini in the field of wildfire science. Lo and behold Steve Albini was the son of said Frank Albini. I haven't heard of Steve Albini before, and I'm not familiar with his music, but he clearly had an enormous impact. I just thought that it was interesting that both father and son could leave behind such a large legacy in their respecti…
The father of film director David Lynch also worked for the US Forest service in Montana funnily enough: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/pressenterprise/name/do...
I wonder if they ever crossed paths.
Guy was as Chicago as a polish sausage. Contributions to the remembrance thread: Albini on Steely Dan ("the Dan"): https://twitter.com/electricalWSOP/status/162260720209465753... His old cooking blog, where I learned that cutting the casing off a hot italian and smooshing it flat is called a "torpedo" (at least at Paulina Market): https://web.archive.org/web/20180125095923/http://whatimadeh... Later Another: his inte…
Guy was as Chicago as a polish sausage. Contributions to the remembrance thread: Albini on Steely Dan ("the Dan"): https://twitter.com/electricalWSOP/status/162260720209465753... His old cooking blog, where I learned that cutting the casing off a hot italian and smooshing it flat is called a "torpedo" (at least at Paulina Market): https://web.archive.org/web/20180125095923/http://whatimadeh... Later Another: his inte…
What's the context around the Steely Dan comment?
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the context around the Steely Dan comment?
Not liking Steely Dan.
(Thought it may have something to do with a midwest dislike of late 70s west-coast AOR fusion.)