Steve Albini, a rock musician and revered audio engineer who performed a singular function within the improvement of the sound of different rock music within the Nineteen Eighties, the ’90s and past — recording acclaimed albums by Nirvana, PJ Harvey, Pixies and a whole bunch of others — whereas turning into an outspoken critic of the music business, died on Tuesday at his residence in Chicago. He was 61.
The trigger was a coronary heart assault, in keeping with Taylor Hales of Electrical Audio, the studio in Chicago that Mr. Albini based in 1997.
With a pointy imaginative and prescient for the way a band must be recorded, and an excellent sharper tongue for something he deemed mediocre or compromised, Mr. Albini was considered one of rock’s most acerbic wits. He was additionally a withering critic of the exploitive extremes of the major-label music enterprise, describing in a widely-quoted 1993 article, “The Downside With Music,” the ways in which naïve bands are lured into main offers with labels that, usually, go away them broke and in debt.
Within the Nineteen Nineties, when his work as a recording engineer — he scoffed at being referred to as a “producer” — was in highest demand, nevertheless, Mr. Albini made no apology for accepting massive checks for recording major-label bands. However these bands did so at their very own danger; in these days Mr. Albini was additionally identified for ridiculing the bands he recorded after the very fact.
“By no means have I seen 4 cows extra anxious to be led round by their nostril rings,” he wrote after recording “Surfer Rosa,” the seminal 1988 album by the Boston-based band Pixies, which turned one the classics of Nineteen Eighties alt-rock. (Even so, Mr. Albini remained an in depth good friend of Kim Deal, the bassist in that band, and recorded her solo mission, the Breeders.)
As a musician, Mr. Albini led the bands Massive Black within the Nineteen Eighties and, since 1992, Shellac, each of which honored loud, uncooked guitars and indignant, screaming vocals. Neither got here to large business success however had been broadly influential, with Mr. Albini seen as a prophet of each aggressive rock and a defiant, do-it-yourself work ethic.
A full obituary will observe.
