53 Facts About Steve Albini

1.

Steve Albini is an American musician, record producer, audio engineer and music journalist.

2.

Steve Albini is the founder, owner and principal engineer of Electrical Audio, a recording studio complex in Chicago.

3.

In 2018, Albini estimated that he had worked on several thousand albums over his career.

4.

Steve Albini has worked with acts such as Nirvana, Pixies, the Breeders, PJ Harvey, and former Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.

5.

Steve Albini is known for his outspoken views on the music industry, having repeatedly said that it financially exploits artists and homogenizes their sound.

6.

Steve Albini was born in Pasadena, California, to Gina and Frank Addison Steve Albini.

7.

Steve Albini is Italian American and part of his family comes from the Piedmont region of Northern Italy.

8.

Steve Albini was introduced to the Ramones by a schoolmate on a field trip when he was 14 or 15.

9.

Steve Albini felt it was the best music he had ever heard and bought every Ramones recording available to him, and credits his music career to hearing their first album.

10.

Steve Albini said he studied painting in college with Ed Paschke, someone he calls a brilliant educator and "one of the only people in college who actually taught me anything".

11.

Steve Albini co-managed Ruthless Records with John Kezdy of the Effigies and Jon Babbin.

12.

In 1981, Steve Albini formed Big Black while he was a student at NU, and recorded Lungs, the band's debut EP, on Ruthless Records, a label he co-managed with Babbin and Kezdy.

13.

Steve Albini played all of the instruments on Lungs except the saxophone, played by his friend John Bohnen.

14.

The accompanying booklet provides insight into the band's influences; Steve Albini cited bands such as Ramones, The Birthday Party, The Stooges, Suicide, SPK, Minor Threat, Whitehouse, Link Wray, Pere Ubu, Chrome, Rudimentary Peni, The 4-Skins, Throbbing Gristle, Skrewdriver, the Ex, Minimal Man, US Chaos, Gang Green, Tommi Stumpff, Swans and Bad Brains.

15.

Steve Albini added that "it was a flippant choice", calling it unconscionable and indefensible.

16.

Steve Albini formed Shellac in 1992, with bandmates Bob Weston and Todd Trainer.

17.

Since the early 1990s, Steve Albini has been best known as a record producer; however, he dislikes the term and prefers to receive no credit on album sleeves or notes.

18.

In 2004, Steve Albini estimated that he has engineered the recording of 1,500 albums, mostly by underground musicians.

19.

In February 2018, along with the Scottish lo-fi band Spare Snare, Steve Albini presented a one-day Audio Engineers' Workshop at Chem19 Studios in Blantyre, Scotland.

20.

In Steve Albini's opinion, putting producers in charge of recording sessions often destroys records, while the role of the recording engineer is to solve problems in capturing the sound of the musicians, not to threaten the artists' control over their product.

21.

Steve Albini's recordings have been analyzed by writers such as Michael Azerrad, who is a musician.

22.

Steve Albini chose the studio in part due to its isolation, hoping to keep representatives of Nirvana's record label, DGC Records, away.

23.

Steve Albini bought Electrical Audio, his personal recording studio, in 1995.

24.

At Electrical Audio in 2004, Steve Albini earned a daily fee of US$750 for engineering work, and drew a salary of US$24,000 a year.

25.

Steve Albini mentioned his liking for "good guitar", saying "good noise is like orgasm".

26.

Steve Albini praised John McKay for his work on Siouxsie and the Banshees's The Scream, saying "only now people are trying to copy it, and even now nobody understands how that guitar player got all that pointless noise to stick together as songs".

27.

Steve Albini cited Ron Asheton because "he made great squealy death noise feedback".

28.

Steve Albini described John McGeoch's guitar playing as "great choral swells, great scratches and buzzes, [and] great dissonant noise".

29.

Steve Albini admired Tom Verlaine for his ability to "twist almost any conceivable sound out of a guitar".

30.

At a 2004 Middle Tennessee State University presentation, Steve Albini reaffirmed his perspective on major labels, explaining that he was opposed to any form of human exploitation.

31.

In November 2014, Steve Albini delivered the keynote speech at the Face the Music conference in Melbourne, Australia, where he discussed the evolution of the music scene and industry since he started making music in the late 1970s.

32.

Steve Albini described the pre-internet corporate music industry as "a system that ensured waste by rewarding the most profligate spendthrifts in a system specifically engineered to waste the band's money," which aimed to perpetuate its structures and business arrangements while preventing bands from earning a living.

33.

Steve Albini contrasted it with the independent scene, which encouraged resourcefulness and established an alternative network of clubs, promoters, fanzines, DJs and labels, and allowed musicians to make a reasonable income due to the system's greater efficiency.

34.

Steve Albini criticized producers who put vocals in the mix much higher than everything else in order to "sound more like the Beatles".

35.

Steve Albini noted that digital recording had enabled many more people to "do productive work" as audio engineers, while noting that he himself was sticking with analog recording.

36.

Steve Albini was asked about file sharing in June 2014 and he clarified that, while he does not believe that the technological development is the "best thing" for the music industry, he does not identify with the music industry.

37.

Steve Albini considers "the community, the band, the musician" as his peers, and is pleased that musicians can "get their music out to the world at no cost instantly".

38.

Steve Albini argued that the increased availability of recorded music stimulates demand for live music, boosting bands' income.

39.

Steve Albini critiqued Jay Z's subscription-only, lossless audio streaming service Tidal in an April 2015 interview with Vulture.

40.

Steve Albini made the point that the internet has a history "of breaking limitations placed on its content" by making paid-for products freely available.

41.

In 1983, Steve Albini wrote for Matter, a monthly new US music magazine appeared at the time in Chicago.

42.

In 1994, Steve Albini wrote a famous letter to music critic Bill Wyman, which was published in the Chicago Reader, calling Wyman a "music press stooge" for having championed three Chicago-based music acts whom Steve Albini labeled as "frauds": Liz Phair, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Urge Overkill.

43.

Steve Albini has frequently stated his dislike for pop music, and in a 2015 interview told 2SER Sydney that "pop music is for children and idiots".

44.

Steve Albini expressed his loathing for electronic dance music and the entire club scene to techno producer Oscar Powell in 2015, who quoted Albini in a billboard advert for his track "Insomniac" which samples Albini.

45.

Steve Albini has criticized music festivals for their corporatization of popular alternative music.

46.

Steve Albini is featured in the first episode of the 2014 documentary miniseries Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways, "Chicago", in which Steve Albini is shown talking about being a producer, as well as recording the Foo Fighters song "Something from Nothing".

47.

Steve Albini has appeared in a number of documentary films and videos about the making of various albums that he has produced, including Josephine by Magnolia Electric Co.

48.

Steve Albini was a guest on the audio podcast WTF with Marc Maron in 2015.

49.

Steve Albini began a cooking and food blog, titled "Mariobatalivoice: What I made Heather for dinner", in March 2011.

50.

Steve Albini is an avid poker player and ranked in 12th place at the 2013 World Series of Poker Seniors Championship.

51.

Steve Albini won his first WSOP gold bracelet at the $1,500 Seven-Card Stud at 2018 World Series of Poker ; he beat out Jeff Lisandro to win $105,629.

52.

Steve Albini regularly engages in public-speaking appointments for the audio industry.

53.

Steve Albini is married to film director Heather Whinna and they work and live in Chicago.