STEVE ALBINI 1962-2024
INTIMIDATING, INSPIRING, WISE – SOMETIMES DUMB – STEVE ALBINI, WHO PASSED LAST MONTH, WAS A ONE-OFF. IN BIG BLACK AND SHELLAC HE REDEFINED HOW A BAND COULD SOUND, AND WHAT IT COULD SAY. AND ON THE HUNDREDS OF RECORDS HE ENGINEERED HE ESTABLISHED A NO-FRILLS PHILOSOPHY THAT CLIENTS AND FRIENDS INSIST WILL REMAIN A PARADIGM. “HE HAD ALL THIS KNOWLEDGE, BUT HE WAS NOT LORDING IT OVER YOU,” THEY TELL GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN.
STEVE ALBINI STOPPED BY THE SESSIONS FOR SLINT’S SPIDERLAND, ALTHOUGH HE WASN’T happy about the circumstances.
In 1987, three years before Slint cut their lionised second album in a Chicago studio, Albini had captured the chaotic debut of the four teenage Kentuckians. He was 25, an iconoclastic punk provocateur who was not only reaching the end of his run with his demented industrial-hardcore band, Big Black, but also rapidly developing a reputation as an acerbic fellow who would record your band on the cheap and quick. For a few days that fall, he and the upstarts met at Studiomedia in the Chicago suburb of Evanston and tried to figure out what exactly they were doing.
“We didn’t want a Big Black production, an Albini production. We wanted to experiment, to do any crazy idea,” remembers then-Slint guitarist David Pajo. “And he really loved that, and it was all us encouraging Steve. He came up with these ideas – tape loops, mikes swinging on each side of the singer’s head, putting a contact mike on his throat, setting up secret mikes and recording conversations.”
The madcap process made for wonderfully madcap results on Tweez. Albini loved the record, becoming, as Pajo recalls, Slint’s first true champion, even singing their praises to Big Black’s new label, Touch And Go, who passed. Their dark Kentucky humour dovetailed with his own bilious jokes. When he asked Slint to not name him as producer when they finally released Tweez in July 1989, they obliged: “Engineered by some fuckin’ derd niffer,” the credits read, employing drummer Britt Walford’s neologism for, essentially, someone who enjoys the aroma of shit.
“He was up to try stuff, having a good time in the studio,” Pajo says of their unconventional methods. “It was almost like a show, where he was performing with us. He was thrilled that other people were interested in the same stuff he was.”
But by the time they returned to Chicago to record their second album, Slint knew more about what they wanted – long arcs or quick slashes between grace and power, the core of what would become post-rock. They thought Brian Paulson, who had recorded their Kentucky kin in Bastro, could get those sounds. Albini was not amused. One night when he was working not far away with The Jesus Lizard on 1991’s Goat, he and the band dropped in on Slint and Paulson, presumably to see if they wanted dinner. Slint
