A few years back I heard Motherfucker=Redeemer (Part 1) by Godspeed! You Black Emperor on 3wk.com. I – no doubt like everyone who hears this for the first time – was blown away by the sheer intensity of it. I bought the album it was taken from (Yanqui U.X.O.) and scoured the liner notes for some clue as to the people behind it (can’t do that with a download!). G!YBE turns out to be a relatively-anonymous Canadian collective (the same ones behind the equally-absurdly-monickered Silver Mount Zion – billed on one release as The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band with Choir), and the only name I recognised was the recording engineer, Steve Albini.
Albini was a name on the ’80s punk/indie scene, stirring up controversy with Big Black (by titling their second album Songs About Fucking) and his charmingly-named band Rapeman. More famously, he worked on Nirvana’s In Utero, and a few other ‘big name’ albums. So far so much abrasive guitar-fuelled anger, and a far cry from G!YBE.
Not long after this, I heard My Father My King by the mighty Mogwai (again, on 3wk.com). This is a thunderous 21 minutes of (now, much-imitated but never bettered) intense slow-build to an all-out guitar-fuelled shitstorm that simply has to be heard to be believed. It is a truly astounding piece of music that defies categorization, and remains one of my all-time top ‘tunes’. A cursory glance through the liner notes revealed that it was “recorded by” one Mr. Steve Albini…
Fast-forward three or four years, and an interesting track (Blanket Over The Sun) by an artist I hadn’t heard of called Shannon Wright catches my attention. The music was very subdued, being largely just one woman and her piano, but at the same time was very intense, very brooding. Again, I ordered the CD, flipped through the liner notes, and sure enough, there in the small-print was “…recorded by Steve Albini…”. Astounding!
So I did a bit more research into this Zelig-like character in my ongoing musical education. And the more I’ve unearthed, the more I’ve come to admire him. Albini turns out to be a very principled man, which initially seems to go against the grain of his punk roots, but is probably borne of the punk trust no-one / DIY ethic. Based in Chicago (because it’s a “manufacturing city so it’s easy to get things made”), Albini runs a couple of studios (Electrical Audio) that lean heavily on analog equipment and ‘real’ instruments. He sees himself as a recording engineer as opposed to a ‘producer’ and charges a flat hourly fee for his work, rather than a cut of any subsequent royalties (so ‘commerciality’ is clearly not a factor in his choice of clients or projects). He also has a deep distrust of the music industry, as evidenced by his much-circulated essay/rant “The Problem With Music“, which is refreshing coming from someone who makes their living within the industry!
He also obviously has a high work ethic, having recorded/engineered in excess of 1,000 albums. A cursory check reveals that I have about a dozen of these. These dozen are pretty varied musically, but they all share something I can’t quite put my finger on – maybe it’s the intensity, the emotional clarity, or just the honesty of the performance. I don’t know. But I do know that Albini fails to disappoint. I might not necessarily now go off and invest in the entire Rapeman back-catalogue, but if I see him credited on an album I do buy, I know I’m in for a treat.
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