Steve Albini
Steve Albini
Steven Frank "Steve" Albiniis an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, record producer, audio engineer and music journalist. He was a member of Big Black, Rapeman and Flour, and is a member of Shellac. He is the founder, owner and principal engineer of Electrical Audio, a recording studio complex located in Chicago. In March 2004, Albini said that the number of albums he had worked on was "probably as many as 1500."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionGuitarist
Date of Birth22 July 1962
CityPasadena, CA
CountryUnited States of America
I feel like bands should be growing, living, functioning entities and to crystallize a band into a single album, and for that to be a touchstone - I understand it from a fan's perspective but I also feel like it's a little bit misleading in terms of the way bands actually function.
These letters never have any term of expiration, so the band remain bound by the deal memo until a contract is signed, no matter how long that takes.
Shellac was asked to do a recreation of our first album, but we've always been a band that improvised our sets. That's critical to the way that we function on stage. Whatever the mood takes us on stage can vary from night to night with what you feel like playing.
If I'm working as an engineer for another band, the responsibility for brilliance pretty much rests on their shoulders. I think I'm pretty good, but I'm not good enough to turn a trout into a sausage, or the other way around.
I don't feel like embarrassing Kurt by talking about what a psycho hosebeast his wife is, especially when he knows it already.
Cooking is about presenting flavors and other aspects of food in a way that makes best use of them and makes an engaging, satisfying meal. Taste necessarily comes into it along with technique. Some ingredients require cooking, cleaning or otherwise denaturing them, some are fine as they are.
Know what you're trying to do before you do it. Turning knobs at random isn't enlightening any more than throwing paint at a wall blindfolded will let you paint a nice picture.
I stopped drinking almost immediately after I had ready access to liquor, when I got to college. It almost immediately lost its appeal for me.
Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment
I moved to Chicago in 1980 to go to college
The band cannot sign to another label or even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens.
It always offended me when I was in the studio and the engineer or the assumed producer for the session would start bossing the band around. That always seemed like a horrible insult to me.
I learned to cook from my mom. Most of what I ate growing up was Italian cooking.
Suicide was such a formative band for me, so influential in the development of my taste. They're one of those bands that operated in absolute isolation for so long that they developed a completely unique world view.