Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Hard to overstate Albini's influence, both as a musician and producer. Big Black? No one was doing stuff like that in the mid-80s. His production on PJ Harvey's Rid of Me took her compositions to a new level. He also produced a lot of very fine albums in the 80s and 90s by the Pixies (Surfer Rosa), Nirvana (In Utero) and various albums by The Jesus Lizard, Superchunk, and others.

Yes, he was cantankerous. Marched to the beat of his own drum, and didn't give a FF about what other people thought. Loved this quote from Tape Op:

"It seemed like most of the music I liked was coming from San Francisco. I don't remember one fucking thing coming out of L.A. that I cared about. And skateboarding. What did that have to do with punk music? What's next, yo-yo tricks?"

https://tapeop.com/interviews/87/steve-albini-Nirvana-Pixies...

His essays and observations have been discussed here from time to time. Here are a few:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30892081

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37132320

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38935526

Surfer Rosa was probably the most influential album on my musical life.

Albini also has an excellent Nardwuar interview:

https://youtu.be/1Vjn8u7HP1o

The sound and production quality of that specific record was really my golden mean for what an alternative rock record should sound like. I especially loved the way he would record the drums, with that open, uncompressed sound. If you listen to most records that came out in the 1980's the drums sound really dated and super-compressed.

Ever since your wrote this, the intro to River Euphrates has been looping in my mind.

I adore how immune he is to NardWuar's hateful surprises.

I can really recommend Songs About Fucking by Big Black. Especially their dope version of Kraftwerk's Das Model.

In addition, listen to Atomizer.

I heard about him on the Foo Fighters HBO docu-series that came out in I think 2015? The one thing that stuck out to me was that he considered what he did a trade in the sense that artists paid for his time and he did not get royalties.

He was a legend as musician, and as producer, despite destroying PJ Harvey's Rid of Me. What a major fuckup!

Anyway, the way he talked and explained the music business was always legendary.

I didn’t start listening to PJ Harvey until later in her career, but Rid of Me is one of my favorite albums. It had a sort of harshness that put me off at first, but once I got past that it really grew on me, and now that perceived harshness is an inseparable part of the final product for me. I don’t know how much of that to attribute to Albini or what the album might have been with a different producer, but what it did become still stands out strongly in my musical experience.

I love the sound of Rid of Me, with one major exception: the radical volume changes on the title track and Highway 61. I 100% don’t understand what was going on there; it makes it impossible to listen to without riding the volume control and it bears no resemblance to how it was performed live.

A Mogwai album did this to me once, while I was wearing headphones. I’ve never bothered to work through the process where I’d know when and where this would happen so I can listen to them again. I just dropped them.

Despite my phenomenal experience hearing them live in Cambridge MA in the 90s. Loudest band I’ve ever suffered through. But that was live.

I don't think there's a single track on the 4-Track Demos that outdoes its sibling on Rid of Me, which is Harvey's best album.

Search 6+ comments up for somebody with exactly the opposite view of what he did to that track: de gustibus and all that.

Search music producer forums and you will the see the same totally opposing viewpoints as for Napoleon Dynamite. They love it or hate it.

Rid of Me is extremely devisive. Excellent record, and extremely influential. Just think of Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days take on it. But Albini's laissez-faire (non-)production??

>But Albini's laissez-faire (non-)production??

I'd take even more exteme versions of Albini's "non-production" that the overpolished turds served by 99% of bands like RHCP and the like...

Of course indie production isn't for everybody, but there's always The Eagles for the rest... or Coldplay or something

Destroyed it? Major fuckup? In what parallel universe?

So sad to hear of his passing. Atomizer is one of my all time favorite albums. His work is timeless and will carry him on.

Another one for your list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35410662

RIP Steve. What a legend.

Yo-yo tricks could be pretty punk I imagine

Had a yo-yo buff a couple of years ago showing me youtube videos, and he literally said "the yo-yo scene takes it's fashion cues from skateboard culture", so full circle?

He couldn't be more wrong with regards to Skate Punk.

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