STEVE ALBINI

Yesterday I saw the back of the Rapeman Sub-Pop 7", and that reminds me of why I love Albini: flat-tops!

Hahahahaha, the guy hardly touches beer! And he gave up smoking cigarettes after the heart attack.

chances are, albini's engineering some record with loud and abrasive guitars and really well mic'ed drums.
m.

seriously i was a mayo h8r until i discovered the goodness of home-made varieties.

i saw steve smoking after rapeman btw...

OMG, WHERE?!?!?!?!?!?

It is called the problem with music

the problem with music
by steve albini
excerpted from Baffler No. 5
Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke."

And he does, of course.

I. A&R Scouts

Every major label involved in the hunt for new bands now has on staff a high-profile point man, an "A&R" rep who can present a comfortable face to any prospective band. The initials stand for "Artist and Repertoire," because historically, the A&R staff would select artists to record music that they had also selected, out of an available pool of each. This is still the case, though not openly.

These guys are universally young [about the same age as the bands being wooed], and nowadays they always have some obvious underground rock credibility flag they can wave. Lyle Preslar, former guitarist for Minor Threat, is one of them. Terry Tolkin, former NY independent booking agent and assistant manager at Touch and Go is one of them. Al Smith, former soundman at CBGB is one of them. Mike Gitter, former editor of XXX fanzine and contributor to Rip, Kerrang and other lowbrow rags is one of them. Many of the annoying turds who used to staff college radio stations are in their ranks as well.

There are several reasons A&R scouts are always young. The explanation usually copped-to is that the scout will be "hip" to the current musical "scene." A more important reason is that the bands will intuitively trust someone they think is a peer, and who speaks fondly of the same formative rock and roll experiences.

The A&R person is the first person to make contact with the band, and as such is the first person to promise them the moon. Who better to promise them the moon than an idealistic young turk who expects to be calling the shots in a few years, and who has had no previous experience with a big record company. Hell, he's as naive as the band he's duping. When he tells them no one will interfere in their creative process, he probably even believes it.

When he sits down with the band for the first time, over a plate of angel hair pasta, he can tell them with all sincerity that when they sign with company X, they're really signing with him and he's on their side. Remember that great, gig I saw you at in '85? Didn't we have a blast.

By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum. There is a pervasive caricature in popular culture of a portly, middle aged ex-hipster talking a mile-a-minute, using outdated jargon and calling everybody "baby." After meeting "their" A&R guy, the band will say to themselves and everyone else, "He's not like a record company guy at all! He's like one of us." And they will be right. That's one of the reasons he was hired.

These A&R guys are not allowed to write contracts. What they do is present the band with a letter of intent, or "deal memo," which loosely states some terms, and affirms that the band will sign with the label once a contract has been agreed on.

The spookiest thing about this harmless sounding little "memo," is that it is, for all legal purposes, a binding document. That is, once the band sign it, they are under obligation to conclude a deal with the label. If the label presents them with a contract that the band don't want to sign, all the label has to do is wait. There are a hundred other bands willing to sign the exact same contract, so the label is in a position of strength.

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. The band cannot sign to another label or even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens. Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed.

One of my favorite bands was held hostage for the better part of two years by a slick young "He's not like a label guy at all,' A&R rep, on the basis of such a deal memo. He had failed to come through on any of his promises (something he did with similar effect to another well-known band), and so the band wanted out. Another label expressed interest, but when the A&R man was asked to release the band, he said he would need money or points, or possibly both, before he would consider it.

The new label was afraid the price would be too dear, and they said no thanks. On the cusp of making their signature album, an excellent band, humiliated, broke up from the stress and the many months of inactivity.

II. There's This Band

There's this band. They're pretty ordinary, but they're also pretty good, so they've attracted some attention. They're signed to a moderate-sized "independent" label owned by a distribution company, and they have another two albums owed to the label.

They're a little ambitious. They'd like to get signed by a major label so they can have some security—you know, get some good equipment, tour in a proper tour bus—nothing fancy, just a little reward for all the hard work.

To that end, they got a manager. He knows some of the label guys, and he can shop their next project to all the right people. He takes his cut, sure, but it's only 15%, and if he can get them signed then it's money well spent. Anyway, it doesn't cost them any thing if it doesn't work. 15% of nothing isn't much!

One day an A&R scout calls them, says he's "been following them for a while now," and when their manager mentioned them to him, it just "clicked." Would they like to meet with him about the possibility of working out a deal with his label? Wow. Big Break time.

They meet the guy, and y'know what—he's not what they expected from a label guy. He's young and dresses pretty much like the band does. He knows all their favorite bands. He's like one of them. He tells them he wants to go to bat for them, to try to get them everything they want. He says anything is possible with the right attitude. They conclude the evening by taking home a copy of a deal memo they wrote out and signed on the spot.

The A&R guy was full of great ideas, even talked about using a name producer. Butch Vig is out of the question—he wants 100 g's and three points, but they can get Don Fleming for $30,000 plus three points. Even that's a little steep, so maybe they'll go with that guy who used to be in David Letterman's band. He only wants three points. Or they can have just anybody record it [like Warton Tiers, maybe—cost you 5 or 10 grand] and have Andy Wallace remix it for 4 grand a track plus 2 points. It was a lot to think about.

Well, they like this guy and they trust him. Besides, they already signed the deal memo. He must have been serious about wanting them to sign. They break the news to their current label, and the label manager says he wants them to succeed, so they have his blessing. He will need to be compensated, of course, for the remaining albums left on their contract, but he'll work it out with the label himself. Sub Pop made millions from selling off Nirvana, and Twin Tone hasn't done bad either: 50 grand for the Babes and 60 grand for the Poster Children—without having to sell a single additional record. It'll be something modest. The new label doesn't mind, so long as it's recoupable out of royalties.

Well, they get the final contract, and it's not quite what they expected. They figure it's better to be safe than sorry and they turn it over to a lawyer—one who says he's experienced in entertainment law—and he hammers out a few bugs. They're still not sure about it, but the lawyer says he's seen a lot of contracts, and theirs is pretty good. They'll be getting a great royalty: 13% [less a 10% packaging deduction]. Wasn't it Buffalo Tom that were only getting 12% less 10? Whatever.

The old label only wants 50 grand, and no points. Hell, Sub Pop got 3 points when they let Nirvana go. They're signed for four years, with options on each year, for a total of over a million dollars! That's a lot of money in any man's English. The first year's advance alone is $250,000. Just think about it, a quarter-million, just for being in a rock band!

Their manager thinks it's a great deal, especially the large advance. Besides, he knows a publishing company that will take the band on if they get signed, and even give them an advance of 20 grand, so they'll be making that money too. The manager says publishing is pretty mysterious, and nobody really knows where all the money comes from, but the lawyer can look that contract over too. Hell, it's free money.

Their booking agent is excited about the band signing to a major. He says they can maybe average $1,000 or $2,000 a night from now on. That's enough to justify a five week tour, and with tour support, they can use a proper crew, buy some good equipment and even get a tour bus! Buses are pretty expensive, but if you figure in the price of a hotel room for everybody in the band and crew, they're actually about the same cost. Some bands (like Therapy? and Sloan and Stereolab) use buses on their tours even when they're getting paid only a couple hundred bucks a night, and this tour should earn at least a grand or two every night. It'll be worth it. The band will be more comfortable and will play better.

The agent says a band on a major label can get a merchandising company to pay them an advance on t-shirt sales! Ridiculous! There's a gold mine here! The lawyer should look over the merchandising contract, just to be safe.

They get drunk at the signing party. Polaroids are taken and everybody looks thrilled. The label picked them up in a limo.

They decided to go with the producer who used to be in Letterman's band. He had these technicians come in and tune the drums for them and tweak their amps and guitars. He had a guy bring in a slew of expensive old vintage microphones. Boy, were they "warm." He even had a guy come in and check the phase of all the equipment in the control room! Boy, was he professional. He used a bunch of equipment on them and by the end of it, they all agreed that it sounded very "punchy," yet "warm."

All that hard work paid off. With the help of a video, the album went like hotcakes! They sold a quarter million copies!

Here is the math that will explain just how fucked they are:

These figures are representative of amounts that appear in record contracts daily. There's no need to skew the figures to make the scenario look bad, since real-life examples more than abound. Income is underlined, expenses are not.

Advance: $250,000
Manager's cut: $37,500
Legal fees: $10,000
Recording Budget: $150,000
Producer's advance: $50,000
Studio fee: $52,500
Drum, Amp, Mic and Phase "Doctors": $3,000
Recording tape: $8,000
Equipment rental: $5,000
Cartage and Transportation: $5,000
Lodgings while in studio: $10,000
Catering: $3,000
Mastering: $10,000
Tape copies, reference CDs, shipping tapes, misc expenses: $2,000

Video budget: $30,000
Cameras: $8,000
Crew: $5,000
Processing and transfers: $3,000
Offline: $2,000
Online editing: $3,000
Catering: $1,000
Stage and construction: $3,000
Copies, couriers, transportation: $2,000
Director's fee: $3,000

Album Artwork: $5,000
Promotional photo shoot and duplication: $2,000

Band fund: $15,000
New fancy professional drum kit: $5,000
New fancy professional guitars (2): $3,000
New fancy professional guitar amp rigs (2): $4,000
New fancy potato-shaped bass guitar: $1,000
New fancy rack of lights bass amp: $1,000
Rehearsal space rental: $500
Big blowout party for their friends: $500

Tour expense (5 weeks): $50,875
Bus: $25,000
Crew (3): $7,500
Food and per diems: $7,875
Fuel: $3,000
Consumable supplies: $3,500
Wardrobe: $1,000
Promotion: $3,000

Tour gross income: $50,000
Agent s cut: $7,500
Manager's cut: $7,500

Merchandising advance: $20,000
Manager's cut: $3,000
Lawyer's fee: $1,000

Publishing advance: $20,000
Manager's cut: $3,000
Lawyer's fee: $1,000

Record sales: 250,000 @ $12 = $3,000,000 gross retail revenue Royalty (13% of 90% of retail): $351,000
Less advance: $250,000
Producer's points: (3% less $50,000 advance) $40,000
Promotional budget: $25,000
Recoupable buyout from previous label: $50,000
Net royalty: (-$14,000)

Record company income:
Record wholesale price $6.50 x 250,000 = $1,625,000 gross income
Artist Royalties: $351,000
Deficit from royalties: $14,000
Manufacturing, packaging and distribution @ $2.20 per record: $550,000
Gross profit: $710,000

The Balance Sheet: This is how much each player got paid at the end of the game.

Record company: $710,000
Producer: $90,000
Manager: $51,000
Studio: $52,500
Previous label: $50,000
Agent: $7,500
Lawyer: $12,000
Band member net income each: $4,031.25

The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 millon dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month.

The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never "recouped," the band will have no leverage, and will oblige.

The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won't have earned any royalties from their t-shirts yet. Maybe the t-shirt guys have figured out how to count money like record company guys.

Some of your friends are probably already this fucked. http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/problemwithmusic.html Steve Albini is a much sought-after producer and founding member of eighties punk band Big Black. http://www.dangpow.com/~landed/bigblack/ more on Big Black

''Maybe GYBE should try writing songs. I mean, if Mogwai can do it...''

they are not v good at it callum.

um, he's not just a recording engineer sundar. shellac, rapeman and big black were/are good rock bands.

oh... don't forget the record buttons! and those level knobs! oh shit... and the pan knob!

(really tho... all respect due...)
m.

I'm just wondering, I mean, I like some of Albini's stuff as a guitarist, and I certainly own no shortage of Albini-produced/recorded/engineered alb's, but I buy those to hear the band, not the Bean.

I mean, I wouldn't eat burnt fries just because they were made with PEI spuds.

Skronk!

sundar you are needed on those threads about Pop processes and performers.....
It looks like you'd be on the 'Pop Personalities! They're GrrrrrrrrATE!' side of things, since there's an implication from the above that the engineering/musician thing should be just be a backroom work-like function? Or have I just misinterpreted a joke?
(I'm not having a go here - I'm genuinely curious....)

you're kidding, right? his are the dryest drums i can think of.

oh no it's INDIE!

been reading the luke haines book where he speaks fondly about steve albini (and NO ONE ELSE at all ever), which got me thinking about that 2+2 thread where albini answered a bunch of questions about his career. i read all through it a few years back and im sure he spoke about luke haines/auteurs but i can't find it on there, any ilxors remember?

Albini and gf do a lot of work for charity, talk about it, are hampered by US postal service

that is so fucking inspiring

not the post office security crap, albini's secret santa thing

TO THE ONE TRUE SANTA ABOVE, THIS IS MY etc.

that is an awesome thing to do. Silly postal service.

The couple contacted U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., who told them he would look into the post office's policy change. But after talking to postal officials, Davis decided he agreed with the policy change.

"Better to be safe than sorry, that what my momma used to tell us," Davis said. "You can't be too protective."

Well... Yes, you can.

That distinctive metallic chingety-ching guitar sound that Albini gets on 'Kerosene' etc... from now on I will only ever hear that as the sound of badly-mic'ed sleigh bells.

aw that's a real nice thing steve.

er, I thought Albini was a jerk. CONFUSING

i met him once when shellac played my friend's wedding and he was super nice and polite, even talked with their parents and everything.

Line-up for next week's Letters to Santa benefit in Chicago. Second City has about 200 seats, so it's a nice, intimate place to see bands. I saw Shellac there at 3 a.m. a few years ago, for an audience of about 50; saw Tweedy, Robbie Fulks, and Jason Molina as well. The Blisters is Tweedy's kid's band--maybe 12 years old, now.

Again. Again. Again.
24 hours of improvisation and music.
Second City ETC
1608 N Wells St Chicago, IL
All-ages
$15 for entire 24 hours
Tickets available at the door only.
Tuesday December 15 6pm through Wednesday December 16 6pm
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=146133034046&ref=ts
Auction items, raffle prizes, music and funny

Confirmed Special Guests
7pm Jeff Tweedy
10pm Robbie Fulks
Midnight Asssscat with Horatio Sanz & Matt Walsh with Chicago Guests
3am Flash Mob Marching Band
6am Bonnie Prince Billy
Noon Nina Nastasia
2pm The Mountain Goats
4:30pm The Blisters

haha, Shellac plays weddings? wow. but yeah, it seems like Albini likes (or liked) being provocative, but most people who work with him seem to love the guy.

yeah basically my friends are super fans and his wife to be just emailed bob weston i think and ended up chatting with them about it...they basically had to pay enough to cover the opening touring band's room & board (had a band from NZ on the shellac tour) but anyway it worked out with their schedule and it was really fun, my old band got to open...

they played most of "la grange" and about 30 second of "shout at the devil" wish i recorded that set

http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/9109/stevealbini02dx3.jpg

Steve Albini's cookery blog..

http://mariobatalivoice.blogspot.com/

"I have also successfully cooked for our cats."

classic!

I like how if you go back to the first few entries it reads like the blandest most uninspired cooking blog ever - think there might have been rather a lot of feet-finding here

his 'great mate' Luke Haines just started one as well, can't quite figure out how much his recipes are trolling (unless you're Paul Weller)

Now that is worth bookmarking!

lol yeah I subscribed to that one

he sure does make a lot of pasta

Love how all of Albini's hobbies - online poker! cooking blog! - reveal him to be the nice, normal guy his reputation doesn't always convey. Though I think he's mellowed a lot as he creeps toward 50.

Now, an Ian MacKaye cooking blog, that would be a surprise.

I remember when Fugazi did a recipe column for Maximum Rock'n'Roll and it was for fucking oatmeal, no joke.

The Haines food blog is fucking great.

Luke Haines?

x-post

Ian M.'s been a vegetarian for awhile and a parent for a few years so maybe he could do some interesting blog posts

in some recent henry rollins interview (on wtf i think) he was talking about how he basically hates the whole 'eating' thing and mostly eats oatmeal.

The only time I have ever followed a musician's recipe was when I made spicy bean burgers from Richard Youngs' vegan cookbook. They were horrible btw and my family hated them.

Please tell me that somewhere in the comments on the Albini blog, Michael Gerard has complained about the quality of his hamburgers.

Man, I get this all part of Albini's cranky old man persona, but I call bullshit on this (from his Gothamist interview):

I’m an exceptionally lucky man in that I’ve never heard a note of Lady Gaga’s music and you could sit her on my lap and I wouldn’t recognize her. I know that she’s a cultural force at the moment but I’m quite satisfied in having dodged that one. It’s like a truck drove by spraying shit from a nozzle over the entire neighborhood and I happened to be under an awning. You know?

I bet he has a Lady Gaga poster above his bed.

Did you know he was a poker ace?

Yeah; he can get dangerously close to "the guy at parties who loudly tells people 'I don't even OWN a TV'" at times.

His whole "You know what I can authoritatively declare sucks? This thing I've never heard/experienced!" schtick is getting old(er).

Someone needs to tell him that shouting this kind of thing hasn't earned anyone "cred" since at least 1995.

love this guy--he's prolly not worried about his cred either at this point. he's having a laugh you know?

Too bad it's not a funny laugh.

i'm going to drive by his house and play lady gaga really loud.

lol this is a quality zing imo

I remember when I saw Shellac last year play at Bell House that it was pretty striking to see a band live that was playing really direct, aggressive music that wasn’t trying to be pretty or poppy. It just seems from my perspective that there aren’t many bands that are making dark or ugly music anymore. Well, it sort of depends on the idiom really. There’s a lot of sort of grungy metal and punk stuff where every single band is trying to make aggressive music.
Yeah, I guess I’m referring more to the... Bands that play at the clubs you go to.

not a zing imo

also Albini is awesome

He'll go through what the rest of us went through a few summers ago: "Bad Romance" will be playing in the background somewhere, and someone will tell him that it's Lady Gaga, and he'll have the thought "Oh, that's Lady Gaga? I hear that at the supermarket, etc."

getting mad at Steve Albini for being cranky about pop music seems like an eternally losing bet, like getting mad at Henry Rollins for going to the gym

I'm not mad at him, I accept it as part of his "thing", but I don't buy this particular one at all.

man if you don't get some lols from that Gothamist interview then you are crankier than ol' Steve A, that shit is full of guffaws

My brother actually played in a pretty well known ska band and he claimed that ska is more popular now than it ever has been. Oh, which band was it?
They were called Mephiskapheles. I was going to say please let it be Mephiskapheles. Was he horn?

okay lol

I'm not mad at him, I accept it as part of his "thing", but I don't buy this particular one at all.

really? you seem kind of furious at him, man

no, I'm more lol @ him

this is all better if you imagine he was wearing a Hello Kitty cardigan during the interview

So this is an interview for Gothamist, which is a New York-centric website.
I believe you.
Do you have any New York stories that you’d care to share?
No.

lol

seriously, as a guy who thankfully does not have to interview as many musicians as much as he used to, i appreciate anyone who provides good copy, even if it's at the interviewers expense. at least if you ask albini an asinine or boring question you're going to get a zing out of it.

I wouldn't recognize Gaga either, but then I don't recognize ILXors I know unless I see em at least once every 6 weeks.

saw Shellac for the first time last week and was genuinely surprised at how good they were. stage banter itself worth the price of admission.

yeah shellac rules, i've seen then...god...over dozen times at least

also Albini is awesome

― great zing-balls (crüt), Monday, October 3, 2011 1:49 PM (9 hours ago) Bookmark

pity most of their albums since AAP are patchy as hell

really? i like terraform the best by far

greyhound was pretty patchy though

how does he know shes shit if he hasnt heard a note?

dunno

though sometimes i feel pretty weird cuz i could say the same thing about a lot of big hits

at home i listen to records and at work i listen to spotify and my ipod and in the car i listen to college radio and sports talk and the local classic rock station, so i haven't heard, for example, "party rock anthem" by lmao

That I can understand, but I honestly feel like its really difficult to be that unaware of Gaga in 2011 - she's a special case. I mean, there are thinkpieces all over the fucking place about her, she's in several different ad campaigns, her songs pop up everywhere, she's the closest things to a cultural phenomenon we've got right now. And, given Albini's past remarks, its hard not to imagine him saying that to get a rise out of people.

Hard not to imagine it working, as we've proved.

Sure, doesn't make it less of a pose if true though. Don't get me wrong, I love Shellac and I love a lot of what Albini's done, just rmde at his schtick at this point.

I actually do buy his ignorance, and if it weren't for a supermarket situation as mentioned above, I'd have no idea what she sounds like. Still am only aware of one bit from one of her songs. It's really easy these days to not listen to the radio, watch regular tv, etc. without being a hermit. Spotify+Netflix+Pandora etc. as noted above.

how does he know shes shit if he hasnt heard a note?

do you really have to ask?

I only know one Lady Gaga song and only know what she looks like because of the video for that song...Telephone?

there are thinkpieces all over the fucking place about her

i'm perfectly happy for albini to keep churning out these uh, albini-isms. dude seems destined never to mellow, and i'd argue that he simultaneously serves as a luminary for the cantankerous inner cynic in all of us and a bit of a reminder to keep our pessimism in check, so as to not take things quite as far as he has. in other words, the consistency of his message has been kind of comforting over the years and a rather noble counterpoint to the voice of those who take most everything at face value.

He should get a free pass forevermore for his Santa escapades with his wife.

OMG what are his Santa escapades? I thought I was pretty filled in on Albini's exploits!

he did the nicest, most awesome thing for my friends who are huge shellac fans and was super gracious and nice and polite that I see him alot differently

Oh I have no doubt that he's a really nice dude, heard that a lot actually.

he gave our chalet their beer stash at ATP one year, claiming they were "too old" to want to drink it. They were in the chalet next door to us.

I once saw him silenced by a heckler, at the Garage in London.

He was introducing - I think - My Black Ass with a long spiel about Satchel Paige being the greatest ball player white people never saw play. Someone shouted: "What about Geoffrey Bloody Boycott, eh?"

Albini was baffled, started laughing and told the heckler: "Sir, you have the advantage."

OMG what are his Santa escapades?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/dec/09/steve-albini-chicago-secret-santa

http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/the-problem-solver/2010/01/letters-to-santa-update.html

That's awesome.

http://twitpic.com/gnu7p

I guess my core idea of "Albini-isms" is colored by all the homophobic shit he said in interviews in the '80s, y'know, when that was still cool.

i was going to say "honestly more concerned about 40-something musicians determined to give lady gaga a fair shake" but then Morbz had to go and mention albini's less charming pigfuckery

I also don't think you get to play Chief Justice of Music when you produce Bush etc.

he did the nicest, most awesome thing for my friends who are huge shellac fans and was super gracious and nice and polite that I see him alot differently

― the 500 gats of bartholomew thuggins (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, October 4, 2011 10:00 AM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark

details on this?

apparently he took the money from bush and gave it to poor mathcore bands or something

See I didn't become aware of Albini until the 90s, so I missed out on all those *charming* 80s years.

xpost cad:

not really my story to tell i guess? maybe i shouldn't have brought it up, but either way left a lasting impression

know ppl that recorded w/him as well and also their impressions seemed at odds w/his public image as an asshole

I also don't think you get to play Chief Justice of Music when you produce Bush etc.

― incredibly middlebrow (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 4 October 2011 14:57 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

how about 'expressing an opinion in response to a question asked to you by someone conducting a pre-arranged interview', do you get to do that

what is it with people's apparent inability to distinguish between the above and someone calling a press conference to announce their views to the assembled media

ppl should turn down interviews when they have nothing to say (99% of everybody)

surely what they have to say is dependent on the questions that they get asked, unless you're suggesting that they be vetted prior to the interview

*grabs coat, trots to door, SLAM*

kinda amazed people are still trotting out this "I can't BELIEVE you've never been heard/seen [insert pop star]" canard

been

Normally I'd otm you Shakey Mo, but not in this case. It seems like Albini spends a fair amount of time on the internet, which makes it really hard for me to believe he's never encountered Gaga. Considering every fucking site on the net, up to the most highminded highbrow sites, has a thinkpiece on her. I just don't buy it here.

jon you understand that most thinkpieces don't have mp3s attached to them???

and albini doesn't strike me as the kind of guy to read think pieces

He said he also wouldn't know what she looked like which, tbh, is the part I have trouble with. I find it easier to believe he's never knowingly heard her.

That does seem sorta implausible (and not because their are thinkpieces about her, but because there are a lot of pics of her about.)

we should go to his website and FLOOD his message board with pictures of lady gaga! that'll show him!

jon - ultimately who cares?

I also don't think you get to play Chief Justice of Music when you produce Bush etc.

― incredibly middlebrow (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, October 4, 2011 10:57 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Steve Albini is fairly shameless about being a "if there's money, I'll do it" kind of producer wrt bands of which he's not necessarily fond.

He's not a producer, he's an engineer.

Come on, that could be said about any of the minutia discussed ad infintum on this entire board. There's about 1000 other examples all over ILM of "OMG artist X said THIS crazy thing about pop culture", I'm not sure why this one is suddenly ranking. I wasn't intending to turn this into some 2-day discussion or w/e, I just thought it came across as a smug, bullshit pose.

(xxpost)

"rankling"

kind of want Gaga to cover "Kerosene" now

or maybe "Things To Do Today"

From the Sunday matinee Shellac Q and A:

Kim Deal or Kim Gordon?

For what purpose?

Ah, the LOLs we had.

gaaaaaaggaagaaaagaaagagaaagagagagagagaaaaa NOTHING TO DO BUT SIT AROUND AT HOME SIT AROUND AT HOME AND STARE AT THE WALLS STARE AT EACH OTHER AND WAIT TILL WE DIE STARE AT EACH OTHER AND WAIT TILL WE DIE gaaaa gaaa gaa ga ga ra ra ra il y kerosene

I support this ^

i mean, i suspect he's kinda bending the truth about not knowing what she looks like but who knows? i bet my mom doesn't know what she looks like, i bet other ppl i know don't know what she looks like

it's not that hard to not know things

i believe that he's not heard her

tbh the first time i heard "poker face" was some youtube of chris daughtry from american idol covering it

then i was like damn daughtry's giving gaga props, time for a thinkpiece, shit just got real

then i was like damn daughtry's giving gaga props, time for a thinkpiece, shit just got real

IRL LOL

Steve Albini is fairly shameless about being a "if there's money, I'll do it" kind of producer wrt bands of which he's not necessarily fond.

this isn't his position - his position is "I am an engineer; anybody can hire me to do what I do, I'm like a mechanic." he charges the same, whoever he's recording, and he doesn't care what kind of music he's recording, he doesn't consider engineering a visionary art like somebody like Lanois does.

my mechanic only works on cars he respects on an aesthetic level

he charges the same, whoever he's recording

I think that's only at his own studio.

I charge whatever the hell I feel like at the moment, based on the client's ability to pay, how nice the band members are, the size and directly proportional gullibility of the record company, and whether or not they got the rock.

must confess i also haven't heard a note of actual gaga or recognize what gaga looks like
but this is what i imagine her to look like:
http://i.imgur.com/KWAtd.jpg
(that's a chicken drumstick on her head)

so... you think Lady Gaga looks like a character from Squidbillies?

is it that far off?

not really, no

this is what i imagine bonnie prince billy looks like:
http://i.imgur.com/n6Rbf.png

His dad is a french tickler?

xpost I bet Lanois is a lot more hands off a producer than many people peg him for. Lots of his stuff (Peter Gabriel aside) is just people together in a room. Even a lot of his fabled sound is mostly just small old school amps cranked up, the odd delay pedal aside.

Anyway. Albini I imagine will pretty much do anything anyone asks him to in the studio. I doubt many people come and ask him to do stuff with drum machines, synths and sequences, though. He also has a pretty well established sliding scale, in that the more money a label has, the more he charges. Punk bands from podunk don't pay much at all. In many other regards, his infamous persona and reputation is pretty overblown. In my limited experience, he's a nice, hard-working guy.And like Ian MacKaye, he'll pick up the phone when you call.

braggin'

He himself had a pretty good drum machine band once upon a time iirc.

today i was listening to that Jarvis Cocker record he did, which is great and has a bit of synths and loops and stuff

tbf the guy seemed insufferable with all those dick-waving Forced Exposure articles

on ILM of all places people should understand that it's possible for someone to be really snarky and aggressive when writing about music online or being interviewed about music and yet a perfectly nice guy irl when dealing with people face to face about regular stuff

they meet!
http://i.imgur.com/kB7ZU.png

http://artforum.com/uploads/upload.000/id09589/article00_wide.jpg

Oh, wait, that should go in the "funny famous people together photos" ILE thread.

Lady Gaga is the guy in the black jacket, right?

this isn't his position - his position is "I am an engineer; anybody can hire me to do what I do, I'm like a mechanic." he charges the same, whoever he's recording, and he doesn't care what kind of music he's recording, he doesn't consider engineering a visionary art like somebody like Lanois does.

― pathos of the unwarranted encore (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Tuesday, October 4, 2011 4:50 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I guess this is what I was trying to say, I just botched it.

there are thinkpieces all over the fucking place about her

I guess I don't read thinkpieces, or the right thinkpieces? I read The New Yorker, The Nation, Artforum, sometimes Film Comment. I guess maybe the NYer probably ran something on her but if they did, I didn't read it. I don't really listen to radio and I don't have tv. Maybe this is why I haven't really heard or seen Lady Gaga much. maybe Stephen A is the same.

Also I teach teenage girls and they don't like Lady Gaga. They like Nicki Minaj, like, A LOT. So I know her. I've heard her music, but only played on pink cellphones

on ILM of all places people should understand that it's possible for someone to be really snarky and aggressive when writing about music online or being interviewed about music and yet a perfectly nice guy irl when dealing with people face to face about regular stuff

I agree

I don't.

http://www.electricalaudio.com/johngrabski.html

albini writes about John Grabski III of The Teeth, who recorded at Electrical Audio as he was dying of terminal cancer. really affecting.

http://www.electricalaudio.com/images/John_Grabski_III.jpg

John Grabski III

Until I met John Grabski III, who died in March, I had no idea how to die properly. I do not want to die, but I had always presumed I wouldn't have any options available to me when the time came. John had been diagnosed with cancer and beaten it back a couple of times already, so he had put a good amount of thought into the subject, and in the way he lived the last year of his life, he proved that it is possible not just to have options, but to be daring and heroic on the way out.

John's relationship with cancer started a half-decade earlier when he underwent treatment the first time. He rebounded and regained his strength, rejoined the musical community in upstate New York and resumed a creative, active life with his friends, his children and his family. When cancer reasserted itself last year in a terminal diagnosis, he made a choice between two options, undergoing a regimen of treatment that might extend his life at the cost of its quality, or a less invasive course that would allow him to continue living more-or-less normally by suppressing some of his symptoms and alleviating his pain, without increasing his longevity. He chose that second course.

John contacted me after making that decision and said he wanted to make an album to help deal with, document and express his relationship with cancer, and I was happy to help. I mentioned the session to Bob Weston and he instantly volunteered to take care of the mastering. John enlisted his brother Ben, and the two of them drove to Chicago to record the album "the Strain." Initially they chose the modest group name New York Farmers for the project, but over the course of the session, a band identity began to take shape and John ultimately chose the name Teeth.

John and Ben worked diligently and efficiently, John playing drums in a fluid, powerful style, the cancer having little apparent effect on his stamina. He and Ben shared guitar and bass duties. The primary guitar used on the album was a Harmony Les Paul-style guitar that was customized for John by his uncle, and John contacted one of his favorite drummers, Coady Willis from the Melvins and Big Business, who lent him a snare drum to use for the sessions. For overdubs John used a Veleno guitar that had once been re-strung lefty and used by Kurt Cobain on the Nirvana album In Utero. John marveled openly that he was finally getting to make the album he wanted to make, and he was connecting both his favorite bands and his entire family in the process.

In the run-up to making the album, John joined the online forum associated with our studio, told his story and was immediately embraced by that community. The forum isn't really part of the studio business, but has a distinct personality of its own, an irreverent and comprehensive international discussion group for music, culture, politics, art and life in general. The forum has created its own society, with members forming a record label, organizing shows and outings, and raising money for charities and creative projects. Forum members jokingly adopted the nickname PRF, short for "Premier Rock Forum," and PRF has become a prefix for any undertaking the forum members undertake.

The PRF community rallied around John, voicing support and assisting in making the record a tangible reality. For the album and his progression through cancer, John adopted the tag line "Rock vs cancer. Rock wins," adding it to Facebook and Bandcamp pages about the record and using it to sign off his correspondence and forum posts.

John made his album, got it up on the web and began attracting attention, garnering praise from journalists and other musicians not just for his perseverance but for the music itself. The album "The Strain" is gripping. The music is hard-edged and bracing, with John's inventive, powerful drumming and heavy guitar framing each song with a sound matched to its theme. It's a genuinely great, powerful album, made more intense by the context that it was intended to be a missive from inside the disease of cancer, like a dispatch from the front, to the outside world.

While in Chicago, John and Ben were invited to play on a bill of PRF bands at a local venue. He and Ben were received like heroes and got to hang out in person with the dozens of enthusiasts John had met online, widening and strengthening the network of supporters for the project.

When the album wrapped, John almost instantly floated the idea of making another one, since the first one came together so quickly. Again I said I'd be honored to put the resources of the studio behind it. John came alone this time, and he was much worse for wear. Tumors had multiplied and grown in his body, including a raft of them in his brain, and the medicine that suppressed the symptoms and pain from the tumors weakened him and left his acuity slightly dulled. Nevertheless, he committed to making the record, and day after day he made progress toward an album intended to compliment "the Strain." When this session ended, he had recorded all the drums and guitar for the album, and preliminary plans were laid to complete it later in the year, his health permitting.

John's health didn't improve, and he passed away March 9, 2012.

While working on the albums, John lived here at the studio and I got to know him pretty well. He and I shared a passion for good food, and John frequently relived favorite meals, describing dishes in detail, whether he made them himself or had them in restaurants. He had a particular passion for seafood, and experimented with different raw and cooked preparations with the same enthusiasm he applied to music. It was apparent from the way he relished his endeavors that John intended, as much as his body would permit, to live his life as though he was not dying. There was nothing resigned about him. As I wrote on the forum when the second session concluded, John had no quit in him. The heart of a lion.

It has taken weeks for my thoughts about John and his endeavor to coalesce into something I can fathom, and I have finally gotten a handle on it. What John did in his final months was prove that death is truly a part of life. For him, death was not a terror, just a thing he had to deal with. We all have to deal with it, but he had to deal with it immediately. That said, he refused to let his terminal condition define him or dictate the terms of his life. He would adapt to his condition the way he might put on an extra layer when the weather changed.

I know that how John lived and died isn't about me, but I saw him in the middle of it and it made an indelible impression on me. The way he defined himself in relation to his circumstances and his art reminded me of a moment of epiphany I experienced earlier in my life, so at the risk of sounding foolish I'll share it here. When I was a kid approaching adulthood I felt like a weirdo. I felt alien and isolated from my peers and the rest of the straight world around me. I and my small cadre of friends were misfits and didn't identify with the roles and expectations set out for us. We felt broken and wrong. Then I discovered the Ramones. The Ramones were a punk band, and their existence seemed to validate everything about the way I looked at the world. They had the same crude sense of humor, they were unflinching in their depiction of the everyday depravity we were aware of but never heard mentioned in polite company, and they were unselfconsciously weird. More than anything else they weren't untouchable rock stars, they were like me, and that made me feel like my own crudely-rendered ideas were worth taking seriously. They gave me license to think my own way and see the world as it appeared to me, not as it was supposed to be. If not for the Ramones, I don't know if I ever would have developed the self-confidence to set out on a life course that ultimately made a career for me and put me in a position to help John Grabski make a record. I owe that to the Ramones.

When I think about the scores of people who are diagnosed with cancer every day, I can only imagine how disorienting, how alienating that must be. And just as each cancer case is different, inevitably the images of cancer patients in the media and public consciousness will fail to resonate with some of them. Not everybody can be Lance Armstrong. Trying to imagine a kid with cancer feeling alone and distant, I can also imagine that kid coming across the Strain, and seeing an example of how a cancer patient can confront the disease head-on, and unflinchingly stare it down. I think John Grabski, Teeth and the Strain could be like the Ramones of cancer. John's music could inspire a cancer patient to continue his life rather than put it on hold. To take a shot at fulfilling an ambition, to carry on eating with gusto, laughing, making plans and engaging 100 percent with the world around him.

When John died he left an album half-completed. It's tempting to think of that as a kind of disappointment, that he couldn't finish what he started, but I think that's misreading it. John wasn't trying to wrap things up, he was just carrying on. He was living his life as a continuum, and that involved working on music. It would be a disappointment if John had not bitten off more than he could chew, because that would imply that John was wrapping things up in a tidy way, concluding an implicit surrender to the disease. John would have none of that. Sure, he knew he wouldn't be able to carry on forever, but he wasn't going to cut himself off, to do the disease's dirty work. If cancer was going to kill him it would have to interrupt him to do it.

John died in the company of his family, and his namesake father shared this story with me:

On Friday afternoon I sat talking with John in his apartment just hours before cancer took his life. He sat in a very small chair in the middle of the room, elbows on his thighs with his hair hanging down over his knees as if to refuse to allow cancer to steal away even a fraction of his day. He was struggling with a single minded focus that I have seen only in the grimacing faces of extraordinary athletes with the mental wherewithal and capacity to push their body beyond the point of exhaustion and far beyond their physical limitations. I asked him carefully, "What are you thinking John?" He very slowly and deliberately fixed his eyes to mine and I had a fleeting thought that I had never witnessed such a deep almost piercing look of utter concentration as he said, "Tomorrow, I am thinking about tomorrow."

This was yet another example of Rock vs. Cancer, Rock Wins. To the last second of this beautiful man's life, John never allowed cancer to steal his character, his spirit, his mind or his dignity. He acknowledged that in the end it would take his physical life away but maintained that cancer would never define him nor would it dictate the terms of engagement. The powerful and profound music of Teeth sends a clear message to cancer and serves as a beacon that shines the way forward for those caught within its deadly grasp. Cancer claimed his body. It was unsuccessful claiming the MAN and as hard as it tried, cancer could not claim his music. On Friday March 9th, 2012 cancer was humiliated, defeated and destroyed. Rock vs. Cancer, Rock Won.

The way John faced his mortality was inspirational. When my time comes, I hope I can follow his example. I hope when I die I go like John, embroiled in the middle of things, surrounded by people I love, doing the things that matter most. I hope I leave a mountain of shit unfinished, that I have a pan on the stove, a phone call waiting and a pencil in my hand. I hope I'm man enough to be thinking about tomorrow.

For all of us, the living, the dying and the someday dying, John Grabski III, you are a hero.

-steve albini

Wow.

That record is pretty fantastic, even if you didn't know the backstory

yeah it's just real nasty 90s stuff, reminds me of a poppier Tar a bit

bump

maybe i shoulda started a new thread

new Screaming Females record sounds good.

Regarding what Albini is up to at the moment, I've heard he's either working on or has just finished working on a solo record by Hugh Cornwell (ex-Stranglers), called 'Totem & Taboo'.

amazing piece there, thanks M@tt.

my mother-in-law just got diagnosed with massive, incompetently (un-) diagnosed terminal cancer and I just forwarded that to my wife, who took an emergency redeye flight last night to see her before she dies.

sorry to hear that sleeve. my stepdad died a couple years back, similar causes & circumstances.

and yeah, thanks for posting the piece, m@tt. very much wanna hear teeth.

who is putting the teeth record out? is it available already?

It is being self-released, the family I believe is handling the physical distro, otherwise you can download it from Bandcamp
The Strain

thanks chris!

thanks for that info! i want to get this.

but lol @ the bassist of the fucking Cribs of all bands getting quoted on there:

"Super raw, honest, not being done for commercial gain etc. Very influenced by Melvins, Shellac, Bleach/pre-Dave-era Nirvana, maybe even a bit Jesus Lizard at times." - Gary Jarman (bassist, The Cribs) in an email to rock critic Everett True

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/td90c/i_am_steve_albini_ask_me_anything/

wow that was an interesting read thanks for posting

that link is going to be such a time sink today...

He comes across as such a decent guy. It's fascinating, and interestign that he seems quite keen to do this kidn of thing - there was the poker forum thing a few years ago, too, which was equally funny and informative.

Interesting read, thanks for the link markers.

Pain in the ass to have to click a fucking thousand "expand" links to read one page though.

Yeah..

About 4 'expands' down, there's a link to a much nicer "questions and answer" table format, however this has not been updated that recently, and when you click back, it takes you to the initial unexpanded version.

People really want to get the guy to list his favourite records, huh! I seem to remember the poker thread had a lot of the same quizzing going on.

Interesting, too, that "Steve's opinion on ____" is something that seems to have a great deal of weight for many people... usually when I have a conversation with Nina Nastasia or The Breeders or PJ Harvey there's a point where somebody says "Albini gave this record to John Peel" or "this was Albini's favourite record" or "Albini said she eats nothing but potatoes".

The interesting thing afaic is his repeated insistence to "make music for yourself, not for others" which is some strange dogma that I can't comprehend

Whoops, I meant to say: "another thing that is interesting is:"

I think it's more like "don't get bogged down worrying about what other people will think" which makes more sense to me.

His Big Black tour diary, linked on that reddit page, is a bit, um, o_O

YEAH yeah you're right. I read it wrong. It did seem pretty anti-social.

xp I kind of love that tour diary for the light that it shines on stuff happening thousands of miles away from me when I was seven years old, but at this point it's kind of perfect that ppl are reading it from a link on Reddit

His comment abour reading/playing scrabble while doing takes was pretty interesting. On the handful of recorsing experiences I've had, esp during the mixing process, yr ears def get fried intensely listening to play backs over and over.

I recorded with Steve recently and he was reading Peter Morris's "A Game of Inches", an inside baseball history. And I can attest that he always noticed if someone flubbed a part or whatever.

"Albini said she eats nothing but potatoes"
stuff like this is pretty interesting! (to me, anyway) i liked his description of KK Null's natto feast. ian mackaye seems really touchy when people ask about his eating habits, though.

i hadn't see him express regret about the pixies comments before

he was sort of apologetic in a recent tape op interview too. albini, so mellow.

what's weird is that i always thought he was fucking around in the first place. like meaningless shit talk for laughs, you know? the fact that he describes it now as mean-spirited sincerity, rather than straight-up trolling, is a bit disappointing.

I always figured he was serious, pixies don't seem like his thing

yeah, i guess not. he did good work for them, though, and they helped put one another on the map.

yeah i dunno, that album sounds great but i expect the pixies were going places either way and i think steve would have done just fine either way....also shit is like almost 30 years ago, it must be weird to be held to all these things you said that long ago

sometimes ILXor & my little dog loutallica partner chr1s b just got back from recording w/steve and sounds like it was the best experience ever, basically

sweet!
re; the pixies, whenever i read interviews with him now, it seems like it's beside the point for him whether he likes the bands he's recording or not.
also, he's got a long-running working relationship w/ kim deal it seems, they must like each other personally.

It was! He even said something nice about our band in the Reddit! Ha!

It was not better then making "Little Dog" fwiw, that experience was way more honest

read him say somewhere (believe it was in the 33 1/3 Spiderland book) that he's regretful about some of his behavior in the early recording days. mentioned Surfer Rosa and Tweez as examples of albums he kind of arrogantly imposed his "vision" upon instead of giving the band what they wanted. also, he was doing pranky/creepy things like mic'ing break room conversations.

xp as good as albini is, i don't think he's ever created a whole new planetary system w/ one of his recordings.

It was not better then making "Little Dog" fwiw, that experience was way more honest

― chr1sb3singer, Thursday, May 10, 2012 1:08 PM (53 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean, EA is a nice studio, but he can't duplicate my signature "Um Jammer Lammy promotional Fernandez travel guitar plugged direct into outdated ProTools" guitar sound

thanks for that link markers, I'm loving this

I learned to make records by being in punk rock bands, and those bands weren't interested in anybody else's opinion on their music, and actively resisted anybody trying to press the point. I started out making records that way and just carried on.

and actively resisted anybody trying to press the point

press what point...they don't like punk or noisy stuff, so what

what exactly is there to resist, I wonder

resist engineers making bad brains sound like foghat, which apparently was going on a lot at the time.
(this is apparently still going on)

i can't imagine steve really respecting anyone who didn't have a chip on their shoulder

I think one reason Albini has mellowed is that at just about 50 he's made it over the sell-out hump. That is, he's secure enough and successful enough that at the stage many of his peers must be scrambling to support the second half of their careers/lives, he doesn't need to hustle. He's made it this far without doing anything stupid, he's in a committed pseudo-marriage, he's got a good business, a good reputation, and he's done it all (cue the music) his way. I'd be pretty sanguine, too.

surfer rosa & tweez, albums that would not be as good as they are if albini hadn't imposed his vision on them - I would think that this might cause him to question the aesthetic he arrived at ("hands off") tbh

I dunno, as a sort of aesthete I can imagine him finding flaws in things that "work" because they deviate from his standard.

Josh, can you elucidate on his 'pseudo' marriage? Intrigued.

Oh, nothing special. He's just been in a committed, very long term relationship with someone who he is not married to. But she is practically his wife, common-law stylee.

But what it boils down to is I actually think marriage matters. I actually think being married to somebody is important. And doing it out of some sense of momentum or nonchalant sort of obligation seems silly to me. It's the sort of thing that you should undertake quite seriously. And I don't think it's the hallmark of a relationship that it's "marriage-worthy." I think relationships can exist inside or outside of marriage, and I feel like the marriage can -- the wedding can occur at any point in a marriage as far as I'm concerned, you know? And if you gave people the option, everybody would ask for one of those really good fifty-year marriages. That's the kind of marriage everybody wants; they want one of them grow-old-together marriages. But you can't order 'em like that. You get a marriage and then you wake up fifty years later and realize you got one of the good ones. And I just see that as a continuous process, and I don't see any real rush to have a ceremony. I feel like the ceremony can happen anywhere along the line.

From interview with Mark Prindle.

(Quite sure they're married since that interview.)

2009, I guess:

http://d3j5vwomefv46c.cloudfront.net/photos/large/27986101.jpg?key=16001200&Expires=1336930159&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIYVGSUJFNRFZBBTA&Signature=Wxlr~qY0xOo1wuORIOkLg4nkt9gZQUR-lIAMO-rlw4X8E~OjwPiOgGZmxM2bpuA94gfCs8jS57AN04M772luEklx1oDvO5zLNbTK-p2AFq6mcYVXMZtxeZCciVMb-tsIlSL-GmXt1DP8DFwqjaWhN9KDNMu-6BooEm6YJqiYl8g_

The interesting thing afaic is his repeated insistence to "make music for yourself, not for others" which is some strange dogma that I can't comprehend

This is 100% true gospel dogma whatever you want to call it. You HAVE to make music for yourself. I mean it's kind of a selfish thing and kind of an ego trip but so is getting in front of a group of people and saying "Stand right there and watch me make these sounds for an hour!" At the end of the day, the only audience you have is you. Your popularity will go in waves, there will be shows where you are playing and nobody gives a shit, or nobody shows up, and you have to be able to deal with it. And if you are not making music for yourself then at that moment you will feel a psychic shock of worthlessness and you may as well just be working in an office, at least you'll be making some decent money.

Super looking forward to those interviews, btw! Thanks for the link.

adam otm, all you can really do is trust your gut and hope a few other people have somewhat similar guts

i love that photo.
he looks sooo happy.
he played the game his way, and he got what he wanted.
lucky b*stard.
re the cancer post : well, i could not read it for a few days for obvious reasons, but yesterday i did, and i'm glad.
our situation was very different, but still, was wonderfully open and honest.

I always read about him talking shit about the Pixies but ive never really read any of those old interviews. Does anyone have any links? I'm pretty curious, all the interviews i can find are more recent.

http://michaeldempster.com/post/1256694678

http://www.dementlieu.com/users/obik/arc/other/kreuzen_fe10.html

In the 1960s and '70s, the left began to recognize that internal political debate was being hampered by crippling "revolutionary" circumspectness -- couching every "he" as a "he or she," Referring to mankind as "humankind," trying to be inclusive in every way to everyone. It was ridiculous -- to the left -- and so the phrase "political correctness" was coined to make fun of this awkward, stilted, revolution-speak language.

So, when someone would speak normally, and one of the forbidden language forms or pronouns was used, someone else -- as a joke -- would chime in with "that's not P.C."

It was a way for the Left to make fun of itself in a way that it needed to and deserved. Most importantly, it recognizes overtly that the trivia that dogmatists might criticize are unimportant. It was a joke that made a moderate, sensible point of critique within the Left.

The Right took hold of the term, using it to ridicule earnest attempts to make discourse more civil or policy more responsible, painting them with the same brush as the myopic, dogmatic revolution-speak it was originally intended to make light jest of.

It is now assumed by the general public that this notion of "politically correct" speech was a serious one, and that the left tried to impose it on others, and that it is an example of the Left overreaching in social areas. This is patent bullshit, and I am disgusted that nobody who wasn't around at the time recognizes it. Using the term reinforces the success of this right-wing propaganda move, and I hate it.

I hate orchestrated right-wing propaganda moves.

I love the Shellac song "Ghosts". Did anything in particular inspire it or is there anything interesting about it you can share with us?

Just had the idea that if you could conjure ghosts it would be a pretty terrible power. Like you could just make somebody dead and a ghost just like that. Or take a regular dead person and make him a restless specter forced to roam the earth forever. And if the person with that power was a little girl, just amusing herself by making ghosts like she was making paper dolls or whatever. How cute and also horrible that would be. And then what kind of people would she do that to? Maybe a historical figure she learned about in school or another kid from the neighborhood or somebody from TV...

^^^love this, probably my fav shellac lyrics and i appreciate the insight

surfer rosa & tweez, albums that would not be as good as they are if albini hadn't imposed his vision on them - I would think that this might cause him to question the aesthetic he arrived at ("hands off") tbh

― cosi fan whitford (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, May 13, 2012 8:25 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is sort of interesting to me--i think steve is still imposing his vision tbh, you can recognize his recordings instantly. maybe it's more like these days you know what you're getting if you record with him?

i think he's just more inclined to slip his vision in through the back door when no one's looking

It's a little like the Dogme 95 folks not imposing their vision with recorded music, fake lights, etc.--when of course you can spot a Dogme 95 movie from a block away.

to be honest i can't hear any sonic difference between surfer rosa and doolittle -- maybe it's the MP3s?
the stooges album sounded like a regular high-gloss rock album.

In a way yeah he seems more like an engineer, someone who knows how to get a good sound and use the right mics. He says thats lots of times producers are responsible for you know, hiring a saxophone or crafting the arrangement or basically co-writing the song as recording. On Surfer he suggested a tempo change and pushed for the in-studio sounds ("You effing die!") but you get the sense he thinks of his job as simply getting the best sonic representation of a song/band. This is why he doesn't take royalties, I'm sure with his work ethic, if he was laying down synth patterns and extra instruments and stuff, he'd want credit.

The difference is between scaled-down multi-track analog and like a far more expensive 24-channel digital system. If you can't tell the difference then I'd say he did a pretty terrific job!

it also matters a lot who mixes the record and who they're answering to/who they feel their obligation is to (label vs. artist vs. themselves vs. idk "posterity" or something) -- mix is 1) an entirely different discipline from recording/engineering and 2) absolutely as important as the recording itself. I don't know who mixed those Pixies records but that'd be where I'd look most for differences.

surfer rosa was all albini. doolittle was a gil norton production but some other dude mixed it

http://thequietus.com/articles/13250-steve-albini-interview-rapeman-shellac

The most amazing thing is that he says he tried to get Bill Withers to play ATP...BILL WITHERS!!...The guy has gone up a billion fold in my estimations...just too bizarre...my mind has been blown...

http://m.imgur.com/a/p0tKn

^^^Must read bit o' epistolary history.

I heard about Albini's admiration of Bill Withers several years back. It makes sense, with Withers' mostly stripped-down production (at least on early albums), his down-to-earth demeanor, posing for the covers with his lunchbox on break from work. There's also a great story in the James Brown book about how Brown was having a diva fit on a small plane on the way to the Rumble In The Jungle concert in Zaire, until Withers pulled a gigantic hunting knife on Brown to tell him to STFU. Badass!

his description of the overwrought nature of bad recording processes reminds me a little too painfully of a recording I made, where we somehow turned what we thought was great material into a mediocre record by (1) the engineer not really getting our live sound and (2) way too much drawn out tinkering and rejiggering

awesome letter. so much respect for albini, especially that last bit about the money.

https://twitter.com/beaunoise/status/383268011169181697

There's likely a bit of an underlying sales-tactic angle to all that though, don't you think?

xpost

love the spirit of the letter, and many of the details, but who says a recording has to sound like a live band? there are so many other things a recording can be.

albini is such a joy to read, and a great dude all around.

I think albini's point is that if you're recording a rock band, it should sound like a rock band

also maybe it's the cynical in me but weird that this is circulating the week of the in utero reissue

uh, i think it's explicitly part of the promo (included in the box set)?

also <3 beau and his twitter.

the fugazi session he mentions was scrapped though, and, ironically, he kind of failed to make them sound like themselves. Everyone has their artistic failures I guess.

it should sound like a rock band

which sounds like what exactly?

There's likely a bit of an underlying sales-tactic angle to all that though, don't you think?

― Evan, Thursday, September 26, 2013 12:38 PM (55 minutes ago)

Not really as Kurt had approached Steve about recording the follow-up to Nevermind... not the other way around.

the fugazi session he mentions was scrapped though, and, ironically, he kind of failed to make them sound like themselves

Nah, they sound like themselves on it

Albini made good records in part because he had an approach that he believed in and stuck to. He talks about it dogmatically as though it is *the* approach, which it isn't, but the fact that he was so adamant about it made him a better engineer/producer imo.

This sounds like ass:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBnDrIxjz8A

the drums are all pushed out and the guitars, which are what really drive the band, are kind of crushed

Yeah, they definitely didn't sound like that live. Weird choices on Albini's part. And arrg weird panning on the drum kit. Hate that.

Yeah it doesn't sound that different than the Kill Taker version to me.

Keep in mind those are DEMOS

sounds way different from Killtaker

i don't like the slint stuff with albini because it sounds too albini. and yet i don't mind the same albini touch on the breeders/pixies stuff. sometimes it works for me and sometmes it doesn't.

otm. Breeders' Pod is my favorite Albini production.

so how much did Nirvana paid him eventually?

since albini refuses to take points on albums he records, nirvana paid him by giving him several points on hole's live through this.

lol

he got paid like $100K iirc

SUCKER!

Didn't he say he went broke soon after though?

regardless

i think Surfer Rosa was one of his best works, and iirc he didn't like the record so much at first.

so i take with grain of salt his remark about the correlation between the quality of the result and the mood of the band.

Albini made good records in part because he had an approach that he believed in and stuck to. He talks about it dogmatically as though it is *the* approach, which it isn't, but the fact that he was so adamant about it made him a better engineer/producer imo.

feel like this is a real truth bomb about a certain kind of artist in general

he also knew how to choose good bands to work with most of the times..

Bush...

if he would've made a masterpiece with Backstreet Boys, he was now the truly the god of all producers lol

of course he is a great producer, but it's easier to be good with Jesus Lizard than with Bush

He would probably admit that!

i don't really care about notions of "good bands" and i don't think it's relevant to Albini's process - he worked with whoever he chose, whether that be for financial or aesthetic reasons

i always dreamed about a collaboration between SY and Albini. that could have been their last masterpiece..

i guess he fucked it with that Rapeman song..among other stuff..

true, i'm talking about the result
xpost

The 18th Dye record sounds fantastic!

I imagine that letter being typed out live on a sturdy but analog typewriter with no edits and no click track.

lol

my faves would probably be pod, surfer rosa, goat, songs about fucking, rid of me. and the first shellac album. kinda glad he didn't do helmet's meantime and spiderland. oh and dial m for motherfucker. i like how that sounds. too far into the 90's and i probably didn't hear whatever he did.

I don't like how the jawbreaker record sounded but apparently during the recording process the console caught on fire so good excuse?

i'll add Man Or Astro Man, and some more i probably forgot..
xpost

seamonsters, dogs...

silkworm

All of the Silkworm albums he worked on sound amazing but especially "Firewater." My favorite drum sound.
xpost

Nina Nastasia's records, those are good.

oh yeah! those are some recent records i love. don't know how much of that is albini and how much of that is liking her a lot though. they sound fine. he is good with strings on some of those records.

taking a good band and not fucking it up is harder than it sounds -- there are plenty of crappy-sounding or overworked records by good bands

if you listen to the recent nina albums they don't scream albini or anything. which is a good thing. they shouldn't. i like tar's jackson too. forgot that one. just a great rock guitar sound.

i still dream of a new orleans brass band recording with albini.

or great punk guitar sound anyway. you have to dig albini drum sound to like the tar album though.

every time i hear a shittily digitally recorded metal album i kinda wish i could hear it recorded by someone like albini. just to get some sort of room sound and some contrast.

From outside the world of rock, he did a really good job on The Thing's Bag It! a few years ago.

Wonder if he's still insisting on the no royalties with the 2013 mix and all that.

I wish more jazz artists hired him cuz yes that Thing record sounds great.

Steve is a genius at documenting what bands actually sound like, which seems like it would be really easy to do but is not. I am in a band that made a record with him and he was a pleasure to work with and I think it sounds closest of all of our records to what we actually sound like live & in the practice space.

obligatory post where i say that razorblade suitcase sounds pretty damn good.

chr1s I figured out what band that is and I'm listening to the record now and it sounds pretty great!

albini has a thing with kick and snare -- when he does anything on the hard side his kick and snare always really stand out to me

i guess he fucked it with that Rapeman song..among other stuff.

Kim Gordon: Big Black were playing in Amsterdam, it was their last tour, and we happened to be there. In the train stations they have machines where you can buy women’s underwear. It was Steve’s birthday, so I bought some to throw at him so he would feel like a rock god on his birthday.

These are all some great records, but Neurosis "Times Of Grace" is the best album Albini ever recorded

I agree with the "no royalties" ideology and put it into practice by working pay-what-you-can with all clients. The rest of that letter is a terrific, dogmatic method but it's a good method. I've heard lots of shitty Albini records by bands that really should've used Protools (or practiced more) ((or ceased to exist))

yeah, what bands actually sound like + an amazing larger-than-life roomy drum sound.

yeah tbf I don't think many bands can claim that their drums sound like that in the practice room

Ha, well the drums actually do kind of sound that way in the practice pad when yr standing right in front of them.

i'm usually behind them so maybe i don't realize ha. but I'm also not a heavy-hitting drummer.

taking a good band and not fucking it up is harder than it sounds -- there are plenty of crappy-sounding or overworked records by good bands

― #fomo that's the motto (Hurting 2), Thursday, September 26, 2013 10:40 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but taking a shitty/mediocre band and recording with them a record with a good production - no one will give a fuck anyway.

i think by definition "shitty/mediocre" bands who are recording an album have a number of people who will give a fuck

Right
But not the one's who liked the "good" bands.
Plus,people who like shitty band usually don't enjoy the "production"..

Assuming we all agree Pixies were good and Bush was shit lol

"Hey,that Bush record sounds great but I hate the band. I think I'll buy it"
A sentence that was never told

http://cdn.straightfromthea.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/blankstare-CtA.gif

here to rep for 'Ocean Songs' which i think is one of the most beautiful sounding records i've ever heard.

It's interesting to compare Seamonsters, which he recorded, against The Wedding Present's Hit Parade stuff which is of a similar style but sounds pretty terrible largely. Seamonsters sounds incredible; not austere at all with its soaring guitars and, yes, Albini drums. In this one example I do think he added so much that he should possibly deserve royalties.

"my mechanic only works on cars he respects on an aesthetic level"

This line on the thread got me to chuckle as I pictured one of those mechanics that works on just BMWs or Jaguars.

Albini gets a great live drum sound, Unfortunately, that same sound seems to be what he gets out of everything else, too.

Anyway, his work with Low and Bedhead show what he can do in mellower circumstances. In some ways, the lack of a pounding drummer in those situations forced him to do better with everything else.

If you don't know, Lil BUB is the latest deformed kitty to take the inter-tubes by storm, following in the paw-prints of the now-legendary Grumpy Cat. The gal has no teeth so her tongue constantly hangs out and has some kind of drawfism so she remains an eternal kitten with tiny, unbelievably adorable front paws. Here she is:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cf/Lil_Bub_2013.jpg/800px-Lil_Bub_2013.jpg

Yeah, well Lil BUB has a YouTube show. In what might one day culturally rival Alice Cooper on the Muppet Show or the punk rock episode of CHiPS, the guest in the third episode is famed funnyman Steve Albini. Here is the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn0GvRpthJ4

I cannot wait for the whole episode in two days...

lil bub's owner is an electrical audio board guy i think

i wonder if there is video of albini interviewing nate silver

Always a good reason to repost this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZWrVQTlonc

"They're HUGE in the world of math rock."

i wonder if there is video of albini interviewing nate silver

I went to this last December. Albini asked Silver something along the lines of: "Why go into election stats instead of going to Wall Street and becoming a billionaire?" And Silver talked about how high the bar was for Wall Street quants, and how he was more excited to be in a field where doing a B+ job felt like an A-grade job, where there was that kind of skill gap.

(Also played cards with them that evening.)

I hear Nate Silver is a good poker player.

Good player, great guy, happy to talk politics and baseball at the card table.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW4mwjSIkoE&feature=share

Steve Albini drives a PT cruiser

i'm going to pretend you didnt say that

http://www.electricalaudio.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=815166#p815166

;_;

pt cruiser is very much in character

the only bad thing about driving a PT cruiser is when you pass another PT cruiser and the driver looks at you with a knowing smile

hope the pt cruiser has truck nutz

just plz tell me it's not a convertible

Know why he must like it? Quality engineering.

i wanted him to drive a beatup GMC A-Team van

you guys I'm really bummed out by this

then again I heard a while ago that Maynard gets around LA in a smartcar which made me lol so, idk...maybe I can get over this

Problem with Music sequel, of sorts:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full

Imagine a great hall of fetishes where whatever you felt like fucking or being fucked by, however often your tastes might change, no matter what hardware or harnesses were required, you could open the gates and have at it on a comfy mattress at any time of day. That’s what the internet has become for music fans. Plus bleacher seats for a cheering section.

"for music fans"

Once we release music it’s out of our control. I use the verb “release” because it’s common vernacular. But I think it’s a perfect description. Even more apt if you consider what happens when you release other things, say a bird or a fart. When you release them they’re in the world and the world will react and use them as it sees fit. The fart may wrinkle noses until it dissipates. The bird may fly outside and crap on windshields; it may get shot down by a farmer. It’s been released, so you have no control over it. You can’t recall the fart, however much you would like to. You can’t protect the bird.

Music has entered the environment as an atmospheric element, like the wind, and in that capacity should not be subject to control and compensation. Well, not unless the rights holders are willing to let me turn the tables on it. If you think my listening is worth something, OK then, so do I. Play a Phil Collins song while I’m grocery shopping? Pay me $20. Def Leppard? Make it $100. Miley Cyrus? They don’t print money big enough.

piece is written like a true libertarian

I mean he's not wrong but there's some serious social darwinism implications to his stance (ie if bands can't make a living at their music it's their tough shit for not being good enough, and the old system that protected them was wrong to do so)

remember back when Albini would take potshots at like, Fugazi. now he's just making Miley jokes like everyone else.

Albini thinks the old system didn't protect the vast majority of bands at all. That's basically the whole thesis of the first "Problem With Music" and he reiterates it in the new one.

I think his point is that it's a wash. Yes, people make less money from selling records, but the flipside is that distro is virtually nothing, recording costs are a fraction of what they once were, and (at least established) bands potentially make more money playing live than they used to.

ie if bands can't make a living at their music it's their tough shit for not being good enough

this is true tho. how many bands do we really need? only a couple are really entitled livings imo, the other 100000000 bands the world is currently blessed with? extraneous to literally everyone... no?

if bands can't make a living at their music it's their tough shit for not being good enough

I would bet an amusingly large sum of money on this not being an accurate reading of his views

to answer the OP, albini is currently waiting for a train

what's interesting about his argument (well one thing interesting about it) is that the atomization of culture doesn't bother him. He thinks it's great to have a million different micro-scenes sustaining themselves but essentially isolated from each other. Which okay yeah it has its virtues. But it makes every scene feel so *small* and insignificant.

xp

only a couple are really entitled livings imo, the other 100000000 bands the world is currently blessed with? extraneous to literally everyone... no?

exactly. the market works!

I see an awful lot of packed shows these days. These micro-scenes get out the vote.

Is his point that it's a wash? The thesis seemed stronger than that, on my first reading. I read Albini as saying that things are better now, given how critical he was in the past:

I’ll start by saying that I’m both satisfied and optimistic about the state of the music scene. And I welcome the social and technological changes that have influenced it.

Although they are largely anecdotal, the picture he paints of the pre-Internet industry seems more or less right. The radically increased accessibility of recording technology is definitely great for musicians, although this seems related only tangentially to the changes in the distribution system of the finished products. And the increased accessibility of music is obviously good for listeners, at least in the short term. However, on first reading, I do not see that he really makes a strong case for how 'the new model' allows musicians to make a living from their music, aside from charging higher prices for live performance: it seems to depend too strongly on the voluntary goodness of audiences and on sales of "ephemera and merchandise" (in which case musicians are really making living from things that are incidental to the music).

he seems much more positive to me

he does not actually address what musicians who have seen their incomes collapse are supposed to do, or whose fault that is

I think that's what he's saying "optimistic" - that he doesn't see the effect of these changes on the "industry" as cause for concern, as he thought the industry was pretty shit

definitely libertariany and I'm bummed he devolves into pop-baiting at the end just in case anyone forgot he could, but he does give a little more historical context beyond "my hit in the 90s used to make me this much, now i get this much"

also, from albini's perspective, most musicians who've seen their incomes collapse were already "fucked" in his pov twenty years ago

Also, first four Def Leppard albums obv = classic

xpost

he's saying what I always wished more indie lifers would say -- music becoming much much cheaper to record, cheaper to distribute, cheaper to hear is a net win for everybody, and it hurts people at the top far more than it hurts people who just wanna make whatever they want and/or hear whatever they want and aren't too considered with becoming rich rock stars.

I do wish he'd made clearer that he must think Spotify is a sick joke. It's going to be too easy for people to ignore the bit about "hybrid approaches" and pretend he's signing off on every type of "brave new world" we're being offered

it hurts people that used to be at the top of the music industry. It is absolutely awesome for people at the top of the tech industry. old boss same as the new boss etc.

xp

it's funny how he can get so het up about the intense machinations of the gargantuan dinosaur music industry and then give not a single sentence of consideration to the tech industry, which has basically just replaced the tech industry and still funnels money upwards, away from musicians.

lol replaced the OLD MUSIC INDUSTRY that should say

OTM

I mean who does he think really makes money off of youtube etc

miley

I mean I'm sure radio appeared ABSOLUTELY INSANELY AWESOME to the first musicians that got played on it, and they were more than happy to do whatever just to be on it, sign away rights, not pay any attention to where money was going etc. until oh wait it's four decades later look how that whole industry turned out oh what do you mean someone else owns all my publishing and has been collecting my royalty checks...?

I really like how he pointed out internet making international distribution so easy to do now, it'll be interesting to watch music culture be less and less America-centric in the future.

he's definitely in that realm of indie iconoclasts who focus their bile on peers but get a little vague when it comes to the world outside. quick to point out how someone is failing to be as cool as music dude as him, strong feelings about the ethical treatment of room sound. less confident when it comes to evils he doesn't see first-hand.

i mean when the dude from cracker is going on about how the majors found a new way to steal his "low" money, steve's going to be a little more interested in saying "told you so, shoulda stuck with pitch-a-tent" than "yes, start-ups are evil"

that sounds about right

outic otm. it's just a new industry sorting itself out, capital catching up to a pretty radical technological break that has made a temporary space for culture that will lose/is losing the battle again.

it's definitely his own fault he's getting sum-ups like this

Stereogum ‏@stereogum 59m59 minutes ago
Steve Albini still loves online streaming, hates Miley Cyrus http://bit.ly/1uFPe2c

hope somebody makes an image for a spotify debate article with Taylor Swift and Bob Seger on the anti-side and dave grohl and steve on the pro

I'd actually love to see a breakdown of what a band makes now vs. 15-25-35 years ago (be most interesting by some sort of median success metric so the platinum artists of their era vs. whatever exactly approximates that these days on down to the bar bands). Obviously return on recorded media is going to be lower, but cost/distribution of same also less and I do wonder if touring is more lucrative now.

Has touring ever been lucrative since recordings became the mainstay of the industry?

let's ask Mick Jagger

"ethical treatment of room sound"?

Anecdotal but it's far from lucrative for the serious rock musicians I know. If the purpose of touring in the 'old model' was to promote recordings, i.e. it was not profitable in itself, have ticket prices (or audiences) really increased enough to make this a sustainable income source in and of itself?

2xpost

I wasn't (and am not) talking about the handful of stars on Jagger's level.

xp Probably not but I don't think under the "old model" touring money plus recordings = to a sustainable income for most people either.

Tbh, I haven't really noticed a radical jump in ticket/gig prices, relative to inflation. Would be curious to see stats.

Definitely much more expensive in San Francisco.

"ethical treatment of room sound"?

sorry, acoustics

yeah I know just joeks... seriously from my anecdotal evidence it seems p lucrative on the high end and then as you move down the ladder it gets less and less lucrative. To the point where a four-person band in a van is going to be constantly struggling to break even from city to city. But it seems like this has been the case for a long time.

xp

long Alibini disqusitions like this are pretty rare anyway and this one's fun imo

i was with him until the hall of fetishes

he seems really hung up abt sex

Songs About Fucking Over Managers And Labels That Used To Make A Comfortable Living

What if your fetish is to be fucked by a corporation? Do you get a pass?

Tbh, I haven't really noticed a radical jump in ticket/gig prices, relative to inflation. Would be curious to see stats.

A new CD, when The Problem With Music was published, cost $27-31, and an international band’s show cost $30. Now a new CD costs $13-22, and as he says in the speech, an international band’s show costs $60-120.

Well, I was comparing gig prices to inflation, not to CD prices, which have obviously dropped. But yeah, the Bank of Canada's inflation calculator says that a basket of goods that cost $30 in 1993 would cost $46.79 today so if ticket prices are 2-4x what they were, that would be considerable.

Sorry, it would cost $44.04.

I'd actually love to see a breakdown of what a band makes now vs. 15-25-35 years ago (be most interesting by some sort of median success metric so the platinum artists of their era vs. whatever exactly approximates that these days on down to the bar bands). Obviously return on recorded media is going to be lower, but cost/distribution of same also less and I do wonder if touring is more lucrative now.
― One bad call from barely losing to (Alex in SF), Monday, November 17, 2014 2:52 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The answer is: fuck no because of gas prices

Concert prices (in the US, I'm assuming?) are 43% higher than they were three years ago, according to this: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=87981&page=1

OK.

I do wish he'd made clearer that he must think Spotify is a sick joke. It's going to be too easy for people to ignore the bit about "hybrid approaches" and pretend he's signing off on every type of "brave new world" we're being offered

File under new methods of fart collecting.

The answer is: fuck no because of gas prices
--i did it all for the 'nuki (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

I'm sure that hurts but I'd still like to see it all broken down.

A new CD, when The Problem With Music was published, cost $27-31

does anybody know anybody who actually paid 27-31 dollars for a new CD in '92? I had a CD player and bought CDs. They cost about 15 bucks.

i think this is a canada thing

remember thinking it must suck to live in canada when i bought comics as a kid

MSRP on CDs back then was like $18-19, which would get marked down to $12-13 at a big box retailer. What really has dropped was list for doubles, which usually MSRP'd then for $30-40.

Albini was not speaking in North America.

if he was referring to the market in Australia, then i can confirm that new CDs in '92 sold in the ballpark of 30 AUD.

which felt like a substantial rip-off even at the time.

music becoming much much cheaper to record, cheaper to distribute, cheaper to hear is a net win for everybody,

if you consider a market that allows Burger Records to exist / flourish a "net win," sure

ahahaha

what's wrong with burger records

burgers aren't records!

xp sorry I couldn't help it, imo they suffer a bit in the quality control department but I like some of the releases

and yes I consider it a net win overall for people to have cheap access to the means of production, sometimes bad bands get good later

i think they've tightened up their QC quite a bit recently, but tbf that's referring to their own actual releases not when they're acting as the tape manufacturing arm of other labels xp

ah that makes sense, they are pretty big around these parts

Tbh, I haven't really noticed a radical jump in ticket/gig prices, relative to inflation. Would be curious to see stats.

I saw JAMC for £6 in 1987, which is £15.36 in today's money. I'm seeing them again on Friday in the same venue for £31.50 plus booking fee. So prices have doubled for that one band in that one venue.

It's difficult to compare like for like as these anniversary nostalgia tours sell quickly at inflated prices thanks to sad old fucks like me but that's a huge increase.

yes definitely, likewise Reading festival ticket was £78 in 1999, which is £119 in today's money. Last year's festival ticket price was £213.

The first time I saw Fugazi in 89 it was £3.50, the last time I saw them in 2002 it was £7.50 (source: Fugazi live show archive) so ignoring the fact the prices are artificially low even their tickets cost more than doubled in a little over 10 years.

Screw Fugazi, those selfish, money-grubbing jerks!

The Eagles in the mid'70s cost around $6 a ticket. Now, it's more like $1 million. But they're selling fewer records.

Also, t-shirt prices have skyrocket. You can't download a t-shirt.

yet

I conceded the point about ticket prices already, referring to actual statistics.

Fuck statistics, we have anecdotal evidence!

in the DIY punk or 'eternally unsuccessful' sphere of things entry fees to gigs have been stuck around the £5 mark in the UK since time immemorial. attempts to whack it up to a price that reflects the costs involved tends to get raised eyebrows and/or no-one turning up because they think it's too expensive

I'd compare more "price to see a new relatively unknown band" in 1977 vs. "new relatively unknown band" in 2014 instead of comparing ticket prices to see the same band.

Well, new relatively unknown bands are in no position to make any money until they are less new and better known, so comparison is moot.

so is the comparison of a band 3 years into their career and 25 years in.

But i think albinis point is that Shellac now is playing the same sized venues as Shellac then, but getting more money. Right?

Here you can compare ticket prices for bands at the small level.

http://www.bottomofthehill.com/calendar_archives.html

In 1997 you could see bands at a small club for $5 (Dandy Warhols, Blonde Redhead) -$10 (Yo La Tengo, Pavement).
Now those ticket prices have almost doubled...$10-20.
Inflation: $10 in 1997 is about $15 today.

i think it's important to remember he's also fine with this not working for "everybody" - he's not saying that the income loss reported doesn't EXIST, but that he's comfortable with an evolution that still potentially lets cool people make cool music, and lets "the music industry" collapse under its own weight

he even cops to being in the dark about subcultures other than his own - guessing anecdotally the indie rockers he likes are doing their thing better or worse, the ones complaining he thinks are the weak ones in the herd anyway

and to be clear, i'm not arguing the dude isn't to some degree a libertarian "i got mine" jerk, even if i appreciate the context and detail he's provided

More like Albini is in I told you so mode. Like, serves you right for where you ended up, if you had listened to me you'd be lecturing in Melbourne too. Though it is some sort of tautology to basically note the ones losing the most money are the ones with the most money.

what abt the painting & sculpture industry

scare quotes or nixon impression

http://oi58.tinypic.com/t86pf9.jpg

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/kot/ct-second-city-never-sleeps-heather-whinna-steve-albini-20141211-18-column.html

Letters to Santa might bring to mind a school exercise, "like writing a letter to Santa asking for a new GI Joe or Barbie doll," says Albini, who spends most of the year engineering punk-rock records at his North Side studio or recording and playing with his band Shellac. "The reality is that these letters are usually from heads of household with nowhere to turn. What would it take for a grown-up to write a letter to Santa to ask for help? It's not casual want. These are people who have no support on earth taking a random shot. Those were the letters that broke my heart the most."

America is so sad

this mostly made me lol but i'm sure someone will find a way to empathize with this well-told tale of SA's overzealous hero worship
http://thetalkhouse.com/music/talks/marissa-paternoster-screaming-females-talks/

steve is a funny old cove:

http://thequietus.com/articles/18882-powell-vs-steve-albini

"I've always detested mechanized dance music, its stupid simplicity, the clubs where it was played, the people who went to those clubs, the drugs they took, the shit they liked to talk about, the clothes they wore, the battles they fought amongst each other... basically all of it, 100 percent hated every scrap."

Oh dear. Albini continued: "The electronic music I liked was radical and different, shit like the White Noise, Xenakis, Suicide, Kraftwerk, and the earliest stuff form Cabaret Voltaire, SPK and DAF. When that scene and those people got co-opted by dance/club music I felt like we'd lost a war. I detest club culture as deeply as I detest anything on earth. So I am against what you're into, and an enemy of where you come from".

seems so weird having such an entrenched position on this in 2015. unless he's just kidding around of course

"The electronic music I liked was radical and different, shit like the White Noise, Xenakis, Suicide, Kraftwerk, and the earliest stuff form Cabaret Voltaire, SPK and DAF"

^ ironically i can now only hear this in my head in the LFO Frequencies intro voice

I totally agree with him. In 1992, when I was 20 and didn't know shit and thought my opinion on others peoples' lives mattered to them and the world at large.

(Cool that he DGAF about the sample, though.)

That's a very odd way of responding to a sample request. Funny though!

can't figure out what war he is fighting here and why

i think there is something sorta charming about having this position in 2015

"Would you like butter or margarine on your toast, Mr Albini?"

*5-minute rant about the suffering of factory cows and the evils of the petroleum industry. Then:*
"IDGAF, whatever."

He's just answering an email requesting permission to sample his voice, and trying to do so with dignity instead of just "No" or "Don't care."

Thinking it's weird and acting all baffled because someone articulated the view that club culture is stupid and detestable is baffling and weird. A firmly entrenched view that clubs and dance music are unassailable is much more bizarre.

Albini surmised that someone was just trying to scrape up a bit of interest in their record. Rote response from him. Bingo! Get the Quietus to scratch a tiny piece of content out of this pretend-beef, without which the story would be "someone just made another house record".

He's just answering an email requesting permission to sample his voice, and trying to do so with dignity instead of just "No" or "Don't care."
--I know some Civil War re-enactors you might want to talk to (Eazy)

Shorter ways of saying "sure" though surely. There is something a bit "I have to make sure you know how I feel about the thing."

Powell probably wrote a horribly condescending or patronizing email. Albini could print it up for the cover of his next record. Maybe a blog would write about that. But probably not because that would be stupid.

He was trying to clear a sample of course he did!

Irony is with Albini an assholish letter dripping with contempt would have equally served.

I'm pleasantly impressed by the consistency of both Abini and MacKaye in their later years. They've been grouch ascetics for years, but they're not without humor, and to this day afaict tell if you want to talk to them you just give them a call where they work.

Speaking of which, for those that missed it I found this recent interview with MacKaye honestly inspiring:
http://www.huckmagazine.com/art-and-culture/ian-mackaye-survival-issue-interview/

This was one of my favorite bits:

But I hate to talk so much about the fucking computer. The fact that it’s dominating this conversation is a sickness. All we can talk about is our devices. For the last decade, society has been stoned on technology. If we’re living through a screen, we’re not doing anything. I thought a lot about the psychological effects of an office. People working eight, ten, twelve hours a day. Look up from that computer, look around you, and nothing has moved. Never in the history of the world have people worked ten hours and nothing has moved. Imagine if you were sweeping for twelve hours how clean your fucking house would be? The dirty plate next to your computer? It’s still there! As a society, there’s gotta be a psychological effect. I don’t know what it will be, but at some point, people will sit back and realise that this is a tool. And that life – real life – is outside of it. I can accept it’s a miracle that we’re talking across an ocean, but fuck if I’m gonna live in it! I wanna go outside, too. If you want to talk about real navigation, one should seek balance. If the right foot and left foot are out of whack, then you go down.

Oh noes, Steve doesn't like some bleep-blorp music! We need a thinkpiece!

People working eight, ten, twelve hours a day. Look up from that computer, look around you, and nothing has moved. Never in the history of the world have people worked ten hours and nothing has moved. Imagine if you were sweeping for twelve hours how clean your fucking house would be? The dirty plate next to your computer? It’s still there! As a society, there’s gotta be a psychological effect.

imagine a nation of pianists, their fingers moving all day and nothing changing around them.

playing guitar all day is obviously different because you can hop around

real physical music made with real physical guitars

a good retort from ian would be "sir, when i'm done working, the people around me are visibly moved."

Except they're not, because he sternly chided them for moshing and crowd-surfing.

"Oh noes, Steve doesn't like some bleep-blorp music! We need a thinkpiece!"

Pretty sure the Quietus thing does not qualify as a thinkpiece.

It doesn't but I am assuming one is coming

that mackaye interview was excellent thank you.

Thinking it's weird and acting all baffled because someone articulated the view that club culture is stupid and detestable is baffling and weird. A firmly entrenched view that clubs and dance music are unassailable is much more bizarre.

Albini surmised that someone was just trying to scrape up a bit of interest in their record. Rote response from him. Bingo! Get the Quietus to scratch a tiny piece of content out of this pretend-beef, without which the story would be "someone just made another house record".

― everything, Tuesday, September 29, 2015 1:42 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is otm.

i like quite a bit of albini's projects.

powell using the email correspondence as a tongue-in-cheek marketing scheme is pretty off-putting. i'm interested to see what he does with it in the music video.

Powell makes techno, not house. There's a world of difference

It also sounds quite a lot like Cab Vol, SPK and DAF (sort of)

'It' being the music that Powell makes

to the last, i grapple with club culture; from hell's heart, i stab at club culture; for hate's sake, i spit my last breath at club culture

I do think that its noteworthy that he does not seemed to have budged an inch from 1986 or so. I suppose the club culture that he would have had more proximity to would be…like, white people with peacock-ish haircuts dancing to Information society, maybe?

Not that what he dislikes is indivisible from black culture, but he seems to completely lack any inclination to engage with black music post…like what exactly? There was this oral history of whichever Tortoise record awhile back, where one of the guys related talking to him about house music or a remix or something to him, and he was indignant or bewildered that anyone would do such a thing. and while I was around him once or twice growing up in and being peripherally involved in the 80s Louisville scene, the first I ever heard of him was in Spin, inveighing somewhat questionably about "beatbox rap."

Powell sounds like the whitest thing ever tbh.

Big Black covered James Brown.

Also Rick James.

I suppose covering the odd r'n'b standard is still considered pretty rad in some parts:p

facebook discussion on Xhukk's page mentions that indeed Powell makes the kinda shit he might dig.

he simply couldn't simply say "yes" or "no thank you." he had to pedantically explain his decades-old grudge against music intended for dancing to a guy who likes what he does but who he had to cast as his ideological opponent. not consonant with his more avuncular role as a facilitator for younger musicians…gotta be G/B/D, I guess.

he obviously did this guy a favor by giving him a shitload of free PR, idg how this can be interpreted any other way

he gets to a) play the role of "Steve Albini" (which he clearly enjoys) and b) this guy gets a ton of attention, it's a win-win

and everyone is stupider

I'm gonna go check out electrical audio boards… I reckon he will have no opposition as such today…

why would anyone ever do that for any reason

Is this really a shitload of free PR and a ton of attention? Pretty sure Powell gets more press at this point than Albini does.

well I'd never heard of him before

(not that that's indicative of anything than my own cloistered existence)

go to electrical audio? when his stans are not sucking his dick or complaining about the 80s/90s midwest milieu having passed its prime, it can be pretty interesting, particularly from a gear perspective, which ILM doesn't rilly fuck with. they love to talk about "Tone attorneys," the lawyers who go to chicago blues bars, venerate Eric Johnson and buy paul reed smiths and rare aluminum guitars that those guys can't afford.

"why would anyone" go to EA?…xpost