STEVE ALBINI

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.