Steve Albini has been honored with a street in his longtime hometown of Chicago.
Thanks to an ordinance passed by Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, the 2600-2700 block of West Belmont Avenue in Avondale, between North Rockwell Avenue and North California Avenue, will officially be declared “Steve Albini Way.” Not coincidentally, this stretch of land is where the legendary producer and engineer’s recording studio Electrical Audio, which was founded in 1997, stands.
Albini died on May 8, 2024 of a heart attack at the age of 61.
Though he was born in Pasadena, California, and raised in Missoula, Montana, Albini has been deeply embedded in Chicago’s music scene ever since he moved there in 1980 to attend Northwestern University.
In addition to fronting underground rock acts SHELLAC and BIG BLACK, Albini produced albums by NIRVANA, PIXIES, PJ Harvey and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. He was an aggressive critic of musicians and others who he felt were in it for the money or popularity rather than the music and he famously refused to take royalties from the recordings he produced for other artists.
In 2004, Albini estimated that he had engineered the recording of around 1,500 albums. According to Mix With The Masters, he continued to work almost entirely in the analog domain, being known for recording “live in the studio” as much as possible. He also placed particular emphasis on the selection and use of microphones in achieving a desired sound, and to best capture the ambience.
“A lot of people making records don’t have a grasp of the process,” he once told Billboard. “They do it thinking that it’s some abstract art form that doesn’t need to be comprehended on a technical procedural level. [In those cases] you’ll end up with a record that isn’t formally completed, but that’s finished when the bell rings.”
In a separate interview with Musician, Albini lamented what he called the industry’s assembly-line mentality. “The sound of contemporary rock records, especially those made with big budgets, is so homogeneous,” he said. “You hear exactly the same mix balance, the same dynamic, the same production techniques brought to bear on every single band.”
Albini also pointed out that the quality of his own records had improved, largely because he had resisted the “fiddling impulse” with the music.
“In quest of a distinctive sound, people endlessly process things,” he told Billboard back in 1995. “But because so many people use that method, those sounds have become quite commonplace. In the last few years, I’ve learned to leave things alone. Now when I set up a microphone and like the way it sounds, I consider the job done.”
SHELLAC‘s first album in a decade, “To All Trains”, was released a week after his death.
