Steve Albini

Steve Albini quotes. . . .

[shitalbinisays]

A couple of years ago my band mounted a tour of eastern Europe. We played all the hot spots: the Czech Republic, Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, we made it as far as Istanbul, Turkey. It was a magical experience, playing in front of audiences who were relatively unjaded by the routine of touring bands and we were welcomed like friends. We played to full houses at the same size venues as the rest of Europe. The same sizes as we would play here in Australia. And the audiences seem equivocally familiar with our music. The key difference being that most of the places have literally never sold a single record. Essentially 100% of our exposure had been through informal means over the internet or hand-to-hand. On that trip we established contacts with local promoters and arts organisations and audiences developed an appetite for our music and we have since sold quite a few records into the region. Our next tour through the region was easier as a result and we’re going back to Istanbul this spring, using contacts made on that first exploratory trip. I expect to have a marvellous time.

Steve Albini, Face The Music Conference Melbourne, 2014

[shitalbinisays]

There’s a lot of shade thrown by people in the music industry about how terrible the free sharing of music is, how it’s the equivalent of theft, etc. That’s all bullshit and we’ll deal with that in a minute. But for a minute I want you to look at the experience of music from a fan’s perspective, post-internet. Music that is hard to find was now easy to find. Music to suit my specific tastes, as fucked up as they might be, was now accessible by a few clicks or maybe posting a query on a message board. In response I had more access to music than I had ever imagined. Curated by other enthusiasts, keen to turn me on to the good stuff; people, like me, who want other people to hear the best music ever. This audience-driven music distribution has other benefits. Long-forgotten music has been given a second life. And bands whose music that was ahead of its time has been allowed to reach a niche audience that the old mass distribution failed to find for them, as one enthusiast turns on the next and this forgotten music finally gets it due. There’s a terrific documentary about one such case, the Detroit band Death whose sole album was released in a perfunctory edition in, I believe, 1975 and disappeared until a copy of it was digitised and made public on the internet. Gradually the band found an audience, their music got lovingly reissued, and the band has resurrected, complete with tours playing to packed houses. And the band are now being allowed the career that the old star system had denied them. There are hundreds of such stories and there are speciality labels that do nothing but reissue lost classics like that once they surface.

Steve Albini, Face The Music Conference Melbourne, 2014

[shitalbinisays]

Well, there's the thing about New York. New York is such a monolith that it's pointless to have an opinion about it. It's like bitching about the weather. It certainly won't accomplish anything and it certainly won't make you feel better about what you didn't like. New York has a couple of characteristics that are undeniable and one of those is that it's a magnet for assholes who couldn't get any attention at home and decided that the problem wasn't that they weren't interesting but that there were all these squares around them in Dubuque or whatever and they need to go to some big cosmopolitan city like New York where people will appreciate them. So if you can imagine that scenario playing out within every city in North America and every one of those assholes with an opinion slightly outreaching his ability getting on a fucking Greyhound. You end up with a pretty good description of what's annoying about New York is that it's full of people whose self-image just ever-so-slightly outstrips their ability. I studied painting under in college under Ed Paschke, who is dead now, he was a brilliant, brilliant educator. He was one of the only people in college who actually taught me anything. I mean, I learned a lot while I was in college, don't get me wrong, but not a lot of it was academic and not much of it was taught to me, it was primarily stuff I learned on my own. But he was one of the few people that actually taught me anything. But at one point, and he was the first person to make me aware of this, of being in New York. He described it as the "catch-all of runners up." And I think that's probably what annoys me about New York when I'm annoyed by it. Whatever they're doing at the moment, that's not really them, in their minds. Like, I'm working in this bookstore but I'm not a bookstore clerk, I'm a writer. Or like, I'm working in the restaurant but I'm not a waiter, I'm an actor. There are all these people who are not the thing that they are doing at the moment and therefore feel demeaned by every second of their existence. And the chip on New York's shoulder is the thing that keeps everything on the ground there. It's the massive weight that causes all of the gravity that happens in New York.

Steve Albini on New York

[shitalbinisays]

Because it sucks and I'm tired of hearing about it. Believe me I've tried. I just hate the parts I hate about it more than I like the little things there are to like. The batting average is just so low I can't bear the dead time between highlights being filled with all that noodling. It's vain music.

Steve Albini on why he hates jazz

[shitalbinisays]

Well, since the new journalism is just re-posting what other people have lifted from message boards and twitter, there are probably going to be a hundred or so stories on the web with headlines like “Steve Albini calls Amanda Palmer an Idiot,” so I’d better make my position on that clear. I don’t think Amanda Palmer is an idiot, and it was rude and sloppy of me to make that impression. I’m sorry Amanda Palmer, the internet is going to tell you that I think you’re an idiot, and while that’s not true, it’s my fault. I Don’t know Amanda Palmer, and don’t recall ever hearing her music, though I hear a lot of music. Full disclosure, my wife Heather once tried to contact her through her agents to see if she would play at a charity event, but I don’t know what happened with that other than nothing happened. I have no problem with bands using participant financing schemes like Kickstarter and such. I’ve said many times that I think they’re part of the new way bands and their audience interact and they can be a fantastic resource, enabling bands to do things essentially in cooperation with their audience. It’s pretty amazing actually. It should be obvious also that having gotten over a million dollars from such an effort that it is just plain rude to ask for further indulgences from your audience, like playing in your backing band for free. Fuck’s sake a million dollars is a shitload of money. How can you possibly not have a bunch laying around after people just gave you a million dollars? I saw a breakdown about where the money went a while ago, and most everything in it was absurdly inefficient, including paying people to take care of spending the money itself, which seems like a crazy moebius strip of waste.

- Steve Albini

[shitalbinisays]

I think that the sale of recorded music is going to be a very small part of the music industry from here on out. Bands are going to want to record themselves because they’re going to want to leave a legacy. The recordings from now on are going to be much, much more under control of the bands themselves. Like, a project of the band, to suit the interests of the band, for the band and their audience. So, the idea of having a record industry where some producer selects a band and selects songs and then it goes up the chain of command and then eventually you’ve got an approved thing that gets recorded, then that’s a formal release -- that’s not going to happen very much anymore. For mainstream pop stars and country artists, where it’s all about how pretty somebody is and what kind of pro songwriters they have and all that kind of stuff, I suppose that stuff is going to peter on for a while. That kind of pop music is going to linger for a while.

Steve Albini, interviewd by "Epitonic" 

[shitalbinisays]

Yeah, it's 1986 all of a fucking sudden. Just like that, I'm twenty three fucking years old, I have a job, a college degree, an ulcer, bad breath and no sex drive. Without even trying, I'm a fucking geezer. And punk/rock means shit little to anybody in the world anymore, it seems, save for people who just tripped over it recently and don't know what the fuck to do with it. The precious few musical gangs still creating viable, new music are barely hanging on, thanks to an audience so bent on crushing out originality and inspiration you'd think they were some sort of revenge squad sent in as infiltrators by our parents from long ago. Punk rock was the whole fucking world once, back when it meant cutting loose, going all-out and being nobody's tool.

Steve Albini, 1986, Forced Exposure

[shitalbinisays]

Not a quote. . . but a nice photo this time.

[shitalbinisays]

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.

Steve Albini, "The Problem with Music", 1993

[shitalbinisays]

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.

Steve Albini, "The Problem with Music"

[shitalbinisays]

As a recording engineer - someone who is deeply embroiled in the process of making records every day - you see trends and fads run through the social organization of the population of musicians in the same way that they would run through a high school.

Steve Albini

[shitalbinisays]

Q: What happened when you were helping to produce Nirvana's In Utero? Didn't they decide to go with someone else on the singles? Albini: Long story, but basically the standard protocol for a big record company at the time was for players in the industry to try to claim authorship of a successful record somehow -- this guy did the A&R, this guy did the legal, this guy was the producer, this guy remixed it -- so credit for success stayed within the industry and players could use it as professional capital. Nirvana made a record by themselves, outside all that influence, and it made everybody inside uncomfortable enough to try to derail it and get them to do it over. Additionally, it's normal for any band to have some slight misgivings about their record once it's in the can, everybody does. The label put pressure on the band, partially using me as a publicity scapegoat, to get them to do the record over, and that coupled with their natural uncertainty eventually created enough doubt that they re-mixed a couple of songs. I know the label was directly involved with blaming me because I got more than one call from music journalists who said, "I just got off the phone with Gary Gersh and he says the Nirvana album is un-releasable and it's your fault." The record that made it into the stores is the one Nirvana wanted you to hear, and I'm content with that. I have no beef with Nirvana, they were a normal bunch of guys under extraordinary stress and they behaved normally. All the motherfuckers around them, all their functionaries and managers and label parasites, those petty little people who fucked with them to preserve their positions within the industry, fuck every last one of them.

[shitalbinisays]

When I first started making records I would sit in front of the console concentrating on the music every second. I found out the hard way that I tended to fiddle with things unnecessarily and records ended up sounding tweaked and weird. I developed a couple of techniques to avoid this, to keep me from messing with things while still paying attention enough to catch problems. For a long time I would read, but it had to be really dry, un-interesting stuff. The magazine the Economist was perfect, as were things like technical manuals and parts catalogs. I had a stack of them by the console. It can't be anything interesting or with a story line like fiction because then you can get engrossed and stop paying attention to the session. It has to be really dull, basically, so you are looking for an excuse to put it down and do something else. This has proven to be a really good threshold, so that if anything sounds weird or someone says something you immediately give it your full attention and your concentration hasn't been ruined by staring at the speakers and straining all day.

- Steve Albini

[shitalbinisays]

“I like noise. I like big-ass vicious noise that makes my head spin. I wanna feel it whipping through me like a fucking jolt. We’re so dilapidated and crushed by our pathetic existence we need it like a fix.”

— Steve Albini

[shitalbinisays]

The band cannot sign to another label or even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens.

[shitalbinisays]

Eurydice's tumblr. Ask me anything | Submit | Archive | RSS March 17 2014 " I reject the term “piracy.” It’s people listening to music and sharing it with other people, and it’s good for musicians because it widens the audience for music. The record industry doesn’t like trading music because they see it as lost sales, but that’s nonsense. Sales have declined because physical discs are no longer the distribution medium for mass-appeal pop music, and expecting people to treat files as physical objects to be inventoried and bought individually is absurd. The downtrend in sales has hurt the recording business, obviously, but not us specifically because we never relied on the mainstream record industry for our clientele. Bands are always going to want to record themselves, and there will always be a market among serious music fans for well-made record albums. I’ll point to the success of the Chicago label Numero Group as an example. There won’t ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that’s fine with me because that industry didn’t operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about. Free distribution of music has created a huge growth in the audience for live music performance, where most bands spend most of their time and energy anyway. Ticket prices have risen to the point that even club-level touring bands can earn a middle-class income if they keep their shit together, and every band now has access to a world-wide audience at no cost of acquisition. That’s fantastic. Additionally, places poorly-served by the old-school record business (small or isolate towns, third-world and non-english-speaking countries) now have access to everything instead of a small sampling of music controlled by a hidebound local industry. When my band toured Eastern Europe a couple of years ago we had full houses despite having sold literally no records in most of those countries. Thank you internets. "

Steve Albini, when asked for his opinion on music piracy (via gregharrington

[shitalbinisays]

You see something happen to a population whereby everyone adopts something that's just preposterous in a way that makes it normal instantly. If any one person prior to the rash of puka shells, for example, was seen wearing puka shells, he would look like an idiot. But when everyone is wearing them, it instantly makes them normal.

- Steve Albini