CHICAGO (CBS) — Steve Albini, an alt-rock musician, audio engineer, and producer who recorded albums for bands like Nirvana and Pixies and based the Chicago recording studio Electrical Audio, has died at the age of 61.
Brian Fox, a fellow producer and engineer at Electrical Audio, confirmed Albini handed away Tuesday night time from a coronary heart assault.
“We are not ready to make any other statements yet. Maybe in the next few days, we could talk about his impact, which was immense,” Fox mentioned in an e mail.
Albini’s demise got here little greater than every week earlier than his longtime band Shellac was set to launch a brand new album, To All Trains, on May 17. It would be the band’s first album since 2014.
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First developing an interest in punk after being introduced to the Ramones as a teen, Albini voraciously consumed all the brand new music he might discover rising up in his hometown of Missoula, Montana, and performed in his earliest music initiatives. After graduating highschool, he moved to Evanston, Illinois, to attend journalism college at Northwestern University, immersing himself within the scene as a fan and a author for native music magazines.
Albini started his music profession in 1981 when he fashioned the punk rock band Big Black whereas a pupil at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
He later went on to kind two different bands, the controversially named Rapeman and Shellac, with the latter the longest-existing and arguably a very powerful band of his profession as a performer. For Shellac, he carried out vocals and guitar alongside bassist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer.
He additionally helped file and observe some of probably the most influential albums of the choice rock period within the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, together with Nirvana’s “In Utero,” Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa,” PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me,” Veruca Salt’s EP “Blow It Out Your A** It’s Veruca Salt,” and a number of albums for Urge Overkill and The Jesus Lizard.
He additionally helped file music for legends akin to Cheap Trick, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, and Foo Fighters, who recorded their hit song “Something from Nothing” at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.