Published
Wed, May 8, 2024, 17:35
- Optimo (Espacio), Loraine James and others have shared moving posts about the revered alternative producer, who died of a heart attack.
The electronic music community has paid tribute to acclaimed rock producer Steve Albini, who died aged 61 from a heart attack, Pitchfork reports.
The alternative icon was best known for his outspoken views, love of analogue hardware, fiercely DIY ethos and work on seminal albums like Nirvana's In Utero and Pixies' Surfer Rosa. He was a member of controversial bands Big Black and Rapeman in the '80s, and in 1997 founded Electrical Audio studios in Chicago.
Albini also famously hated club culture, earning himself a generation of electronic music fans in the process. In an email to the UK artist Powell that later became a billboard, he said he'd "always detested mechanised 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 battles they fought among themselves. Basically all of it: 100 percent hated every scrap."
That said, in an interview with Marc Maron in 2015, Albini confessed to liking the original house scene in Chicago, calling it a "genuine expression of joy" before it was "stylised and co-opted and turned into a formula."
Read some social media tributes to Albini.