CHICAGO, May 9 2024-Late last summer, I needed to talk to Steve Albini about Sparklehorse. A session he had helmed for the late Mark Linkous more than a dozen years earlier at Electrical Audio, his efficient and economic Chicago studio, had been salvaged by the singer’s family and was about to be released. Within an hour of my Tuesday morning email, he’d volunteered access to his memories: “I’m in session all week,” he wrote. “I typically start work at 10.30 these days so any time before that I can talk.”
I was not surprised to find Albini at work. The famed recording engineer, who died from a heart attack earlier this week at the age of 61, was a pillar of independent music’s sound and ethos. In the four decades since he’d fled Montana bullies to study journalism at Northwestern University, he had engineered or otherwise worked on close to 1,500 albums, from commercial landmarks like the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and Nirvana’s In Utero to cult staples like Dirty Three’s Ocean Songs and Tony Conrad’s Slapping Pythagoras and almost every point in between.(from pitchfork.com)
