As evinced in a podcast interview, Steve Albini seems genial, articulate, and aware that such a thing as computers exist. (He spontaneously uttered the word baud.)
Albini is a record producer. How does he produce records?
If you think about like records that are made over a span of months for superstars, like, those are horrible records, you know? And I’m not trying to be a contrarian here. I think everybody would agree that like the big blockbuster records that are the superproduced records that are like a year in the works, like, those are all pretty awful, you know? Whereas records that you knock out in a weekend – like, a lot of those are pretty good records, and more importantly, if you work on 50 or 100 records a year, you have a much better likelihood of a couple of them being really great experiences than if you work on two records a year. […]
Like, most bands, if you allow them to do what they do naturally, you’ll get a pretty good representation of the band. And, generally speaking, it’ll be a satisfying experience. When you start deconstructing a band into its component parts, and parsing their music out into lyrics and verses and choruses and riffs and bridges and turnarounds and fills and modulations and stuff, then, you know, you work on all of these elements individually and then try to reassemble them into a sort of a simulacrum of what the band was doing organically, right? My experience has been that that makes freakish records that don’t represent the bands very well.
Unless you’re Andrew W.K.
If you take a presentable woman, just a normal, good-looking woman, and she walks into your bedroom and disrobes, that will probably have the desired effect on you. I’m guessing it would. On me it would… If instead you had a team of experts bring in, like, a good arm and another one would bring in a really nice buttock and another one would bring in a good thigh, and then start bolting them together through a laborious process that required a team of experts, you know, I’d have a hard time believing that that assembled mannequin of – a simulacrum of a good-looking naked woman would actually be as effective as the simple presentation. […]
As a listener, I appreciate it the most when I feel they are communicating to me directly as a listener and I get to experience them full-bore – Naked Lady Walks into Room, you know? Like all at once, bang, I get it all. And I feel like an awful lot of the music business, the professional end of music presentation, is spent trying to elaborate on these things…. You end up making these bizarre modifications to something that, on its own, is pretty awesome. […]
I feel like things as they are have about as much awesomeness as they are capable of having. And you can’t imbue awesomeness into something that actually sucks. And in its way, something that sucks full-bore sucking at me is an honourable experience. It’s an honourable exchange, you know? […]
I think pretty much all decent records are made with, if not complete disregard, with significant disregard for everybody that isn’t in the band, you know? When I hear incredible records, I feel the people involved in those records were involved in some kind of a mania that was possessing them and that only they could really grasp, and if they tried to dumb it down for other people, it wouldn’t be as awesome because it wouldn’t be as complete an exposure of their mania.