Charlie D wrote: Fri May 10, 2024 2:23 pm

Charlie D wrote: Wed May 08, 2024 12:08 pm FM El Protoolio texted it to the group chat not five minutes ago.

Fuck.

I feel compelled to say something more than this but I'm not comfortable saying anything about someone I don't know.
However, I can comfortably say this much: I am one of a club of people who agree that they wouldn't have the friends they have now if it weren't through Steve's influence. I wouldn't be in the band I'm in now or some of the bands I've been in / jams I've had if it weren't for Steve. I wouldn't have met Graham or Hastie or Brandon or Eliya or Tommy - Like who would have pointed out Battersea Power Station to me if I hadn't met Tommy because we followed each other on Twitter because we both posted here because Steve had this site built for his studio? Even though I never met Steve, beyond "influencing how I play guitar" or "influencing how I record", he had a butterfly effect on my life and I see, from reading this thread, I'm not alone.
Even though I never met him, he had an actual real impact on my life. For that I think I should thank him but I gather that would have made him uncomfortable.
I'll stop before I'll start rambling.
I believe he was fond of farewells this way:

I've definitely had this conversation with several group texts about how none of us would know each other without Steve. His effect on our lives is showing to be greater than we even considered. I have best friends who I will love until the day I pass into the next world exactly because of Steve and more importantly, this forum.

I don't want to dwell on any of the negative stuff but, as a friend of mine said the other day "when you say some things that need to be said you will inevitably say a few things that do not," and I think that's an important takeaway. Maybe it's not about never saying dumb shit so much as just trying to mostly say the right shit.

I had to leave the Pedalboards of Doom FB group because of neckbeard knuckleheads posting that particular Big Black liner and screaming about C-P and that everyone was a disgrace for being upset at the news. Same kind of Qanon losers you get on Bowie threads etc.

It’s deliberately in bad faith and at the moment I have zero fucking patience for that shit.

It's just abject fucking cowardice, as far as I'm concerned.

Now that Steve Albini is dead...

In other words, "Now that he's not around to speak for himself, I feel able to sling some mud without having to worry about the consequences!"

If that [name redacted] dipshit wanted to play at investigative journalism, and takes such immense pride in speaking out on such matters, why not bring it up with Steve while he was still alive? For all his status as a demigod of the underground rock world, Steve wasn't some unapproachable A-list celebrity - just pick up the phone and call Electrical, or drop him a line via email.

Clout-chasing and engagement-farming, that's all it is. Boils my piss.

Chomskyite wrote: <troll dude>

That link shouldn’t have been posted on this thread at all, and shouldn’t be engaged with. Has no place here, and a Google search would tell you in less than a minute the guy’s an awful person (and an incarcerated one, at that).

Nice to see you back, Chomskyite, mind. Same with the other old names. <waves to b_d>

Chomskyite wrote: Fri May 10, 2024 5:16 pm It's just abject fucking cowardice, as far as I'm concerned.

Now that Steve Albini is dead...

In other words, "Now that he's not around to speak for himself, I feel able to sling some mud without having to worry about the consequences!"

...

Clout-chasing and engagement-farming, that's all it is. Boils my piss.

That is precisely it, what gives me solace at least is just imagining how it wouldn't take an army of PRFers on his behalf, a deluge of fans in his defense, it would take a single Steve to tear the missive to shreds. And he knew it, and so.. here we are.

So, I've had more of a chance to collect my thoughts, and I am going to write some of them. They may be disorganized.

I haven't had much real-world contact with PRF folk, and I've only met Steve in person a couple of times, but I can't help but think about how Steve, and, by extension, the PRF, have had an outsize influence on my life in a bunch of different ways. I still remember listening to In Utero and wondering why it sounded so characteristically different from everything else I'd heard to that point. I was in my early 20s, and online reference materials circa 2006 or 2007 so were pretty primitive compared to what they are today, but I was able to read an article about how Steve's way of engineering a record had led to that sound, and how Nirvana had been heavily influenced by Surfer Rosa, and I guess I started down a rabbit hole of discovering bands and albums.

At that time, I had just barely gotten good enough on guitar that I was able to start writing my own songs, and, armed with some terrible drum samples, I set out recording them. And I think I'd been chasing that sort of sound since then. I spent a lot of time reading interviews, then later watching presentations Steve had done that ended up on YouTube, and I think I was just sort of awestruck at the simple, common-sense methods that Steve used, and I just absorbed as much of it as I could. I think it just made the idea of recording music seem so much more accessible. I remember the first time I recorded a "real" album with actual drums on it was when I recorded a project my brother and sister had made. I had the capability to use three microphones with the mic inputs on that computer, plus a USB microphone I was able to use as a room mic. I didn't have the capability to obsess about gear because I just didn't have money for gear, so I focused on the basics of sound recording principles, hit "record," and everything sounded good.

But it wasn't just the techniques that struck a chord with me. I had a huge control freak problem, and I think that I started on the path to being less Type A when I recorded that project. I provided some direction because my sister was new to recording and needed to find a process that was conducive to her, you know, remembering how the songs went, and part of that was making the decision that we'd use a click track and scratch guitar tracks so she wouldn't get lost, but, for the most part, I just did my best to stay out of the way and let things happen the way they needed to. I don't think I would have done things that way if I hadn't been exposed to Steve's philosophy on recording.

I dunno. I've only met Steve twice, at Shellac shows, and he always struck me as a warm, genuine person. I remember I was talking about him with a friend once, and all he could say was "Steve Albini is a cock." I can honestly say that my experience has been the opposite.

I remember, early on, getting into Big Black and reading some of the more provocative things Steve wrote, and I think that resonated with the angry, drunk ball of rage I was in my early 20s. I think, in my case, I fell into the kind of petty edgelord behaviour that a lot of young men use to cope with the world, especially those of us that never seemed to quite fit into it. Older, wiser me knows that this is the end result of living in a racist, sexist, patriarchal society that holds up a very narrow spectrum of white men as some kind of standard, but younger me was a dipshit and engaged in a lot of toxic behaviour.

And then Steve, the guy who wrote the cool, provocative shit I was reading, started talking about how maybe it wasn't so cool after all, and started holding himself accountable for his past behaviour in a really authentic way, and that kind of resonated with me. Around the same time, I was in the middle of my own coming to terms with the stupid crap I said. I guess it was kind of nice to see I wasn't the only one who had a lot to learn. I think a lot of people on here called me out for stupid crap I wrote, and I think Steve did a fair number of times, too. I also think that being here did a lot for my songwriting skills, mostly back when the songwriting challenge was still a thing. I sure got exposed to a lot of cool bands to check out.

So, yeah, my interactions with things Steve did and things adjacent to him and his studio has had a pretty profound effect on my life, not just in terms of how I make and record music, but also in terms of my own growth as a person into, I hope, slightly less of a dickhead.

A library burned to the ground this week. RIP Steve Albini.

This is my first comment here and I feel a bit like a trespasser, but I needed to express my sorrow and my condolences in a room where they would be heard - and understood.

Steve had a way of writing three-line eulogies about people you've never heard of that made you miss them from that moment on. I could blabber on about him for hours without ever doing him justice.

Because Steve was force & fulcrum of a whole culture, of an abundance of great art and great people, a world which, although far away, felt like a second home to me. Part of the reason why I'm writing this here is to extend my gratitude to the lot of you who have been active participants in this world, whether you were aware of it or not.

I hope he laughs with Norm MacDonald when I speak of his big heart.

I'll resist the urge to type down all the reasons why I loved and admired him, because you all already know. But I wanted to put it on record, to the people who understand who Steve was, that I did, and that I will miss him tremendously. My deepest condolences to his family and friends and to everybody reading this all the way to page 23.

Thanks, Sparky. It's nice to be back (although what I wouldn't give for the circumstances to be different).

And I totally agree with you - that awful nonsense doesn't deserve any attention. Will redact the troll's name from my previous post now.

Dammit.

Been sifting through my feelings during this stupid, shitty week and I keep coming back to this: I owe the man a profound debt of gratitude. For nearly four decades I’ve loved music he made or recorded, a lot of it bound up with people and places that are long gone. Nearly all of the friendships I’ve made since coming to Chicago in 2005 have had a direct or ricochet connection to this forum and the incredible community around it.

As a kid I was attracted to punk rock because it was direct, and because it contained the idea that music, art, and maybe life can be unshackled from exploitation or pretension. Steve put that ethos - and the struggle to see it through - into fierce words and generous deeds like no-one else.

Thanks man, for this and so much more. I owe you a lot, and will pay it forward as best I can.