Audio hero Local musicians share experiences working with late producer Steve Albini By: Ben Waldman Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Saturday, May. 11, 2024

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/05/2024 (545 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In 2014, the noise-rock/post-punk band Conduct travelled from the “Chicago of the North” to the actual Windy City for a five-day session at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini, the prolific recording engineer best known for his work on In Utero, the 1993 studio album released by the definitive grunge rock band, Nirvana.

After forming in 2013, the members of Conduct, a Winnipeg-based band which has since changed its spelling to Kandekt, figured that if they were to record their first album as a group, they might as well reach out to the man listed as producer on the last album to feature Kurt Cobain.

Conduct — Nicholas Liang, Stephen Kesselman, Graeme Wolfe and Rob Gardiner — wasn’t interested in working with Albini, who died Tuesday at age 61, just because of the acts he’d been associated with.

Liang says it had more to do with Albini’s no-nonsense reputation, no matter who he was recording, along with his professional ethos, which Liang refers to as transparent and agnostic.

“I think he took a very documentarian approach to recording, while at the same time understanding his responsibility as the shepherd of the record,” says Liang.

“Albini operated under the principle that it was inappropriate for him to have an esthetic opinion about the music he was recording because that would (lead to bias) when it came to making sober, objective decisions with regard to that music.”

Albini also understood that to record an album was an exertion of labour and capital for any artist, and it wasn’t his place to be anything other than sympathetic to their desired outcomes, Liang says.

That approach led hundreds of artists — including the Pixies, Black Midi, Ty Segall, Superchunk, Smog, Low, Page and Plant, and Cloud Nothings, as well as Canadian acts such as Halifax’s Thrush Hermit, Toronto’s Sadies and Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet and Ottawa’s Metz — to seek out Albini’s guidance over the course of his 40-year career, which included gigs as the frontman of bands including Big Black and Shellac, the latter of which played and stayed at the Royal Albert Arms in the late 1990s.

While working with Conduct, Albini — a difficult man with a penchant for controversial and inflammatory statements — recounted that experience to Liang, who relayed the scraps of that visit to the Free Press.

“He woke up to a glow in the window and all the dumpsters were lit on fire, so Winnipeg left an impression on Albini,” says Liang.

But that trip to the city wasn’t the record man’s first.

---

One night in 1993, Chris (Mama) Bauer, the drummer of local noise rock outfit Stagmummer, was standing in the thick of the crowd assembled at the Royal Albert Arms to see Chicago’s the Jesus Lizard play.

“We were blown away by the aggressiveness of the music, along with the technical skill,” says Bauer, who aspired to make similarly abstract, aggressive music with Stagmummer. “They gave you 40 minutes of music that left you wanting more.”

A member of Stagmummer bought Jesus Lizard’s 1991 album, Goat, which managed to capture in recorded format the same experience. When they looked at the credits on the CD insert, the name “Steve Albini” screamed out.

That led Stagmummer singer Zach Walsh, who performed under the stage name Jack Balles, to contact Albini, who agreed to record the album that became 1996’s Rim. The original plan was to go to Chicago, but some scheduling concerns led Albini to travel north instead.

For a week, Albini slept on the couch of Stagmummer’s de facto manager, Ted Turner, a longtime staff member at CKUW 95.9 FM, bonding with the band through what Bauer describes as a shared dark sense of humour.

Over the course of a seven-day recording session, Albini made himself at home at Private Ear Recording, a studio formed the previous year at the corner of Dagmar Street and Bannatyne Avenue by Lloyd Peterson and Neil Cameron.

“When Stagmummer hired Albini to come here, his reputation was as an abrasive, curmudgeonly taskmaster, and so we were maybe a little apprehensive,” says Peterson. “We were hoping the studio would live up to his expectations.”

Albini showed up with two battered road cases full of the kinds of microphones most producers cradle like newborn children. Albini asked for rigging tape and was on his hands and knees fixing the microphones into place.

“He was not precious at all about using these expensive tools to capture the sound as well as possible,” says Peterson.

In front of Bauer’s drumkit, Albini placed the microphone about 2 1/2 metres in front of the bass drum, and asked Bauer to place his cymbals as far away from the drums as possible. It was a logical way to ensure a controlled recording setup, which then allowed Albini to sit back and be present when the band — Bauer, Walsh, bassist Rob Barteaux and guitarists Scott Cook and Mike McIsaac — was recording, says Peterson.

“He was not the kind of guy to hover. He asked me if I had any audio-porn, old copies of Mix or Sound on Sound magazines, and while the sessions were in progress, he would flip through them, getting into whatever his zone was,” says Peterson.

“He wasn’t micromanaging, he was just letting it happen.”

While at the studio, which had a billiard table, Albini solidified his reputation on the felted green.

“He was without question the best pool player we ever had there,” says Peterson, who now operates Paintbox Recording.

Albini bet the band that if anybody beat him, he would forfeit his fee, which turned out to be a mixture of cash and a locally made Garnet amplifier.

Nobody came close to winning.

“He was a rifle,” says Peterson.

---

So when Liang contacted Albini in 2014, the producer wasn’t hearing about Winnipeg for the first time, even if he hadn’t heard of Conduct. Liang says there’s some misconception that to record with Albini, who was known for not taking royalties, artists needed to be reputable or to have achieved some acclaim.

“The truth is you had to pick up the phone and call, which is exactly what I did,” he says.

After setting a date with Albini to record their album, Fear & Desire, over the course of a five-day session, Conduct headed to Chicago. Other Winnipeg bands followed suit, with Albini again living in Winnipeg for two weeks while lending his production talents to KEN Mode on its 2015 album, Success, and working with Softswitch on its 2018 EP Happiness.

Albini also gave members of Softswitch, including Rob Hill, a thorough walk-through of the studio when he heard Hill and Mike Bridavsky’s plans to open No Fun Club, an analog-heavy recording studio of their own in Winnipeg.

“He detailed what ideas worked, what didn’t and advised what he’d do if he were me,” Hill posted to the Instagram account of No Fun Club, which has developed a sustained relationship with the technicians at Albini’s studio, Electrical Audio.

“Never once did he question or naysay what we were trying to do … only to support it.”

In the studio, Liang of Conduct says Albini was quick and efficient, not getting in the way of the band, with a five-day session wrapping up in only 72 hours.

Electrical Audio could have charged the full five-day rate, but Liang says that wasn’t Albini’s style.

He handed the band a wad of cash and sent them back to Winnipeg.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com