– Steve Albini had recorded Nirvana… and Honey For Petzi
For the duration of a record, the Lausanne group worked with the legendary sound engineer, who died on Wednesday at the age of 61. Its musicians remember.
Published today at 7:28 p.m.
Steve Albini (here in 2014) put on his work coat to record his artists – Nirvana, Pixies, PJ Harvey… He refused the label of producer.
Getty Images/Chicago Tribune/Brian Cassella
Steve Albini hated show business but his talent forced him to come to terms with it: the price to pay for having recorded around 1990 some of the most cult albums of Anglo-Saxon rock, sometimes coupled with big sellers as long as the we call ourselves Nirvana, Pixies or PJ Harvey. The American had an ethic as uncompromising as his working method: only music counts, not decorum; All that matters is the veracity of the sound recording, not the gadgets.
Coming from noise punk (Big Black then Shellac), he imposed on the general public the urgent and raw character of “do-it-yourself” recordings, the antithesis of overproduced pop – he also refused the label of producer. He worked at a fixed rate, $1,000 a day in his Chicago studio, always in an engineering suit. It was in this outfit and in this studio that he died on Wednesday May 8. Heart attack. He was 61 years old.
Behind the myth, there was the man, and he was not inaccessible. In 2000, the Lausanne trio Honey For Petzi contacted him to record their 3e album. Albini accepts, the group will spend 10 days in Chicago to create “Heal All Monsters”.
Honey for Petzi in 2000, the year he abandoned the sidewalks of Lausanne for those of Chicago.
DR
“We were 22 years old, we were going to look for a sound,” remembers bassist Philippe Oberson. It was winter, it was -20 outside, we didn’t really leave the studio. It was made up of two rooms in an old warehouse, including a very high silo in order to obtain natural reverberation without using effects. Everything was like this. The take was live, Albini wanted to capture a snapshot of the group, without cheating. He was calm, generous in his field of expertise, he shared his gear, his secrets – we used his way of placing the microphones with very specific angles on our following albums. He was anything but a guru. He saw that we were there for his work and not to ask him questions about Kurt Cobain. We were reserved people.”
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For drummer Christian Pahud, “it was interesting to see the gap between the public person, the myth, and the real man, much less tormented and radical than in his positions on the recording industry or his playing of music. scene with Shellac. He lived in the studio with his partner, very nice, not at all the misogynist that his Rapeman project might have led you to believe. Rather, she was the one wearing the panties.”
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“His work ethic was anything but posturing. He recorded as close as possible to the sound of the group but refused any act of production. Only once did he want to take an aesthetic initiative by proposing an effect on a voice. He turned to us and said, “That’s not good, is it?” And it was indeed disgusting! (Laugh) He was very pleasant because he never got angry, not even annoyed when we restarted failed takes: he read his newspaper.
Francois Barras is a journalist in the cultural section. Since March 2000, he has been recounting current, past and perhaps future music.More informations
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