In our Pioneers series, we illuminate the genius of the most influential artists and producers in musical history. This month, we're talking Steve Albini, a musician, producer and engineer whose uncompromising approach helped to shape the sound of albums from Nirvana, Pixies and PJ Harvey.
You may wonder why MusicRadar – a website that would rather holiday at a synth-packed and rain-soaked Superbooth in Berlin than lay on a beach in Bermuda sipping cocktails – would put Steve Albini, a famously stubborn anti-studio-tech producer (in fact, a famously stubborn anti-producer) on any kind of pioneer-labelled pedestal.
Well, just as superheroes don't always wear capes, so pioneering studio whiz-kids don't always use the latest 3D soft synths, cathedral-modelling convolution reverbs, 200GB orchestral libraries, and AI. Steve Albini didn't go anywhere near any of that lot in his production career, nor did he even – according to him – have a production career. But it's this kind of anti-establishment, anti-technology, anti-normality attitude that actually made Albini such a studio pioneer.
