RIP Steve Albini. Punk rock writer, musician, and audio engineer.

I've heard gossip about later lives but I'll always remember Albini as this obsessive for a perfect punk rock sound. I read him first as a budding rock critic writing in this small magazine, Matter, often obsessing about DIY studio recording his favorite noise. The rest was fucking around, pre-internet trolling effective now and then (funny and/or poignant; "Bad Penny," etc) but mostly tedious and annoying. His nerd punk voice sounds cornier now. But his punk rock/noise rock sound still packs a punch, punishing Roland drums and a mangle of violent guitars, long knives slashing, clashing in a clangorous, grandly horrific, grudge match of killer robots. He'll likely be remembered for records he helped produce more than the records he played on. Surfer Rosa. In Utero. His re-recording of '70s Cheap Trick, by me anyway. But Albini's punk rock sound was the first thing he got straight. Consider  "Cables," leading off 1983's Bulldozer, the first Big Black record I heard: Violent, histrionically angry, vaguely sexual in a creepy way, prone to spasmodic outbursts of frustration and derision. A Punk Rock Tuesday honorarium.