Code Orange recalls legendary sound engineer Steve Albini
“We wanted it to feel more … more alive,” Jami Morgan said of the most recent Code Orange album, “The Above.”
And so the Grammy-nominated Pittsburgh hardcore/metal band turned to the man who had worked those wonders for the likes of Nirvana, PJ Harvey, Pixies, and The Jesus Lizard.
They ventured to Electrical Audio in Chicago to work with legendary engineer Steve Albini. The music world lost the 61-year-old noise pioneer, famed for such bands as Big Black, Shellac, and Rapeman, on Tuesday when he died of a heart attack.
The Code session was arranged through the band’s A&R man at their new label, Blue Grape Music.
“He brought up Steve and I was like, ‘Dude, if he’ll do it, that’ll be a dream,’ ” Morgan said in a phone interview Thursday from an LA studio session.
As it turned out, Albini had a studio assistant who was a Code Orange fan and nudged him to take on the project.
“Basically, the plan was to just go, record there for a couple of weeks,” Morgan said, “and just bang out all the instruments and all the main band stuff — play in a room, a lot of it together.
“Then, in our typical fashion, we’d kind of take that and hybrid it together with a lot of the digital stuff we had done and demos we had done and it would become a bit of a collage. But there would be this overarching live element.
“So we wanted to put it in somebody’s hands who would let us get in there and just make it sound great, and that would be kind of like the extent of the involvement.”
They didn’t have any contact with Albini beforehand. When they arrived at his studio in late 2022, Morgan says, “we knocked on his crazy little door” and they encountered “a sweet, sort of neurotic guy who considers himself a technician. He wears like a plumber outfit.”
“We were nervous going in with this big producer, like, ‘What’s he gonna think of us?’ And in reality, he didn’t think of us. That’s really not what he does. He doesn’t really even have an opinion on anything, which I think is awesome.
“At the same time, he was very
supportive. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, I don’t have an opinion, like I don’t care.’ It’s like, ‘I do care and therefore, you should just do your [ expletive] thing.’ And he would hear little things that he loved and he would tell you what he loved.
“He was really drawn to how interconnected we all were and how we finish each other’s musical sentences in a lot of ways. That seemed to put a real smile on his face.”
Albini, not surprisingly, was not the kind of engineer — he bristled at the word “producer” — who was looking at the clock. He was relaxed with time.
“He makes these awesome coffees,” Morgan said. “They’re kind of like sweet, and he calls them ‘fluffy coffees’ and he literally goes upstairs for like an hour and a half and just makes each singular person one of them. It was awesome. Sometimes, the other guys will make it, but a lot of times he’ll just go and make it.”
“That said a lot about him. He wants it to be a communal, enjoyable experience, in his own curmudgeonly but also awesome and kind way.”
In terms of the result, Morgan said, “I just knew that the drum sound [would be great]. He built his whole room for sound. He handconstructed it so the walls are at a particular angle and, of course, he’s got particular mics everywhere. The fact that we could all basically jam in the same room was really beneficial.
“For me, being kind of neurotic at times about what the end product should be, it was kind of scary. But stepping back, it’s crazy that it was even scary because it’s ... Steve Albini. He really allowed us to lead the process, basically.”