BIG AND LOUD

Steve Albini, bad wolf journo for Chicago's Forced Exposure, never went out of his way to win friends. Big Black, punk-brutal guitar-metal trio from the same windy city, starring Albini and cohorts Dave Riley and Santiago Durango, aren't the types to invite all the A&R men in for free. On a return visit to London to record their follow-up to 1986's white-hot Atomizer, a quick gig saw their record company Blast First compile a guest list of 227. Albini whips out a fan letter that's just turned up: inside, a girl who announces she's already tongue-lashed Albini in print starts accusing Steve the journo of being a "dancer-on-other-people's-graves" before ordering a place as No 228. Hmmm...

Steve: "When you're a secret, then the only people that come to see you are those who honestly have got some idea of what's going on, and now there's this hip element that's really repulsive."

So what's your ideal audience?

Steve: "Just guys, just people. Imagine the calibre of the people who come to see us now! A lot of haircuts, a lot of beards, even worse! I also hate those people who show up in their dyed black cheesecloth from head to with some satanic tattoo on their foreheads who think they're really in tune with you."

After Atomizer's exhilarating protest-and-survive onslaught--with child-molesting, wife-beating, pyromania. abattoirs, and kerosene as a solution--are Big Black getting distracted?

Steve: "Lately we're just protesting about the kind of audience we're getting. We cultivate it into our set." Sant: "We get up there pretty disgusted which infuses us with a sort of disgusted energy."

San Francisco must have been good then.

Steve: "We decided to make the show as much of a bummer as possible for the love children."

Dave: "It was the first time we had tomatoes thrown at us. Broken bottles and glasses too."

Headache is BB's new 4 track EP on Blast First. It's still fastball metal noise 'n' stuff, and Steve and Sant still wield their guitars like filed-down baseball bats, but it doesn't hang out on the precipice like Big Black can.

Steve: "It's mostly pretty good but I don't think it rages enough. It's not as melodic but it's really noisy and aggressive. Atomizer was more songs."

Dave: "We went to a different studio to write and put Headache together under different circumstances, so that might have contributed to the end thing."

Steve: "When we were working on Atomizer there were different ways to build a density in sound. One of them is everybody playing the same thing all the time at maximum velocity. This time each song has got a different approach to volume.

Some we tried to make intricate and some we kept simple. All of our records are basically shots in the dark. The record we're working on now kicks the shit out of Atomizer and Headache.

What do you want people to feel when exposed to Big Black?

Steve: "In a perfect world, it would make the same impression as it makes on us. When I put the needle down on one of our records, I just want to be enveloped by it. Whatever the mood or the sensibility. I want it to be all-encompassing, to knock people over."

Atomizer flattens you; Big Black's first two EPs, Lungs (Albini solo plus a drumbox-with-a-filthy-temper from Dec '82) and Bulldozer (Dec '83) have been released together as The Hammer Party on Homes-stead. Lungs pushes in comparison, Bulldozer, er, bludgeons.

Big Black's records are fine guitar noise, coiled up in all the right places. They are records you can dance to till you drop.

I got this from an unattributed clipping. From the cluelessness of the interview, I'd guess it was from one of the big 3 British music papers.