Fugazi Releasing Long-Bootlegged Steve Albini Sessions

Fugazi is officially releasing something of a holy grail for ’90s underground music lovers: the pioneering Washington, D.C. band’s long-bootlegged fall 1992 session with late producer Steve Albini for material eventually released the following year on the album In on the Kill Taker.

Featuring Albini’s entire original mix taken directly from the master tapes, the material is being made available as a name-your-own-price download on Bandcamp, with all proceeds benefiting the non-profit organization Letters Charity. Albini and his widow Heather Whinna were longtime supporters of the endeavor, which uses art as a conduit to transform passive compassion into immediate assistance through the distribution of money, given without expectation or judgment, directly to families experiencing poverty.

Fugazi picks the story up from here in a note on Bandcamp:

“In the fall of 1992, the members of Fugazi were deep in the process of finishing up the songs that would eventually come out as the In on the Kill Taker album the following year. The band had been working on the songs for a couple of years and had gotten as far as recording a few of them at [D.C.-area recording studio] Inner Ear as well as making numerous practice recordings, but by late October they seemed to have hit a bit of a wall. In an attempt to shake things up, it was decided that they would take up Steve Albini’s standing invitation to do a free recording at his Electrical Audio Studio, which at the time was located in the basement of his house on North Francisco in Chicago.

Fugazi and Steve had crossed paths numerous times over the years and had become friends and admirers of each other’s work. The band really appreciated Steve’s aesthetic, especially the early Jesus Lizard records and it seemed like the change of scenery would help them get a better perspective on the songs they had written.

In early November, a minivan was rented, loaded up with gear, and driven to Chicago by Ian [Mackaye] and Joe [Lally], while Brendan [Canty] and Guy [Piccioto] made the 12-hour drive in Brendan’s station wagon. They arrived at Steve’s house and immediately got to work. The original plan was to spend a weekend recording just two or three songs, but once everything was set up and the tape was rolling, they just kept on tracking.

The hang itself was epic and in the downtime, when they weren’t recording, a deeper affinity and friendship was quickly realized. Steve would show off his culinary skills making the group fresh pasta from scratch, after which they would all gather around his kitchen table to play Corickey, a dice game the band had taught him in London a couple of years before. This was a shared obsession and a constant feature of any time spent together. Steve would then traumatize the band with screenings from his collection of outré videos and they would spend hours talking about punk rock. The laughter was non-stop.

In those three or four days, 12 songs ended up getting recorded and mixed –the entirety of the eventual In on the Kill Taker album. During playbacks in Steve’s upstairs mixing room everyone was very excited by the results. However, once the band was driving back home to DC with cassettes of the rough mixes to check out it was clear that this was a session that wasn’t going to be released. The two vehicles met at a rest stop in Ohio and there both sets of band members realized they had come to the same conclusion independent of each other. It’s difficult to explain the issue, but, for as incredible as things felt while at Electrical, the songs sounded flat in subsequent listens. A few days after returning home, Albini wrote to the band with a similar opinion and it was decided to nix the recording.

Less than a month later, Fugazi went into Inner Ear Studio with producer Ted Nicely to make what would become the official In on the Kill Taker album which was released by Dischord in June 1993, while the so-called “Albini Session” was shelved. Though the Chicago recordings have been under lock and key for over three decades, some tapes have leaked out and poor-quality versions of some of the songs have ended up on the internet.”

Fugazi closed with a request for fans to “please be generous” when donating. The band has not played in public since 2002 although members allegedly jam from time to time in private and have turned down highly lucrative offers to reunite.