It’s rock: Carminho took fado to the studio of Steve Albini, Nirvana’s historic producer, and left there with 4 songs

NThere is no record that producer and sound engineer Steve Albini has ever been moved by a fado record. It is known that, of the hundreds of albums he recorded — from Pixies to Nirvana, from Breeders to PJ Harvey, from Whitehouse to Jesus Lizard — none of them fit into this genre of ours, this Portuguese with nostalgia. That changed radically in October 2023, about half a year before the man who also fronted the band Shellac passed away, unexpectedly, at his workplace. It was in that month that one of the biggest icons of so-called alternative music met with Carminho and recorded four songs at Electrical Audio, Albini’s studio in Chicago (USA), which resulted in an EP — “Carminho at Electrical Audio” from its simple title — , made available digitally on October 11th and will also be released on vinyl in the second half of November.