Russellmania
The musical archive of the late Iowa-born cellist and electronic composer is now available in the UK and Europe. Andrew Male lends an ear to the first batch of four.
Arthur Russell AUDIKA/ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP
CHANCES ARE, if you are a fan of Arthur
Russell in 2021 it’s largely down to the work of Steve Knutson and Audika Records. The custodian of Russell’s musical archive and estate since 2004, over the past 17 years Audika have reissued such original and hard-to-find LPs as 1986’s minimalist voice-and-cello masterpiece World Of Echo and the block-chord minimalism of 1983’s
Tower Of Meaning, alongside game-changing archive collections such as the agitated pulse-pop poems of
Calling Out Of Context, the unguarded country-folk of Love Is Overtaking Me and the graceful, melancholy home demos of 2019’s Iowa Dream. In the process, the range, context and significance of Russell’s genius has expanded from left-field, New York-based avant-garde club innovator to 20th century musical polymath, who has influenced everyone from Frank
Ocean to Floating Points and, in the process, changed the face of 21st century music.
However, and it’s a significant however, hard copies of Audika’s US releases have rarely been locatable or affordable in the UK, so it’s only right and proper that it’s through Rough Trade, who originally released World
Of Echo in 1986, that these records will now be more accessible. The only solo vocal LP released under his own name in his own lifetime, it’s fair to say that, 35 years on,
World Of Echo (★★★★★) still stands as Russell’s masterpiece.
As with all of Russell’s vocal works it is emotionally rooted in his childhood, growing up in the corn belt town of Oskaloosa, Iowa. Playing piano at six, cello soon afterwards, Russell was a child prodigy who soon drifted into teenage aimlessness. Arrested for vagrancy in San Francisco, he was released to the custody of a local Buddhist commune where he played cello for fire-walking ceremonies and joined the commune’s country band(!) before studying minimal composition at the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music. Recorded in 1984, 10 years into his career as a club music innovator with outfits such as Dinosaur L, Loose Joints and Indian Ocean, and later described by Russell himself as an exercise in “vivid rhythmic reality”, World Of Echo paints the picture of a solitary soul caught between past and present, love and loneliness, the warm sedative blanket of decaying cello rhythms and the cave reverb of his own voice simultaneously seductive and haunting. The words, chosen more for sound than meaning, and often accompanied by jags of cello feedback, reveal that resonant Arthur Russell melancholy, the eternal farm kid realising he is alone in the New York night, and that “the centre’s worse, too/And the answer is/It’s all/Ending/Darkness.”
World Of Echo was released in 1986. In 1987, Russell was diagnosed HIV-positive. He continued recording, playing gigs, building a studio in his apartment, and working on a handful of album projects right up to his death in 1992. One project, another collection of voice-and-cello songs for Philip Glass’s Point Music, appeared in revised form as the posthumous Another Thought in 1994, while material intended for Rough Trade and a more autobiographical work called Corn was then brought together on the seismic Calling Out Of Context
(★★★★★) in 2004.
A celebration of Russell’s late-period club minimalism, the audible influences of rap, electro, acid house and post-punk made strange, Calling Out
Of Context takes World Of Echo’s forlorn, floating soul and the fluid euphoria of Russell’s slender voice and drives it forward with skeletal dance rhythms, electro bleeps and run-out-groove feedback. Along with Soul Jazz Records’ 2004 compilation, The
World Of Arthur Russell, it re-contextualised Russell for a new generation of DIY bedroom musicians; this cross-sectional polymath became their new patron saint.
It’s this audience, and not the one of his peers, that embraced Audika’s 2008 release, Love Is Overtaking Me. A collection of folk, pop and country songs recorded between 1973 and 1990 that revealed Russell at his most tender and autobiographical, his unguarded narrative style, wry poetic profundity and quiet melodicism anticipating the music of Bill Callahan and The Magnetic Fields. That album shifted perceptions of Russell once again, so that by 2019’s Iowa Dream (★★★★) Russell was, as Lucy Schiller states in her linernotes, an artist “something close to the mainstream…”
Focused on tracks from the start of Russell’s career, including home recordings, lost songs and major label try-outs for Mercury’s Paul Nelson and John Hammond at Columbia, these raw, intimate demos (restored by American musician Peter Broderick) can be disarmingly honest (I Wish I Had A Brother) and goofily romantic (I Still Love You) but best demonstrate Russell’s Buddhist belief that the universal can be located in the prosaic. Here are transcendental bubblegum pop songs about sitting on sidewalks, going to school, or watching a film with an ending “that just felt tacked on” (You Did It Yourself). Russell once described bubblegum pop as “the notion of pure sound [as] a reality”, and that’s perhaps the best way to understand what he was searching for during a painfully short 20-year period of creativity: different ways to locate an unadulterated, absolute state through music; the Buddhist ideal. As such, it’s instructive to compare Iowa Dream to the double LP
Instrumentals (★★★★★), composed around the same time. Designed to accompany a slide show by his Buddhist teacher Yuko Nonomura and recorded live in New York and Berkeley in 1975, with a downtown NYC supergroup comprised of Ernie Brooks, Julius Eastman, Rhys Chatham and Peter Gordon, these melodically exquisite, rhythmically complex “songs without words” at first seem attuned to the avant-garde world of Robert Ashley and Robert Wilson, and creative forbears such as Charles Ives. However, it now becomes apparent that the works were of a piece with the songs on Iowa Dream, another attempt by a different route to harness “the notion of pure sound as a reality”. It is a mark of Russell’s genius that he could locate this in both ’60s bubblegum pop and ’70s New York minimalism. It is thanks to the archive work of Steve Knutson and Audika Records that we can now hear that as well.
“A musical polymath who has changed the face of music.”