Can’t stop the hop
The prescient songwriter’s vast archive keeps delivering remarkable, surprising wonders. By Grayson Haver Currin.
Arthur Russell ★★★★★ Picture Of Bunny Rabbit
APRIL 2022 MARKED 30 years since the death of Arthur Russell, the creative whirlwind who succumbed to American apathy for the AIDS epidemic a month shy of his 41st birthday. Russell was hyper-productive in his 40 years, gliding through the interstices among multiple New York scenes – punk and disco, downtown experimentalism and folk traditionalism. But Russell bemoaned the idea of finishing anything, so he was not prolific in the typical commercial sense. During his lifetime, he offered a smattering of singles and scores and one finished album, World Of Echo.
Russell, however, has been prolific in death. His 1,000-hour archive of unreleased material has been carefully analysed and culled into a trove of anthologies and ad hoc albums, most reaffirming his position as a seer for our permissive times, for genre as springboard rather than fencepost. Three decades after his death, Russell’s output still feels like an aquifer without its own end. This nine-track set (subtitled: Code Only Faster: Crossing The Line From Vocal To Instrumental And Back) – built from two mastered test pressings found by his family and four spellbinding and challenging instrumentals spotted among his tapes – only furthers that feeling of limitlessness. Captured around the same time he was making
World Of Echo, and just before the diagnosis that doomed him, Picture Of Bunny Rabbit also synthesizes the duality of Russell’s cello songs, or how readily they swivel from sweet and wistful to plangent and pained.
One jewel from that former category, Not Checking Up, arrived previously on a Devendra Banhart-curated compilation. It’s louder here, though, the levels reinforcing the delicate interplay between Russell’s cello (which moves with the ubiquity and unsteadiness of ner vous breath) and his beautifully mumbled melody. The song sounds like an act of self-care, a break taken for just hanging out alone. Russell swings sweetly over an electronic gyration and pizzicato pulses on In The Light Of A Miracle, an aubade for the wonder of what’s coming next. Russell harmonises with his cello as it coils into something like a string quartet – joyous and stirring, like the sun leaping over snow-capped peaks.
But it’s the instrumentals that are perhaps most rapturous here. During a triptych of numbered pieces titled Fuzzbuster, Russell tangles with simple loops, his cello sometimes smearing over serialised guitar and keys like melted butter and sometimes squaring up to them in musical fisticuffs. During the eight-minute title track, Russell sounds like the lost comrade of Tony Conrad and John Cale. His cello hisses, growls, and groans, sparks flying from the long tones like a welder battling some impenetrable beam.
Exactly what kind of rabbit is this, captured in playing suited for Metal
Machine Music? A similar question emerges as Russell’s discography expands, complicating a picture that only gets more nuanced and curious with time. Even Russell’s most intimate recordings could make him feel like a phantom; as the details are filled in, the phantom expands.