MUSIC
Arthur Russell Revived: Hold On To Your Dreams
/ Thom Donovan
10.25.09
The 2006 posthumous Russell collection First Thought Best Thought expands orchestral music blending it with pop, serialist, ambient, free jazz, and Aaron Copland-inspired musical themes, while Russell's disco music blends funk, avant-garde, and folk elements, as well as instrumentation native to non-Western cultures. In Russell's late career, Russell was allegedly hoping to create a dance music without percussive instruments. In Audika’s 2008 collection, Love is Overtaking Me, Russell does all of the pop styles of the 70s more successfully than many of their originators. As in Stephen Merritt's 69 Love Songs (a project no doubt indebted to Russell) one hears post-punk, Fleetwood Mac, Dylan-inspired folk, country, electro, and Minimalism (a la La Monte Young/Tony Conrad). And all these musical styles are transmuted by Russell's unusual arrangements, his singular phrasing and playful lyrics, and the unmatched coeval nature of his voice and cello playing.
Through Russell's insistence and unmistakeable talent, he was always close to commercial success. As Lawrence explains, he was probably thwarted by an unwillingness to compromise in any way for the purposes of selling records, but also by the untimeliness of his vision. Listening to Russell in 2009, as many devotees will attest, Russell sounds "fresh," like his records could have been made yesterday.
Speaking as someone who has all of Russell's music on steady rotation, nothing compares to his album, World of Echo. The music exudes subtleness, fortuitous accident, and extreme craft. Even though we know from the album's liner notes that Russell used a convoluted series of contact mics, effects pedals, and electronic drum machines (operated by foot pedal) to compose the album, what we cannot know from the liner notes is just how important the studio process was to the making of the work. It is fascinating to read in Lawrence's biography how World of Echo was made, because it reveals an artist acting just as improvisational in the editing studio as in the recording booth. That so much of the editing process was fortuitous (to the studio tech working with Russell through the editing it seemed to him as if Russell was often recklessly recording over and 'bleeding' tapes from his sessions) makes me appreciate World of Echo all the more. It also makes me hear the recording better through a sporadic series of accidents, collisions, near misses, erasures, silences, truncations, and palimpsests).
Through Russell's insistence and unmistakeable talent, he was always close to commercial success. As Lawrence explains, he was probably thwarted by an unwillingness to compromise in any way for the purposes of selling records, but also by the untimeliness of his vision. Listening to Russell in 2009, as many devotees will attest, Russell sounds "fresh," like his records could have been made yesterday.
Speaking as someone who has all of Russell's music on steady rotation, nothing compares to his album, World of Echo. The music exudes subtleness, fortuitous accident, and extreme craft. Even though we know from the album's liner notes that Russell used a convoluted series of contact mics, effects pedals, and electronic drum machines (operated by foot pedal) to compose the album, what we cannot know from the liner notes is just how important the studio process was to the making of the work. It is fascinating to read in Lawrence's biography how World of Echo was made, because it reveals an artist acting just as improvisational in the editing studio as in the recording booth. That so much of the editing process was fortuitous (to the studio tech working with Russell through the editing it seemed to him as if Russell was often recklessly recording over and 'bleeding' tapes from his sessions) makes me appreciate World of Echo all the more. It also makes me hear the recording better through a sporadic series of accidents, collisions, near misses, erasures, silences, truncations, and palimpsests).
