The World of Arthur Russell

Arthur Russell

album cover

An Introduction to . . .

Arthur Russell's world was really many worlds. The cellist, songwriter, and singer from Iowa was a part of the highbrow "new music" and multidisciplinary art scene at the New York performance art space known as the Kitchen. He provided backing for Allen Ginsberg's poetry readings. But Russell (1951–1992) was also the artist behind the first disco single on Sire Records—"Kiss Me Again," credited to Dinosaur L—and part of a rock collective called the Flying Hearts that sometimes included future Talking Heads singer David Byrne.

This single-disc collection, one of several to surface since Russell's death, from AIDS, in 1992, focuses on dance music. It does have a steady backbeat, but it's not exactly the same thing Justin Timberlake fans think of when they want to party. Russell favors cool open-ended chords and oddly careening sound effects, many involving his multitracked cello. The vocal phrases are fairly straight-forward—"Is It All Over My Face?," which has been cited as a key influence on the U.K. garage scene, is defined by repetitions of the title hook. But what surrounds them is often defiantly off-kilter and deliciously strange. It's art music for the dance floor.

Though much of this music was created in the early to mid-1980s, it aligns, sensibility-wise, with the cut-and-paste sample-wrangling that erupted a decade later. Russell's ideas about texture, and collision, presage some of the more radical fringes of electronica, just as his pop songs, collected on Calling Out of Context, anticipate the more recent work of Four Tet, Juana Molina (see p. 511), and others who create soundscapes on laptops rather than in recording studios. Russell never hit commercial paydirt, but his music points the way to a future where distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow become irrelevant.

Genre: Electronica
Released: 2005, Soul Jazz
Key Tracks: "A Little Lost," "Wax the Van," "Go Bang," "Treehouse"
Catalog Choice: Calling Out of Context
Next Stop: Various Artists: Journey into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story
After That: Ned Bartsch's Ronin: Stoa
Book Pages: 665–666