The Village Voice obituary read, “He simply vanished into his music.” Arthur Russell passed away at the age of 40 on April 4, 1992, and apart from the principal members of the New York underground, few cared. He left behind a musical mausoleum: 166 linear feet of tapes and papers residing in the New York Public Library — the analog remains of a man and his cello — a life spent restlessly experimenting, pursuing reinvention and chasing fame.
For Russell and his art, however, death was not the end, but the beginning of a new life.
Though he only released one album in his tragically short life, Russell’s varied, endlessly creative body of work has garnered an almost cult following in the past decade thanks to posthumous releases. With these archival compilations, folks have rightly begun to conclude what many of his peers did decades prior — Russell was a genius.
Born Charles Arthur Russell Jr. in Oskaloosa Iowa, he was desperate to shake the confines of rural America and chart his own path as a bonafide artist. Russell’s move to San Francisco in the late sixties netted his first major connection: Allen Ginsberg. The angelheaded hipster was Russell’s avenue into the avant-garde, shaping his trajectory as a classically trained cellist-based experimentalist. Ginsberg would later refer to his star pupil’s music as “Buddhist Bubblegum”. Like any champion of bold, exciting art, Russell found himself in New York City only a few years later. His impact can be found throughout the music of lower Manhattan during the 70s and 80s. He first gained acclaim for his deep involvement in the dance scene of the time, producing hits like Loose Joints’ “Is it All Over My Face?” and Dinosaur L’s “Go Bang!”. Russell also wandered into the avenues of New Wave, appearing as a contributor on an early version of the seminal Talking Heads song “Psycho Killer”. It is ironic then that, despite his notable influence in and around the thriving New York art scene, he is all but unremembered. Without his solo efforts, Russell would be nothing but a mythological specter whose existence can only be traced back to the grooves and scratches of those albums and 45s he produced.
Perhaps the greatest misconception about artists like Arthur Russell or The Velvet Underground is that their forward-looking, non-mainstream leanings meant they didn’t want some element of commercial fame — when in reality they did (see the rest of The Velvet’s catalog after John Cale’s exit, for example). Russell truly wanted fame. He wanted to make it big — and had nearly every opportunity to do so. Russell lined up major label recording sessions and auditions that were all fruitless due to his creative discontent and micro-managerial engineering. He was an insecure perfectionist, and it cost him in the industry. That’s why so little of his art ever saw the light of day while he was living. But ironically, perfectionism is precisely why Russell’s music soars.
“World of Echo”, Arthur Russell’s only album released while he was alive, is his most iconoclastic and revelatory work. A dark, introspective, minimalist meditation — Russell contorts his cello into breathtaking passages of experimentalism. Songs like “Soon-To-Be Innocent Fun/Let’s See” demonstrate Russell’s relentless toying with song structure, flowing between cohesion and fragmentation. It is a quiet, sometimes violent barrage of abstract noise — and it’s really quite spiritual. It is the sound of a man being in complete and total control of his artistry. He has unobstructed power over the force of his bow, the modulation of his voice, his distance from the microphone and the effects twisting and mutating the strings of his cello. It is pure mastery — a record that is totally, ultimately Arthur Russell. The sonic documentation of a revolutionary genius. But for all of his technical pioneering, he was deeply indebted to pop sensibilities. This side of Russell went all but unknown until a few years ago.