Arthur Russell - Walking in the Light of a Miracle

A dark star, a sliver of light vanishing into the night. A Celine-like, severe image that, better than most, sums up the experience and life of Arthur Russell, a far-off star whose swift trajectory went unnoticed by nearly everyone, and whose singular aesthetic universe was fully understood by almost no one. At least until the revival wave of the 2000s made him the subject of a necessary, if no less striking, reassessment, finally doing justice to one of the very few figures in popular music entitled to bear the name "genius".

An introverted personality, individualist in his own way, entirely devoted to the obsessive expansion and refinement of his own music, Russell flirted with virtually every possible expression and scene, wringing more out of each one than anyone else, always a step further than anyone else, only to slip away just before being caught by the fossilizing gaze of critics and media. Minimalist composition, club culture, avant-garde, folk songwriting and post-punk lasciviousness thus make up the heterogeneous jumble of styles that helped (not) define his oblique, elusive identity.

Let's try anyway to keep up and bring some order to this muddle.

Who knows what grows in the morning light 

and down through the grasses so blue

Metamorphosis number one. From the prairies to mantras with Allen Ginsberg

Charles Arthur Russell was born in the spring of 1951 in a rural Iowa village. He was a child who grew up with all the typical traits of the enfant prodige: he mastered the piano before he was even eleven years old, and by fourteen he already had his first compositions under his belt, while his interests were already drifting elsewhere. In particular, it was the cello his mother brought into the house that caught his attention, until he decided to learn it with the initial aim of joining the school orchestra — though it would turn out to be the one true love of his entire life.

All this while he devoured atypical reading material, from articles on American avant-garde art to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, interspersed with a great many volumes of philosophy, which would open the door to his future passions for Buddhism and the avant-garde of John Cage.

All told, Arthur had a quiet, solitary and seemingly happy adolescence, in his rural home environment of books and tractors, until at eighteen the mild-mannered young man surprised his parents (his father had become mayor of the small town of Oskaloosa) by announcing he wanted to leave for San Francisco and join a Buddhist commune.

The West Coast was famously the top magnet for freaks and bohemians, and the San Francisco subculture in particular was emerging in those years as an extraordinary melting pot of possibilities and artistic and philosophical ferment: hippie movements caught between pacifism and the last remnants of the Beats, avant-garde-flavored installations and events on the daily agenda, with new philosophical-spiritual trends arriving from the East armed with books and bank accounts, offering their followers the promise of existential balance. The excited mind of the young provincial had only to dive in, happy and thirsty for knowledge.

Cello on his shoulder, orange robe on his back, Russell quickly settled into the city's culture. In this period, art and life were one and the same: Arthur went to live in the commune of a Mongolian guru, while by day he attended the school of the prestigious Indian master Ali Akbar Khan, where he learned the compositional techniques of the North Indian tradition. But it was another encounter that would end up turning everything upside down and leaving a brutal mark on this story: his meeting with Allen Ginsberg.

The legendary poet and thinker of the "beat generation" was at the time engaged in studying and promoting the Hare Krishna movement, which he also financially supported, and he brought Russell into his circle to record some mantras (fragments of which can still be found online today). The rapport between the two was exceptional: the ever-taciturn Arthur, barely twenty, learned with extreme ease and instinctively followed the master's "lines." A collaboration that went on for three long years, during which Russell set Ginsberg's readings to music, and which eventually culminated in a brief but intense romantic relationship between the two.

The split with Ginsberg in '73 was little more than a formality; between the two of them an affectionate correspondence would endure, alongside frequent visits and financial help, for more than a decade to come. Symbolically, though, it marked the end of a cycle: having left the commune, which required him to give up ownership of his cello, Russell also left San Francisco and opened another bold chapter of his journey. Bound for New York City.

The birth of the moment
Is never ending
Home away from home,

Home away

From home

Metamorphosis number two. A double somersault into the New York subculture

From the warm contours of California sunsets to the teeming, green-and-steel-decorated life of New York stretches a space that is not just continental in geographic terms. Arthur Russell crossed it at the end of 1973, chasing his own personal artistic obsession, which was making itself felt ever more insistently: finding the key to pop music. While enrolling at Columbia University (which he would abandon shortly after) and taking some electronic music courses at the Manhattan School of Music, he came into contact with New York's lively and renowned avant-garde scene, where he found a particularly cold welcome. The road ahead of him was steep and winding: Russell's early works, forward-looking even as they were still taking shape, were harshly criticized by the influential theorist and serial composer Charles Wuorinen, particularly regarding his bold composition "City Park," which featured readings of texts by Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, among others. Russell's apprenticeship was forced to find other paths forward.

In those years, while he could easily be found around town scraping together a miserable living playing in restaurants or behind a used-clothing stall, he received expressions of esteem and affection from Philip Glass, then at the start of an impressive career as a minimalist composer, who would become the second shadow, alongside Ginsberg's, destined to watch over the musician's entire path. Another friendship marked a decisive turning point, this time for his résumé: namely that with Rhys Chatham, who put him in charge of replacing him as artistic director of the small but important avant-garde cultural space The Kitchen.

A brief period, this "kitchen" chapter, but an extremely important one for Russell, the place where the seeds of all the parallel experiences of the cello-playing DJ had the chance to take root and develop.

Russell ran The Kitchen mostly along the lines of the minimalist avant-garde, hosting mainly obscure or up-and-coming artists, with special attention paid to music and performance art, until in 1975 he booked first the Modern Lovers and then the Talking Heads to play at the venue, to the horrified astonishment of industry insiders. Russell's choice to bring rock into a typically arty context was a significant and deeply symbolic one, a preview of what Laurie Anderson and David Byrne himself would soon go on to do — namely, closing the gap separating high and popular music, a process deeply characteristic of the American Seventies — but one that was not understood in that milieu at the time, and which marked the end of Russell's period at the venue.

In this period events moved at double speed. Russell set foot in what would become his storied apartment on 12th Street in the East Village, an electricity-less hole fixed up as best it could be, reportedly by Ginsberg himself, while artistically he found himself increasingly drawn to the world of rock, especially after he began frequenting CBGB's.

It is thus through the intercession of his most illustrious friend, Glass, that he deepens his relationship with David Byrne, who, after spending a few evenings together, begged him to join his band Talking Heads, at that time busy writing their first album. Russell turns down the offer due to "aesthetic differences" ("they all came from the School of Art... and besides, I had long hair," he would later explain in one of the very few interviews he gave), although he did appear on guitar at some of the "Talking Heads'" earliest live shows.

He instead finds himself more in tune with the personality of Ernie Brooks of the Modern Lovers, to whom he hands over a few pieces for voice and guitar, hoping for a collaboration. A band would indeed come to life in the second half of the decade, The Flying Hearts, featuring, alongside Russell and Brooks, Larry Saltzmann (guitar) and David Van Tieghem (percussion). More than for any recorded output it brought to fruition (none), the lineup matters as the core of an open-ended ensemble coordinated by Russell (which also included Byrne, Peter Gordon and Jerry Harrison), given to improvising through long, entirely instrumental sessions.

In Russell's project, more than forty-eight hours of music were meant to be accumulated, to be reassembled and played without interruption over two straight days. In reality, though, there would be only five gatherings, and lost amid the tangled discography of the era, only a handful of fragments would survive.

The derivative work that concretely emerged is the Instrumentals series, two volumes totalling less than an hour of music, released in an extremely disorderly fashion: the second volume came out first, on Another Side, a satellite label of Disques du Crepuscule (though not until 1984), while Volume 1 would lie neglected in the most forgotten corners of record companies for almost thirty years.

As mentioned, this is entirely improvised music, "with no idea whatsoever of what the final result would be," as Gordon would recall, with an evidently minimalist background but built using the instruments and devices typical of rock, starting with the title itself, a precise nod to that very idiom.

It is a composition (or rather, a "performance") unique of its kind, starting from a source that is in itself indefinable, shifting depending on context from a chamber ensemble of piano, clarinet, cello, trombone and marimba to a rock outfit of guitars, bass, keyboards and drums. Russell's gaze is cross-eyed and far-sighted at once, one eye on pop music – Canterbury and psychedelia – the other on the minimalism that, in that very year, was emerging from such eminent composers as Steve Reich, Terry Riley and his friend Philip Glass (it is, after all, the year of "Music For 18 Musicians", as well as of "Einstein On The Beach").

Repetitiveness is one of the key concepts of Russell's music, implicit, on closer inspection, in every one of its transformations and already perceptible in this handful of instrumentals: dismantling the notions of beginning, narrative and conclusion in favour of the possibility of tuning into the piece at any point whatsoever, stepping away from it and picking it back up depending on one's mood, rediscovering the same kind of connection without losing any essential evolutionary stage.

To go along with the mood of the moment, then, in this case a most precarious state of urban joy and melancholy, at once comforting and destabilizing. Sitting in a café watching faces and poses go by, or heading back home to one's domestic cocoon at the end of an intense, stimulating day, aware of taking part in an immortal ritual that knows no beginning and looks toward no end. Russell's art had already found its most mature expression in this most ill-fated of works.

Bang go-bang-bang go bang-o

Go bang-bang-bang, go bang-o, yay!

Metamorphosis number three. Wanna go bang!, or: anatomy of a mutant disco coupling

Nineteen seventy-seven, then, the year in which Philip Glass composes "North Star", while Meredith Monk is touring New York with her multidisciplinary performances ("Our Lady Of Late") and Brian Eno releases the ambient music manifestos Music For Airports and "Music For Films". All of this, however, momentarily fades from this story, at least on the surface.

The scene shifts instead to a gay club dripping with sweat and grime: New York, after all, never sleeps, and the mirror ball is there to remind everyone gathered of exactly that.

New York's disco scene is, first and foremost, a social phenomenon, made up of great turntable personalities and of clubs with strong, distinctive identities, among which Nicky Siano is the undisputed godfather at the legendary Gallery (before going on to rule Studio 54), while Walter Gibbons and Larry Levan are the standout names at Galaxy 21 and Paradise Garage respectively.

Our humble protagonist, with his "farmer's face", steps onto the scene fortified by his recent acceptance of his own homosexuality, approaching with a mix of prurient curiosity and genuine interest a genre, disco, in which he senses liberating potential and generous boundaries with no predefined limits. Russell begins a brief, stormy relationship with the Italian-American hairdresser Louis Aquilone, at the time a very close friend of Nicky Siano and a regular at the late-night Saturday scene.

It's Siano himself who, many years later, recalls Russell's debut on the scene: "After spending a few Saturday nights without Louis, Arthur finally decided to go out clubbing with him. By the third or fourth week he started coming without Louis. (…) His way of dancing was bizarre, oddball: he was in every respect a white dancer in a predominantly Black context."

The astral alignment, then, couldn't have been more favorable: on one hand our man's desire to experiment with popular music, on the other the right circle of acquaintances – Siano, Byrne and Will Socolov. Financed by Siano's "gallery", Russell writes and produces his first single under the pseudonym Dinosaur: the eccentric "Kiss Me Again", whose credits include names like Peter Zummo, David Byrne and Gloria Gaynor – a hugely popular disco hit that dissolves its soulful theme into a sophisticated exploration of pulsing basslines and shifting rhythms. Released by Sire, the single does the rounds of Manhattan clubs and is a decent commercial success, selling around two hundred thousand copies, but it struggles to break into the mainstream circuit. Above all, it's a one-off experiment with no follow-up: Siano's rise as the pope of New York's dj culture – an ascent that already carries within it the seed of its own ruin, white powder – and Russell's extreme fastidiousness are no longer compatible.

Their paths then diverge. While Siano is temporarily in California in a recovery community, Arthur frequents the innovative nights held at David Mancuso's court: his Loft is a small space for alternative nightclubbing, with no alcohol and no mandatory memberships, free food for everyone, open marijuana use, and above all an audiophile sound quality considered at the time the best in the city. In this club, which becomes a pilgrimage site for hippies and the gay community alike, Arthur Russell will forge his new, shapeless creature: Loose Joints.

In this project the horizons of disco expand further still, pushing toward rhythmic exploration never so influenced by Afro and tribal stimuli, and above all toward groove – undisputed credit for this goes to the "second man" involved in the experiment, Steve D'Acquisto, an eccentric student and dj devoted to improvisation and imperfection as artistic creeds.

This particular open couple (joined, in fact, by Steven Hall and various vocalists recruited at the Loft) completed three singles, probably the most complex and seductive episodes in our man's entire clubbing career: the unsettling "Pop Your Funk", a crossroads between dry funk and house undertones where the soul dries out into a knowing male whisper; "Tell You Today", a destabilizing house-leaning number seasoned with whistles, looped out-of-tune choruses and jazzy drifts, while for the first time typically dub techniques are introduced, such as the heavy use of reverb and echo and "bass" lines darker than usual.

The collective's true masterpiece, however, will be the formidable "Is It All Over My Face?", an extremely effective groove driven by a possessed bassline that pushes everything else – ecstatic voices, warm horn effusions and percussion – into a single backdrop. The single will later be turned into a club and radio-airplay instant hit by Larry Levan's memorable remix featuring a female vocal.

Russell's activity as a producer and dj becomes nothing short of frenetic in the early Eighties, appearing as a writer and co-producer on various projects under just as many pseudonyms: as Felix he delivers the excellent single "Tiger Stripes", a nocturnal disco-soul track with a hulking bassline; he becomes Lola for a handful of electro-funk seven-inches; he turns into Killer Whale for a few mixes of other artists' tracks (the "dub remix" of Signalsmart's "Radio Rhythm" is well known); and he wears the mask of Indian Ocean for the curious EP "School Bell/Treehouse", probably the most extreme experiment of the period, with rhythms and grooves stripped to the bare minimum – essentially a duet between percussion and cello.

Much of this output finds a home at the small label Sleeping Bag Records, set up by Russell himself together with Will Socolov (whose habit of sleeping in a sleeping bag is the origin of the name), which becomes a genuine beacon first for this kind of free-form, drunken disco and later, just as surely, for "old school" hip-hop.

All these flashes of disco genius, these scattered shards of eroticism confusedly woven into the enrichment of a form never satisfied with itself, which unwittingly already anticipated so much house and acid jazz to come, would have remained little more than archival curios and offhand divertissements for connoisseurs, had they not found an outlet and a justification in a more unified, substantial body of work.

The task of crystallizing this oblique, innovative formula into a full length therefore falls to 24→24 Music, for which Russell reclaims his original nickname Dinosaur (adding an 'L'), and the first LP released by Sleeping Bag Records, in 1981.

The title derives from the compositional device adopted of varying the rhythm every twenty-four bars, but at the same time it ambiguously alludes to the idea of a work running around the clock, circular, rich in recurring themes and with no real, closed-off development.

A short work (barely half an hour), with dim lighting and a rising temperature: the essence of the whole statement is probably contained in that filthy request concealed behind the single "Go Bang!": a killer groove exhaled from the spicy ménage à trois between a constantly mutating rhythmic bed, anarchic basslines and scorching organ phrases that nonchalantly cut through the coupling. More than the typical disco environment, this climate of gleeful perversion – even more disorienting when you consider the small, unassuming figure actually at work behind the decks – is in reality remarkably close to no-wave territory: amid the funky guitars and drunken saxes of "Get Set" and "In The Corn Belt" (James Chance is just around the corner), and out-of-tune voices chasing each other in the dark in urgent pursuit of servitude and sodomy, 24→24 Music seems to set up a disco club for punk veterans and assorted nihilists, an erotic drive and an effectiveness of formula that didn't fail to tempt illustrious names in the scene. Producer Bob Blank above all, but also the rising star of New York djing, Francois K., who remixes an alternate version of "Go Bang!" with vocals by Lola Love, probably making it Russell's most popular disco hit.

Even in these moments of (relative) fame, though, Russell keeps an extremely low profile; he can't, and has no interest in, cutting the figure of the synthetic dandy or the eccentric, charismatic disc jockey that would have instantly opened the mainstream's doors to him. On the contrary, even on his "hottest" nights he's often found in the shadows, reluctant to step into the spotlight, with the crowd sometimes astonished to learn that those lines and grooves were produced by that small white guy in a bricklayer's jacket with a face pitted by acne.

At the same time, Arthur Russell's fragmented personality wasn't built to tie itself definitively to any one of his pseudonyms: having found the key to pop music, at this point, all that remained was to throw the doors open.

It takes my whole time

I’m on another thought now

My eyes searching the real face

Of an angel

Fourth metamorphosis. Echoes and thoughts out of sync

Although Russell never stopped frequenting disco circuits, playing numerous nights and producing a handful of singles right up until a few months before his untimely death, from the early Eighties onward his gaze had already shifted elsewhere.

Settled on the personal front thanks to his long, intense relationship with Tom Lee – a faithful partner and confidant who would stay by his side for all the years to come, who would turn a blind eye to his sporadic infidelities, and who would go on to administer his posthumous artistic legacy – Russell worked with Laurie Anderson as a percussionist, was briefly drafted into the ranks of Ernie Brooks' new band The Necessaries, and, through the ever-present Glass, came into contact with Robert Wilson, for whom he helped score the classic "Medea".

For Arthur, this was the big opportunity to make the definitive leap in quality and join the ranks of the great minimalist composers of his generation.

Writing of the pièce proceeded intensely, but Russell, notoriously terrible at managing himself, with his aversion to discipline and fixed schemes, undermined the success of the collaboration: after a promising start, uncertainty and an obsessive fussiness over the composition took over, and after several skipped rehearsals, Wilson eventually decided to fire him.

What remains is once again an unfinished work. Originally conceived for voice and instruments, the piece that was actually completed nevertheless stands as Russell's most important legacy in the field of orchestral composition. Once again it was Philip Glass who gathered up the remnants and published them in an extremely limited edition as Tower Of Meaning on Chatham Square.

Alongside his actual output on various fronts, however, Russell always kept working, in the privacy of his home, on a remarkable quantity of songs and experiments for voice and cello – all the more striking when compared with the scant discography he left behind at the time of his death. This body of material was continually polished and expanded over the years, as he worked meticulously on every single detail, chasing an elusive perfection whose only outcome was a mass of material (estimated at around a thousand hours) condemned to remain forever "in progress".

This chronic insecurity was finally broken, however, in 1986 with the release of the most original, instinctive and personal work of his brief career: World Of Echo. Rarely does it happen, as it does in this essential, deafening monologue, that an artist merges so completely with his own work, camouflaging himself to the point of total self-erasure. The arrangements have never been so skeletal: with beats, grooves and orchestral motifs stripped away, what remains is an electrified cello, a handful of electronic effects and a voice so nakedly trance-like it borders on unsettling.

More than an album of songs, World Of Echo is in fact the flow of a half-waking consciousness, a hall of mirrors in which traces of lived experience, intimate desires and nervous impulses are refracted, materialised in the breath of voice and cello. Given its thoroughly spontaneous, hazy dimension, the album can only be a distillate of instability, phase shifts and reverberations that echo as if inside an aquarium, revealing in turns flashes of vibrant intensity ("Soon-To-Be Innocent Fun/ Let's See"), unexpected rhythmic qualities ("Answers Me") and lyrical ones ("Being It"). A mantra that absorbs and purifies, but one whose core and true hypnotic components remain, as such, impossible to dissect.

An extremely personal work also for the clear thread it draws through the artist's own path, resurfacing, disfigured, stylistic solutions from his more or less recent past (raga, dub reverberations) and chewing over self-citations from his earlier compositional output ("Tower Of Meaning") and his gay-disco years ("Wax The Van", "Treehouse") – a hermetic, seductive work that ultimately can only be recognised and partially explained in the name of its author.

A one-of-a-kind album, for which it is still impossible to trace any direct relatives, World Of Echo garnered a fair amount of critical acclaim, thanks to a mini-tour that saw Russell performing a series of shows for cello and electronics alone, and above all thanks to the attention of Melody Maker, which included it among the most "significant" records of 1986, letting it ride a long wave of esteem and relative popularity throughout the following year. Russell, though, had little interest in chasing sales figures, and was once again at work in his small apartment, constantly reworking old and new songs, this time aiming for a formula closer to the song form than ever before.

Fate, however, had already begun working against him, planting the seed of destruction in the midst of this last great burst of creativity. Shortly after the release of World Of Echo, in fact, following a clandestine encounter one night, he was diagnosed with HIV, which forced him into a long course of chemotherapy. It was the kind of news that would upend anyone's life, yet it was met with unusual composure by Arthur and his partner, without disrupting their usual routines – chiefly clubbing and writing at home – and it deepened, with even greater poignancy, the musician's bond with Tom, to whom a good portion of the new songs would be dedicated.

Despite themes that are for the most part sunny and positive, Another Thought inevitably takes on a very particular depth. With this collection, Russell set out to deliver a handful of more clearly defined songs, with an almost singer-songwriter approach: more than a monologue, Another Thought is a sequence of short stories, ballads with refined lyrics and clearer contours, while the impassioned vocals continually sway between a barely-concealed, almost childlike fragility and a velvety sensuality reminiscent of the soul of Terry Callier, an artist Russell had privately championed ever since his arrival in Manhattan.

The first half of the album is thus made up of minimalist serenades for voice and cello, disarming in their simplicity and intensity: from the radiant melody of “A Little Lost” to the bare-bones blues of “See-Through Love,” where every single sound trembles with an indescribable emotion, all the way to the featherlight trumpet-and-congas ditty of “This Is How We Walk On The Moon” (to this day one of his best-known songs) — a handful of vignettes of transparent, crystalline grace unfold, which to burden with further comment would only mean sullying.

The second half of the record favors instead more abstract, psychedelic and loosely structured solutions: the lyrics are very often reduced to essential phrases repeated with different tones and emphasis, backed by richer arrangements that draw on Byrne-style exoticism and on synth-pop to drive totalizing amorous ecstasies (“My Tiger My Timing,” “In The Light Of The Miracle” – the latter featuring Elodie Lauten on backing vocals) or quiet reflections and private nostalgias (“Me For Real,” “Losing My Taste For The Night Life”).

What emerges is a hybrid record, in Russell's plans a step toward another theorized project that would never see the light of day: a larger work that would have included a small brass ensemble, echoes and “open air” recordings, tied back into pop structures. An album that, in the end, picks the song-form back up with the sole purpose of definitively dismantling it, a kind of spiritual testament from the musician — Another Thought would nonetheless not arrive on record for another seven years, thanks above all, once again, to the interest of Glass, who would release it posthumously on Point Music in 1994.

One, No One And A Hundred Thousand

Russell died in April 1992, at the age of forty, forever bound to the list of names, famous and otherwise, lost to AIDS between the late Eighties and early Nineties, leaving behind more than a thousand little tapes of unreleased material and remixes scattered around his New York apartment, jealously guarded by Tom Lee, who would go on living in that very room for another fifteen years.

For about a decade the curtain — one that, in truth, had never fully risen in the first place — came down over him, until in the 2000s a series of reissues and anthologies surprisingly put his name back on everyone's lips, bringing numerous declarations of love (most notably from Jens Lekman) and lavish covers (“Janine,” performed by Tracey Thorn).

Starting in 2004, then, came the first, crucial releases of unreleased material, accompanied by a biography (“Hold On To Your Dreams,” by Tim Lawrence) and a documentary (“Wild Combination,” by Matt Wolf, presented at the 58th Berlin Film Festival).

Nothing short of essential is the album Calling Out Of Context (2004), which brings to light a side of Russell that never had the chance to fully emerge in his lifetime, namely the one most influenced by hip-hop and Eighties-style electronics. The record collects the mini-album “Corn,” originally intended for Sleeping Bag Records but rejected at the time by Socolov (an episode that marked the break between the two), alongside other unreleased gems from the period such as the splendid “That's Us: Wild Combination,” “The Platform On The Ocean” — two of the tracks most reworked and revisited by the composer — “Calling All The Kids,” produced and remixed with Walter Gibbons, and other material intended for the electro project 1-800-Dinosaur, sketched out for Rough Trade and belonging to the long list of Russell's “unfinished” works.

In 2006, meanwhile, justice was done to the more minimalist and contemporary Russell, with the release of First Thought Best Thought, a double LP that, after more than twenty years, reunites his “Instrumentals” with “Tower Of Meaning,” with the addition of some succulent unreleased tracks (“Sketch For The Face Of Helen”).

Another essential release within the Russell universe is the compilation Love Is Overtaking Me (2008), a collection of no fewer than twenty-one tracks, exceptionally granted by Lee and spanning different periods. What emerges here is an unprecedented Russell, a folk troubadour behind brilliant guitar ballads that connect, on one hand, to the finest American singer-songwriter tradition (John Martyn, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell), but also throw a bridge toward the more austere, intimate shores of Nick Drake. The record thus ranges across moods (the sweetness of “Nobody Wants A Lonely Heart,” the ironic “What It's Like”) and styles (the country of “I Forget And I Can't Tell,” the crooner ballad “Love Comes Back”), with the hushed, tender “Goodbye Old Paint” and the bouncy “Janine” standing as the undisputed peaks of this disarming collection, which highlights yet another facet of a disintegrated personality.

A personality that continues to gain new shades in subsequent anthologies, among which stands out Iowa Dream (2019), a melodic tribute steeped in Americana to his rarely acknowledged home state. While small lessons in style like “I Never Get Lonesome” (country: the reference is Townes Van Zandt), “The Dogs Outside Are Barking” (pop: the reference is Jackson Browne) or “Sharper Eyes” (folk: the reference is Jackson C. Frank) confirm his renowned skill at engaging with tradition, a tear-jerking serenade like “You Are My Love” goes beyond even his already stratospheric standards, while “Everybody Everybody” shows just how little it takes to put together a perfect song. But don't get too comfortable, because we're still talking about a loose cannon: and so, when you least expect them, out pop “Barefoot In New York” (practically a patchwork of “The Murder Mystery” and “Sense Of Doubt”) and “Just Regular People” (can you imagine “Blue Jay Way” reimagined by Robert Wyatt?), as well as the syncopated post-punk-funk of “I Kissed The Girl From Outer Space.” The cello stays on the sidelines but, when it emerges, reminds us what an ace instrumentalist Arthur was: see the title track, which dusts off the carefree power pop of Necessaries, not without a touch of nostalgia.

Among all the posthumous releases, Picture Of Bunny Rabbit captures one of the artist's most fertile periods, drawing on recordings made shortly before his masterpiece, as well as the only album released in his lifetime. Granted to the press by Arthur Russell's sister and mother, the album offers a glimpse into the musician's work intended to serve as a soundtrack for ballets and theatrical productions. Russell's tools were always essential and basic: a cello, a voice, effects, and plenty of imagination. Picture Of Bunny Rabbit shares with World Of Echo the harrowing pain of an AIDS death already foretold.

The nine tracks thrive on contrasts between solid and fluid forms; the instrumental scrape and the fragility of the voice take on the traits of an alien, pervasive musicality, particularly on the splendid, turbulent and dissonant title track. The pop and singer-songwriter inclination is barely perceptible, unpredictability always lurking, and it's hard to follow the complex compositional structures without resorting to a good dose of imagination and madness. Even the words follow no pattern, often resembling grains of sand thrown to the wind, as in the blues-like “Not Checking Up,” or crushed between the lips to the point of sounding like a bloodless lament, as in “Telling No One.”

Murky melodies and passionate surges create yet another creative oxymoron; the overflowing sensuality of “Boy With A Smile” and the harsh beauty of “Very Reason” are enough on their own to justify interest in this new unreleased document. Two splendid forays into the same imaginative world as Vini Reilly (“Fuzzbuster #06,” “Fuzzbuster #9”) and the daring cut-and-jam version of “In The Light Of A Miracle” (from “Another Thought”) firmly underline Arthur Russell's visionary power and further expand his creative universe.

Arthur Russell, deep down, was exactly this. Looking back at the trajectory of a talent cut short right at its peak, what stands out clearly is a fragmented self that never settles into and is never consumed by any single form, but instead absorbs and soaks up everything, coming close to the pinnacle of an extreme impersonality, after which nothing is left but to find a grotesque and equally radical form of authenticity. A paradox that Russell embodied like few others, emerging as an individuality that existed entirely on its own terms, one that outstripped everything and that, necessarily, will outlive everything.

Contributions by Ossydiana Speri ("Iowa Dream")

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