When Arthur Russell died—at 40 years old, from AIDS-related illnesses—in 1992, he had only released one ‘proper’ LP, 1986’s World of Echo. But he’d been hugely prolific, endlessly recording, and occasionally releasing, an ever-evolving array of songs. He left behind over a thousand reel-to-reel, DAT, and cassette tapes. This archive has, over time, been turned loose unto the world, most notably with the compilations Another Thought (1994) and Love is Overtaking Me (2008).
Russell’s music is best known, and loved, for the way it gathers all manner of incompatible influences, and genres, and turns them into something singular, unique. Russell was at once an avant-garde composer, a disco producer (largely as Loose Joints and Dinosaur L), a country strummer, and a starkly-beautiful songwriter murmuring sad nothings in desolate, death-streaked songs set to a solitary cello.
Russell’s music is best known, and loved, for the way it gathers all manner of incompatible influences, and genres, and turns them into something singular, unique.
Born in small-town Iowa, Russell grew up amid the cornfields and conservatism of post-war America, but his relocation to New York led him to both improv gallery shows and queer-club dancefloors. His songs are situated at the nexus of down-home and downtown, rural and urban, dissonant and melodic, experimental and accessible, musique concrète and discothèque pop. He played with Talking Heads and members of the Modern Lovers, and was friend and collaborator with Allen Ginsberg; the pair calling their musical communions “Buddhist bubblegum”. This confluence of influences made Russell out of time, and place, in the ‘80s, but a veritable patron saint for the third millennium, with its endless blurring of musical, cultural, and sexual boundaries.
After two 2004 compilations—The World of Arthur Russell and Calling Out of Context—brought brand-new attention, Russell’s music has been covered by Scissor Sisters, Sufjan Stevens, and Robyn, sampled by Kanye West, used to sell mobile-phone plans, and has influenced Blood Orange, Julia Holter, and Owen Pallett. The life his music has taken on after his death makes Russell a happy example of an artist achieving the posthumous success they never knew in their day.
While Russell left behind a cache of amazing recordings, he left little other ‘content’. Recorded interviews and filmed footage of him are incredibly rare, almost non-existent. So, for fans yearning for more, there’s only one real source: the 2008 documentary Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell. Where most rockumentaries fall somewhere between rote promotion and shameless fan-service, debutante director Matt Wolf, who’d go on to make the excellent Teenage (2013) and Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019), fashions something far more precious.
A drama chronicling a decade in a tortured, toxic, on-again/off-again marriage between two young men in turn-of-the-millennium New York, Keep the Lights On solely employs Russell songs.
Rather than employing celebrity talking-heads, interviewees are almost entirely close-to-home: Russell’s parents, his partner, his friends. Their testimony paints a portrait of an artist riddled with conflicts, a classic studio boffin who struggled with life beyond recording. He was obsessive, elusive, secretive, a control-freak; someone thought by others as “strange” and “eccentric”. He wanted to be successful, but bucked at even the most basic careerist trappings. He was at once a workaholic and a self-saboteur, always making music—recording every day—but never finishing it.
He worked on his most famous song, ‘That’s Us/Wild Combination’, for five years, only for it to never come out in his lifetime. It’s about childhood family holidays, and the photographs taken before leaving (“that’s you, me, on self-timer/we’re leaving at five in the morning”); one of numerous Russell compositions to contrast a big-city musical sensibility with lyrics from the farmland.
His most evocative words come with ‘Close my Eyes’, a folky, acoustic song that’s also about pre-dawn anticipation; filled with flowers, fields, morning light, and “watery dew”. It’s striking to hear it employed at the start of Ira Sachs’ 2012 film Keep the Lights On, in an opening-credits prologue that montages vintage, seemingly-homemade queer artworks, depicting men in water-colours, oil paintings, and sketches, in various states of undress and sexual congress.
World of Echo’s stark cello scrapings give a doomed, haunted quality to random sex, drug use, and the comedown from both.
A drama chronicling a decade in a tortured, toxic, on-again/off-again marriage between two young men in turn-of-the-millennium New York, Keep the Lights On solely employs Russell songs. It leans on the plurality of his output; the fact that there’s a Russell cut for every mood. World of Echo’s stark cello scrapings give a doomed, haunted quality to random sex, drug use, and the comedown from both. The sunny male/female harmonies of ‘Come to Life’ colour a rural escape. ‘Big Moon’s’ boisterous excitement matches a surprise party. ‘I Like You!’ both suggests and soundtracks newly-minted attraction at the disco. And, finally, the uplift of ‘This is How We Walk on the Moon’—with its hook “every step is moving me up”—symbolises finally being able to walk away from a doomed relationship.
In How to Survive a Plague, David France’s 2012 documentary about the AIDS epidemic and ACT UP activism in the 1980s/‘90s, Russell’s compositions are incorporated into score; situating his music in the environment in which it was made, and the greater cultural story that surrounded his death. Rather than his mournful minimalism conveying the gravity of the situation, instead Russell songs —’That’s Us/Wild Combination’, ‘Soon-To-Be-Innocent-Fun/Let’s See’, ‘Keeping Up’— are employed to signify defiance, survival, celebration.
These are all qualities found in his music, and its ongoing cultural significance. Towards the end of his life, Russell composed his whispered, skeletal, cello-and-voice pieces due to being weak from disease. But the strength of the songs has Russell living on, in that spectral way of artmakers; thriving in a time more welcoming of both his music and his sexuality.
When Arthur Russell died—at 40 years old, from AIDS-related illnesses—in 1992, he had only released one ‘proper’ LP, 1986’s World of Echo. But he’d been hugely prolific, endlessly recording, and occasionally releasing, an ever-evolving array of songs. He left behind over a thousand reel-to-reel, DAT, and cassette tapes. This archive has, over time, been turned loose unto the world, most notably with the compilations Another Thought (1994) and Love is Overtaking Me (2008).
Russell’s music is best known, and loved, for the way it gathers all manner of incompatible influences, and genres, and turns them into something singular, unique. Russell was at once an avant-garde composer, a disco producer (largely as Loose Joints and Dinosaur L), a country strummer, and a starkly-beautiful songwriter murmuring sad nothings in desolate, death-streaked songs set to a solitary cello.
Russell’s music is best known, and loved, for the way it gathers all manner of incompatible influences, and genres, and turns them into something singular, unique.
Born in small-town Iowa, Russell grew up amid the cornfields and conservatism of post-war America, but his relocation to New York led him to both improv gallery shows and queer-club dancefloors. His songs are situated at the nexus of down-home and downtown, rural and urban, dissonant and melodic, experimental and accessible, musique concrète and discothèque pop. He played with Talking Heads and members of the Modern Lovers, and was friend and collaborator with Allen Ginsberg; the pair calling their musical communions “Buddhist bubblegum”. This confluence of influences made Russell out of time, and place, in the ‘80s, but a veritable patron saint for the third millennium, with its endless blurring of musical, cultural, and sexual boundaries.
After two 2004 compilations—The World of Arthur Russell and Calling Out of Context—brought brand-new attention, Russell’s music has been covered by Scissor Sisters, Sufjan Stevens, and Robyn, sampled by Kanye West, used to sell mobile-phone plans, and has influenced Blood Orange, Julia Holter, and Owen Pallett. The life his music has taken on after his death makes Russell a happy example of an artist achieving the posthumous success they never knew in their day.
While Russell left behind a cache of amazing recordings, he left little other ‘content’. Recorded interviews and filmed footage of him are incredibly rare, almost non-existent. So, for fans yearning for more, there’s only one real source: the 2008 documentary Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell. Where most rockumentaries fall somewhere between rote promotion and shameless fan-service, debutante director Matt Wolf, who’d go on to make the excellent Teenage (2013) and Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019), fashions something far more precious.
A drama chronicling a decade in a tortured, toxic, on-again/off-again marriage between two young men in turn-of-the-millennium New York, Keep the Lights On solely employs Russell songs.
Rather than employing celebrity talking-heads, interviewees are almost entirely close-to-home: Russell’s parents, his partner, his friends. Their testimony paints a portrait of an artist riddled with conflicts, a classic studio boffin who struggled with life beyond recording. He was obsessive, elusive, secretive, a control-freak; someone thought by others as “strange” and “eccentric”. He wanted to be successful, but bucked at even the most basic careerist trappings. He was at once a workaholic and a self-saboteur, always making music—recording every day—but never finishing it.
He worked on his most famous song, ‘That’s Us/Wild Combination’, for five years, only for it to never come out in his lifetime. It’s about childhood family holidays, and the photographs taken before leaving (“that’s you, me, on self-timer/we’re leaving at five in the morning”); one of numerous Russell compositions to contrast a big-city musical sensibility with lyrics from the farmland.
His most evocative words come with ‘Close my Eyes’, a folky, acoustic song that’s also about pre-dawn anticipation; filled with flowers, fields, morning light, and “watery dew”. It’s striking to hear it employed at the start of Ira Sachs’ 2012 film Keep the Lights On, in an opening-credits prologue that montages vintage, seemingly-homemade queer artworks, depicting men in water-colours, oil paintings, and sketches, in various states of undress and sexual congress.
World of Echo’s stark cello scrapings give a doomed, haunted quality to random sex, drug use, and the comedown from both.
A drama chronicling a decade in a tortured, toxic, on-again/off-again marriage between two young men in turn-of-the-millennium New York, Keep the Lights On solely employs Russell songs. It leans on the plurality of his output; the fact that there’s a Russell cut for every mood. World of Echo’s stark cello scrapings give a doomed, haunted quality to random sex, drug use, and the comedown from both. The sunny male/female harmonies of ‘Come to Life’ colour a rural escape. ‘Big Moon’s’ boisterous excitement matches a surprise party. ‘I Like You!’ both suggests and soundtracks newly-minted attraction at the disco. And, finally, the uplift of ‘This is How We Walk on the Moon’—with its hook “every step is moving me up”—symbolises finally being able to walk away from a doomed relationship.
In How to Survive a Plague, David France’s 2012 documentary about the AIDS epidemic and ACT UP activism in the 1980s/‘90s, Russell’s compositions are incorporated into score; situating his music in the environment in which it was made, and the greater cultural story that surrounded his death. Rather than his mournful minimalism conveying the gravity of the situation, instead Russell songs —’That’s Us/Wild Combination’, ‘Soon-To-Be-Innocent-Fun/Let’s See’, ‘Keeping Up’— are employed to signify defiance, survival, celebration.
These are all qualities found in his music, and its ongoing cultural significance. Towards the end of his life, Russell composed his whispered, skeletal, cello-and-voice pieces due to being weak from disease. But the strength of the songs has Russell living on, in that spectral way of artmakers; thriving in a time more welcoming of both his music and his sexuality.
