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Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell

A somewhat revelatory documentary
By RICHARD BECK  |  October 25, 2008
2.5 2.5 Stars

wildcombinationINSIDE.jpg

Get around to it: Belated props to Arthur Russell. By Richard Beck.
Arthur Russell’s music was “out of its time,” says former Modern Lovers bassist Ernie Brooks near the end of Matt Wolf’s documentary. He’s right. Russell’s strange, exquisite music — dance tracks, avant-garde cello-and-voice songs, pop tunes — has been enjoying a renaissance in recent years, but it retains a magical otherworldliness. This makes Wolf’s project an intriguing one. On the one hand, he wants a reconstruction of Russell’s life to explain Russell’s music, and this never happens. The many friends and collaborators who are interviewed think Russell was a weird, gentle genius — which we knew already. On the other hand, Wolf gets to include footage of Russell playing live and in the recording studio, and some of that — especially the grainy footage where he performs a song called “Eli” — is revelatory. There’s no explaining Arthur Russell. It’s best just to listen to his music. I hope Wolf’s documentary will encourage people to do precisely that. 70 minutes | Museum Of Fine Arts: October 30, 31; November 2, 5, 7, 8
Related: Get around to it, Dancing with himself, Let's talk about sex, More more >
  Topics: Reviews , Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Arthur Russell,  More more >
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ARTICLES BY RICHARD BECK
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  •   SONG OF HERSELF  |  August 05, 2009
    "Listen, I will go on record saying I love Feist, I love Neko Case. I love that music. But that shit's easy listening for the twentysomethings. It fucking is. It's not hard to listen to any of that stuff."
  •   DJ QUIK AND KURUPT | BLAQKOUT  |  June 15, 2009
    LA hip-hop has two threads, and DJ Quik pulls both of them. The first is g-funk, a production style that relies on deep, open grooves and an endless parade of funk samples.
  •   FLIPPER | LOVE  |  May 26, 2009
    Flipper formed in San Francisco in 1979, and they're remembered three decades later because of a song called "Sex Bomb" that's one of the funniest pieces of music I've ever heard.
  •   ST. VINCENT'S ACTOR GETS A RUN-THROUGH  |  May 26, 2009
    There were not one but two clarinets on stage at the Somerville Theatre on Tuesday night, and that gives you some idea of how intricate Annie Clark's chamber-pop compositions can be.
  •   LOCAL COLOR  |  May 28, 2009
    It's become a commonplace to say that "indie" is too vague to mean anything useful, but that's not actually true.

 See all articles by: RICHARD BECK

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