You would not guess, listening to his music, that Arthur Russell grew up in Oskaloosa, Iowa. In fact you might not guess that he came from anywhere. He spent almost his entire creative life in New York City as a dance-music producer, singer-songwriter, and avant-garde cellist before dying of AIDS in 1992. Russell’s exquisite, strange, watery records are not quite anxious or agitated, but they never settle down either. His was a kind of principled, half-voluntary homelessness.Most of us will nod in earnest agreement at the suggestion that the artist and the art are different — though not entirely separate — things, but we don’t really mean it. We want the artist’s life to explain the artist’s output. Matt Wolf’s fine new documentary Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, is, among other things, an effort to line up Russell with his music. It doesn’t quite make it. Russell’s friends and collaborators remember him as a gentle guy who was also very, very weird. He spent hours on the Staten Island Ferry listening to mixes of his own work. He was difficult to work with. He had trouble finishing things. One of the film’s interviewees suggests that the process of making was more important to Russell than the final product (I don’t buy it). None of this comes anywhere close to accounting for Russell’s music. The clips of Russell in performance or in the studio put all of Wolf’s evocative mood-making to shame.
Russell arrived in New York in 1973 and soon became musical director of the Kitchen, an avant-garde art space frequented by the likes of Philip Glass and Brian Eno. He didn’t really hit his stride until he started making dance records. He had a knack for pioneering. “Kiss Me Again” was the first disco single to be released on Sire Records, and “Is It All Over My Face” — yes, it is what you think it is — can claim both house and garage as not-too-distant descendants. He used all kinds of pseudonyms, releasing records as Indian Ocean, Dinosaur L, Killer Whale, and Loose Joints, to name a few. The last of those is attached to a more conventional dance track, “Tell You Today,” which is also one of his best. For four minutes, “Tell You Today” clatters along with cowbells, whistles, and a few brass players who have all kinds of trouble hitting the right notes. But with two crashing piano glissandos, everything congeals into a persuasive, funky four, and when Russell starts singing, his voice harmonizing with itself, you can feel a light go on somewhere. The track floats off three minutes later, basking in its own ravishing light.
As Russell’s many aliases were making themselves known on New York City dance floors, Russell himself was doing all kinds of other things. There is a series of playful, intricately composed “Instrumentals.” There is the almost medievally austere Tower of Meaning. There are also — almost unbelievably — country songs. Audika Records’ latest Arthur Russell compilation — there have been three others — Love Is Overtaking Me, is split between sweet, jangly, ’80s pop and country songs. Russell’s voice is usually processed through all kinds of reverb, but here, left on its own, it has a kind of flat warmth that is perfectly suited to heartland tunes. On “Close My Eyes” and “Maybe She,” Russell even sounds a little like — I really never thought I would be writing this — James Taylor or John Denver. This is not to say that Love Is Overtaking Me is a collection of masterpieces (it isn’t; some of these songs are silly), but Russell’s versatility is a little scary. Near the end of Wild Combination, we’re told that there are still hundreds of Russell tapes lying in storage facilities, and one could go crazy imagining the new Arthur Russell genre experiments waiting to be unearthed. What’s next? A collaboration with Black Sabbath? Rap?
To a certain extent, however, these are curiosities and add-ons. Russell wrote and recorded his most significant work with his voice and cello. A track called “This is How We Walk on the Moon” occupies the middleground between Russell’s avant-garde solo work and his earlier dance music. It starts out with an unaccompanied cello figure on the verge of distraction. He doesn’t dig into the strings. He plays across their surfaces, allowing wisps and overtones to play loosely across what turns out to be a strong, almost funky rhythmic core. Russell’s singing, when it comes in, is highly intuitive. His voice chases bits of inspiration. His enunciation is fluid, words dissolving and reconstructing themselves all the while (the main lyric is, “Every step is moving me up”). Halfway through, the melodic semi-improvisation stops and Russell’s voice suddenly reappears, routed through a watery synthesizer and stacked up in imposing harmonic towers. It sounds wholly alien. This is why Russell’s life is so hard to align with his music. His country songs tell you that he’s from Iowa, and they’re right. But this stuff tells you that’s impossible, and it’s better music. (Don’t be distracted by the stupidly literal video.)
