QCA Music: Arthur Russell

The above is a trailer for an excellent film about gay musician Arthur Russell entitled, Wild Combinations – A Portrait of Arthur Russell.
Wild Combination is a film about gay American cellist, composer, singer, and disco artist, Charles Arthur Russell Jr. Russell’s use of unlikely pairings of sounds helped establish himself as a forerunner of modern music. He also dabbled in disco, for which he is perhaps best known, but also combined orchestral instruments with pop-stylings following in the vein of the Beatles, punk rock, and even some Indian and African music (incorporating drums, mantras, and refrains into his tunes). His vocals reveal a gentle, graceful folk quality both transcendent and painful that fall somewhere between lullabies and art songs. In his latter days, he eventually pioneered “echo music,” songs whose instrumentation and distorted vocals evoke the acoustics of large spaces, caverns, and skies, surely influenced by his rural upbringing and Buddhist spirituality.
Russell was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa in 1952. Before moving to New York in 1973 at the age of 22, he had lived in a Buddhist commune and studied Indian music in California. His early years in the city included a stay with Allen Ginsberg, an East Village address shared by punk maestro Richard Hell, and collaborations with Philip Glass and John Cage. He ran with filmmakers, painters, performance artists. During his own lifetime, Russell somewhat avoided the limelight, releasing his albums under different pseudonyms and sabotaging his creative collaborations by being unable to relinquish control. Russell died of AIDS on April 4, 1992, at the age of 40. In an April 28 column, Kyle Gann of The Village Voice wrote: “His recent performances had been so infrequent due to illness, his songs were so personal, that it seems as though he simply vanished into his music.” His estate rests in the hands of his then-boyfriend.
Russell was prolific, but was also notorious for leaving songs unfinished and continually revising his music. Musician and producer Ernie Brooks said that Russell “never arrived at a completed version of anything,” while Peter Gordon stated, “his quest wasn’t really to do a finished product but more to do with exploring his different ways of working musically.” He left behind more than 1,000 tapes when he died, 40 of them different mixes of one song.
The film is really worth seeing, and if you’ve never heard him, do yourself the favor of listening to a few of his songs right after the jump…

THIS IS HOW WE WALK ON THE MOON: This tune was recently used in a T-Mobile cellular telephone commercial. Note the simple strings and drums combo along withe the refrain, “Each step is moving me up” cut up and re-organized throughout the song. The titular line is garbled through a vocoder, all trends of electronic music.

A LITTLE LOST: The lyrics of this love song are playful and simple. Russell used to create songs while his boyfriend worked his 9-to-5 job and then sang them to him when he came home. Some of these songs were love songs. This sounds like one of them.

THAT’S US/WILD COMBINATIONS: This upbeat song builds up slowly at first, but incorporates echo lyrics with a kicking drum line and a catchy keyboard. The song actually sounds a little like Paul Simon.

A SKETCH FOR THE FACE OF HELEN: An example of the “echo music” that began to typify Russell’s style near the end of his life. Orchestral, epic, and moving, though perhaps a little abstract, like Philip Glass or Radiohead.