Ok . MORE Arthur Russell (But This Is Great)

Plus in the documentary, you get to hear Mimi Goese's beautiful rendition of an AR song called 'Time To Go Home Now', which has yet to emerge from the archives (if it was even recorded at all), I got so curious about the song I asked Tim Lawrence, who drew a blank, so I then approached Mimi (via Facebook) about it and she wrote me this back -

hey,
thanks for your interest in arthur the magnificent. dick connette (he used the name A. Leroy) and I worked together in the 80's. I forwarded your request to dick and this is his reply:
Arthur Russell was a friend and musical colleague of mine going back to the late seventies. Mimi and I wrote and performed together for a while in the late eighties and early nineties. I asked Arthur if he had any songs that he would like us to do and he handed me lead sheets and home solo recordings of two - "Canvas House" and "Time To Go Home Now," both of which we played in public. It was only later, I think maybe even after Arthur died, that I discovered that, apparently, Arthur had written them both especially for us. I was retrospectively touched and honored.

Great to know, thanks! Wonder if he did that for anybody else?
Speaking of other people performing AR, Master Mix: Red Hot + Arthur Russell has quite a harvest, via Blood Orange, Robyn, Lonnie Holley, many others (2 CDs)
Wild Combination is worth getting on DVD for the extras, and speaking of Tim Lawrence, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 should be useful and entertaining, judging by his first book, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979, which I'm reading now.

That's a lovely anecdote Maresnest, thanks for sharing.

Thanks, it's such a lovely track, and crucially placed in the documentary just after Arthur passes away, with slow-motion shots of wheat fields iirc, very sad and beautiful, it really haunted me.

On a happier note, Mimi's record 'Soak' from which it is taken, is brilliant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF3dNllTzIA

wow, I have to rewatch that movie.

I can't remember if I heard Tell You Today before I heard Robyn's version. Both are amazing.

holy moly I am a big Hugo Largo fan but never knew any of this, it's been over a decade since i watched that documentary

thank you everyone for your responses. andy was working on recording all weekend so i just now came back to this wealth of information and well-considered recommendations. have ordered world of echo and world of arthur russell and very much looking forward.

i got world of echo from amazon, so it came with the "autorip" dealie. jammin` it now and i was just wondering if anyone knows what actual galaxy he was from? because i can say with a good amount of confidence it wasn't this one.

album is one of the most unique things i've ever heard. correct me if i'm wrong, but this is just him playing cello through various effects and singing, right?

got my copy of the world of arthur russell in the mail yesterday and have been enjoying it greatly during this morning's commute. i remembered exactly 0% of what this sounded like, so it's essentially new to me. really fine stuff; totally different from world of echo lol. very cool to have a peak into what must have been a really interesting scene at the time. really like 'in the light of the miracle' especially. i love the vague liquid liquid / esg / 99 records vibe it has.

Yeah, and I like "Waxing the Van" too---no metaphor there, far as I can tell: he's just waxing the van all over his face in the light of the miracle.

You gotta be clean on your bean in order for that hat to stay on.

Got home to a copy of 'Iowa Dream' in the mailbox--so excited for more Arthur. If this turns out to be even half as good as 'Love Is Overtaking Me' I'll be thrilled.

Mine should arrive tomorrow. Excited.

it sounds good:
https://daily.bandcamp.com/2019/11/15/arthur-russell-iowa-dream-review/

Some of it is startling. Just when you think maybe you're acquainted with the length and breadth of his output, more amazing things appear.

Yeah, whole thing is now on bandcamp (I pre-ordered CD, ain't sorry)
https://arthurrussell.bandcamp.com/album/iowa-dream

this is lovely. jeez how much more could there be?

this is unbelievable. absolutely enthralled by it.

agreed. is there anything this guy couldn't do? title track is just joyous, bursting with life

this is nuts. I don't know anything about the state of the archives, but how is this stuff just coming out now? For me this is much better than Love Is Overtaking Me. Just wow. Gorgeous.

It's fascinating to see where his head was at before punk/disco and all the rest.

This is $10.99 on CD at Deep Discount, FYI (deepdiscount.com) vs. $14.98 on Amazon (I'm not a shill, I swear!). This is one of those select releases where I'm resisting the temptation to listen on streaming before I can hear it for the first time on non-lossy media.

How fresh and 'of now' can recordings of thirty odd years sound. Genius.

words of love is my favourite after one listen through

Moderator request to pls change the thread title to Ok . MORE Arthur Russell (It's all Great)

"She's walking to the train, I think I hear it, she's walking to the train, I think I hear it." Word--so much quiet momentum here, so much in it, so far I can only listen in maybe 15-20 minute segments: a kind of miniature box set effect, unique in my experience (whole thing is timed at 62:04 by my veteran Sony boombox)listening also on plain ol' Koss UR-40 headphones). Re lossy, meant to do comparative listening w stream, but haven't yet---bandcamp should be fine, though, as it usually is (for my Koss, anyway).
re jeez how much more could there be?, a friend of mine was a neighbor of his, and often saw him walking around with big studio headphones plugged into his Walkman, and my friend refrained from saying hello or even nodding, because Arthur always looked like he was in or past the middle of something, really really coming to a big decision---though this went on for years, and we now know that he would frequently end up doing yet another mix, or starting over with the recording, and/or putting the material away and going on to something else---in between walking around and around New York, listening---and driving his label crazy. So there could be a lot more.

Beautiful post dow <3

I can just picture him running around, seemingly always on an Important Mission.

80% still unheard http://www.dustedmagazine.com/features/778

evidently he was always on an Important Mission

I'm going to have to give this another shot, my first listen I couldn't do it; there just didn't seem to be much of a spark there.

Sadly, I'm with you akm.

I'm with most of you; this album is absolutely destroying my world. I remember reading an interview with Steve Knutson around the time Corn came out where he basically said everything from the archive worth releasing had already been released. Unbelievable, then, that in 2019 Audika drops a folk-mode Arthur Russell comp that's even better than Love Is Overtaking Me. It's also great that Come to Life finally has a proper home. I've been obsessed with that song for 10 years, probably my favorite AR track after Wild Combination. The credits also reveal who did those angelic background vox--Mihr'un' Nisa Douglass, whose only other credits appear to be singing on Van Morrison's Inarticulate Speech of the Heart (which has sent me on a tangential early-80s Van kick) and the 25th Anniversary performance of Terry Riley's In C.

There's also this awesome thread of clear-headed psychedelia permeating Iowa Dream, especially on the mid-70s tracks like Everybody Everybody, Iowa Dream, Come to Life, etc.-- a kind of surreal childlike wonder + oblique, cyclical chord progressions over propulsive rhythms. It's a zone I could live in forever. And You Are My Love has brought me to tears more than once--such a sweet, direct love song that's sentimental in the best ways possible. Also Barefoot In New York is so wild and weird and hilarious. I'll stop raving now, but if you're on the fence about checking this thing out, DO IT

...a kind of miniature box set effect, unique in my experience...

― dow, Thursday, November 21, 2019 2:00 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

This is OTM

you speak well to the zone

:)

re AR walking around and around, dressed as The Decider etc., and the artistic payoff still emerging, I'm especially struck by this but in Jenn Pelly's review:
In “You Did It Yourself,” Russell seems to be experiencing yet another moment of endearing self-sabotage (“You did it yourself/It keeps you down”) and also reflecting on a “thrilling” film he saw “last night”: “Understood all of it very well/I didn’t like the ending though/Maybe I’m crazy but it just seemed tacked on.” The pieces of his sung critique stream by like a river. Russell was prone to the unresolvable, to the nonlinear, to atmosphere over concrete. The miracle of his catalog is how the seams mend together, stitch by stitch, a different way forward, as if creating no “endings” for himself

But also, becoming ace at envisioning daily deaths of the heart, as in the killer finale, "In Love With You For The last Time," though of course you gotta come back to life for another last time, in his cycles especially.

this *bit* in Jenn Pelly's review, which I meant to link:
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arthur-russell-iowa-dream/

Unreleased Loose Joints instrumental and acapellas for RSD 2020

https://aboveboarddist.co.uk/rsd-2020-loose-joints-is-it-all-over-my-face-40th-anniversary-inc-masters-at-work-kon-remixes-west-end-records/

wish they would release "Let'd Go Play Baseball" from that insane mix linked upthread, but this is pretty cool even if it's just all versions of 1 tune

still being knocked out by Iowa Dream, so great.

Me too. It's just as good as Love Is Overtaking Me

This may be a silly question, but how is it possible for labels to still be putting out 'new' Arthur Russell material (or indeed material from other artists that was recorded decades ago)? Are there just loads of recordings sitting around that nobody's got around to releasing, or are there legal issues involved, or do they not think that there's a market for this stuff?

w/r/t Russell in particular, Steve Knutson has the rights to the archives and there is still a ton of unreleased material from what a friend who knows him tells me

weirdly it seems like the Loose Joints stuff and some other things are via Sleeping Bag and hav different rights situation as shown by the reissue linked in the revive

Are there just loads of recordings sitting around that nobody's got around to releasing, or are there legal issues involved, or do they not think that there's a market for this stuff?
i think audika doesn't want to just unload tons and tons of stuff — russell was notoriously protective of his music and they want to do it right.

yeah that matches what I've heard secondhand

yeah, i mean, it'd be nice to have more, but you can't argue with knutson's quality control so far.

Agreed that Steve Knutson has done a great job.

from Rolling Jazz 2020:
https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/to-cy-lee-instrumentals-vol-1

The music of "To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1" contains naturally elegant orchestration wrapped around something visceral and primordial. Swirled inside the 11 pieces are shades of Japanese Min’yo folk, Celtic folk, the Ethio-jazz of saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya and hints of the pan-human ‘ancient music’ that sat underneath Arthur Russell’s melodies on First Thought, Best Thought. The music is filled with space, inspired, he says, by computer games and Japanese animation, particularly Joe Hisaishi’s.

this is exquisite

― calzino, Wednesday, March 11, 2020 6:26 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

nice! was just going to ask about that one--it hasn't crossed my radar at all, but Mekurya, Arthur Russell, and Castle in the Sky are all among my favorite things and I didn't expect to ever see them grouped in a music blurb

btw, I don't care where we talk about IA, but there is this thread if you missed it: International Anthem: S/D

― rob, Wednesday, March 11, 2020

live set from 1985 — sounds amazing. also sounds like there were maybe four people there.
https://roulette.org/event/arthur-russell-2/