Ok . MORE Arthur Russell (But This Is Great)

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/

wow, thanks!

God damn, this is beautiful, thanks so much!

it really is great!

It really, really is, pity I there's no download option. I loved the 20 min video from Phil Niblock's flat that surfaced years ago and this has exactly that same atmosphere.

right-click and "save as", worked for me!

yeah, you can "save audio as" and get the mp3

Wow, this is amazing, thanks for the heads-up--yeah, as long as I right-clicked on the timeclock, saving as mp3 worked for me

Incredible find. I love this. Thank you for sharing here.

XXXP - Thanks guys, I was clicking the wrong bit of the player it seemed, got it now, awes!

Oh my! What a wonderful thing; a revelation! So many of my favourite AR songs some in prototype form. I'm welling up listening to this and it was recorded on my 17th birthday which somehow makes it resonate all the more.

Yeah this is wonderful indeed.

just lovely

Amazing!

Marvelous, thanks so much for sharing tyler!

I saved it by going to the link via plain Chrome, no Incognito, and clicking on those three dots at after the audio icon--didn't even have to use Sound Pirate (which works in plain Chrome, that's why I went there that way).
In case this goes away, here's the lowdown, for people of the future:

Arthur Russell
Saturday, March 2, 1985. 9:00 pm
The influential and profoundly brave cross-genre artist (1951-1992) presented “The Deer In The Forest,” and other extended vocal compositions with his ubiquitous amplified cello.

Update 2019: With Peter Zummo, trombone, and possibly Elodie Lauten or Steven Hall on Casio keyboard. Considered early versions of songs that became more focused later. For example, Each Step Is Moving (around 7 minutes in), is substantially This Is How We Walk On The Moon, which wasn’t released until 1994, posthumously. In this concert Russell was experimenting with repeated phrases and lines, as if testing them out, which likely emerged later in more developed versions.

of all the post arthur passing releases or shares- this is the one for me

This live set plus World Of Echo and Another Thought are sure helping me deal with this bullshit

tim lawrence's bio of arthur russell "hold on to your dreams" is quite good. pretty good balance of focus on his work vs. his personal life.

i wrote this tweet about one of my favorite revelations from the book:

I’m learning from “Hold On to Your Dreams” by Tim Lawrence that Arthur Russell collaborated with almost every NYC musician of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but I was still shocked by the reveal of this anecdote pic.twitter.com/HFypGCOhTS

— n1ck amm3rman (@somelanguage) July 21, 2020

that's a wild one

oh yeah gary lucas posted the tape of that somewhere a while back, it's wild indeed

if you go to my tweet, there's a follow-up tweet with a youtube of the music they worked on together. it's pretty bad. some very basic stripped-down '80s beats from russell and terrible rapping from vinny d

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wet2Kla6c9c

vin is further from the pocket than chief keef

I had heard that story but didn't know that the recording was on YouTube. It's really not great.

Imagine if Arthur had worked with some rappers who were actually good...

As he co-founded Sleeping Bag Records he must have had the chance to consider working with some good rappers.

I also dream that there is an unreleased collaboration with Kurtis Mantronik languishing in a vault somewhere.