Ok . MORE Arthur Russell (But This Is Great)

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.

he worked on something with kurtis mantronik but apparently they didn't mesh well

the lawrence book says they got together a couple of times and enjoyed talking about music but ultimately kurtis thought russell was too weird

as i have read the book i have obviously completely and utterly forgotten all about this. I shall keep dreaming that it was actually the best thing ever.

Oh man, this looks good, I didn't realise that more of this performance existed.

https://arthurrussell.bandcamp.com/album/sketches-for-world-of-echo-june-25-1984-live-at-ei

On an evening in late June of 1984, Arthur Russell lugged his cello down to Centre Street in Soho, to his friend Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation, a large room in which sound searched for, and continues to find, new expression. Here, Arthur set up his equipment, which his companion Tom Lee remembers could be an excruciating process of plugging and testing and waiting. As contemporary listeners of Arthur’s ever-expanding catalogue, it’s perhaps easy to position this moment in terms of Arthur’s known trajectory—on this June evening, he was two years away from distilling this material into his solo opus World of Echo, and also from receiving the HIV/AIDs diagnosis that would cut short his vivid and restless musical career.

Harder than establishing a trajectory, however, is the task of entering Arthur’s labyrinthian musical mind. Sketches for World of Echo, Arthur’s live performance at Niblock’s space, now rewards listeners with an unprecedented chance. On this ethereal progression of songs which blend into one another almost hypnotically, their only punctuation a few coughs and some clapping at the end, we hear a thirty-three year-old laying out a kind of sonic draft for World of Echo, the only solo album he released before dying in this same city at age forty. Niblock remembers this rich stage of Arthur’s style acutely, and would capture it again, on a PCM recorder a year later in this same room, in the collaborative film Terrace of Unintelligibility. On this summer evening, though, Arthur experiments in real time with the effects of amplification on his 18th century cello, and with swinging his voice alternately between purposeful incomprehensibility and brief clarity. Snippets of lyrics rise from the performance thirty-six years ago, but often, Arthur decides to abandon clear language, and blends his voice with that of his cello, trying for an ongoing mesmeric atmosphere. Pieces of the future World of Echo float up briefly, namely in “Let’s Go Swimming.” A version of the ever-melancholic “Losing My Taste for the Nightlife” unfurls softly over the cello’s light rhythm. Meanwhile, the hovering, almost gilded stretch of cello-and-tape in the previously unheard “Sunlit Water” transports us elsewhere for more than ten minutes, a heavenly ending meditation. As ever with Arthur Russell, each new release pushes back our sense of this idiosyncratic, deeply imaginative composer’s horizon. Sketches for World of Echo now joins the rest of the music in Arthur’s huge and gorgeous ocean, into which he invites us to listen live for the first time, and to, in his words, go swimming.

Whaaaaaattt

Oh my god thank you so much for posting this because it's given me a chance to cop the limited edition cassette. Not many copies so be quick people!

Yeah thanks maresn3st, I copped one, too!

Hopped on top of
This this morning

Beautiful.

good looking out, cheers

grabbed one too. Didn't know about this performance at all. Gorgeous. Thanks Maresn3st

is this same as the Roulette set that was up earlier?

https://roulette.org/event/arthur-russell-2/

No, this new thing is a solo performance from a year earlier.

XXPs - welcome!

about five minutes in and goddamn this is good

At first I luved drone monolith that suddenly slid into foreground of "Changing Forest," but, as tends to happen with naked drones, ones without guitars etc. I slid from caffeine to zzzz, however woke up and stayed awake for all other tracks, especially re the amount of thick crunchy sustain and sometimes fuzz bundled with outright cello, behind and within mellow vocal flexing; cello is lone voice, articulate as hell, on "Sunlit Water."
But also, this was released last summer, news to me!
Amazon customer review:

reviewer: plunderphonica
5.0 out of 5 stars
in the gentle undersea rhythms of a coral reef the Blue Tang displays his dreamy coloration
Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2011
This is a 4 track disc clocking in at 29:14. The first three tracks represent a reissue of the "Let's Go Swimming" twelve-inch single released on Logarhythm in 1986 [LR-1002-1]. "Let's Go Swimming (Gulf Stream Dub)" & "Let's Go Swimming (Puppy Surf Dub)" were on Side A. "Let's Go Swimming (Coastal Dub)" was on Side B.

The final track, "Make 1,2 (Gem Spa Dub)" is a previously unreleased 11:09 version of a song which appeared a few years ago on Calling Out Of Context. On that album, it was a 2:50 window into Arthur's world. This echoey, throbbing behemoth was recorded sometime between 1986-1990 and it is a gem.

This release comes with an insert. It's a six panel fold-out b/w poster of Arthur lying in the sand on a beach, bundled up against the cold, and completely absorbed in the act of singing into a microphone.

There are no liner notes. Inside the gatefold, there are some limited production and session details.

In his book "Hold On To Your Dreams," Tim Lawrence quotes Simon Reynold's Melody Maker review of LR-1002-1: "This is impossible dance music, jumbling your urges, making you want to move in ways not yet invented, confounding your body as it provokes it. In its tipsy mix, I seem to hear Can, Peech Boys, Thomas Leer, Weather Report, hip hop, but really this is unique, original, a work of genius."

As Audika Records moves forward by looking back into the Arthur Russell archives, I hope they'll release a similar package focusing on the various mixes and versions of Dinosaur's "Kiss Me Again" from 1978. If they have control of that song, that is. If not, then I'll settle for a massive box set compiling all 40 "Let's Go Swimming" tapes! There must be a killer country version lurking lurking in a drawer somewhere...

yeah that's Let's Go Swimming EP is sublime, I have it on vinyl

"Sunlit Water" is flat out incredible on this new one, all-enveloping and gorgeous