#worldofecho

Since his passing 21 years ago, NYC once-footnote Arthur Russell has enjoyed a long upswing in popularity and anthologization – the documentary, the posthumous albums, the indie boosts by people like Grizzly Bear and Jens Lekman. However, among the volumes of folk songs, chamber music, and weird, winsome disco he left behind, Arthur released one album in his lifetime that combines yet eludes all those things. It’s a magnum opus. Every bit of it rings true. And it sounds like unlistenable mush the first several times one hears it.

1986’s World of Echo is the only LP where our hero is the sole musician front to back, mostly consisting of voice and cello. But Arthur’s cello isn’t some baroque “Eleanor Rigby” thing; it grinds and buzzes through the record awash in echo, reverb and distortion. Much of it consists of the creator’s old disco 7-inches as Dinosaur L, Loose Joints, et al recast as disco without beat, with all rhythmic backbone removed until the given composition is a rattling, indistinct ghost of itself. Arthur’s lonesome tenor sounds slovenly here, wandering tentatively in and out of the sound, hardly finishing what it begins. Song structures are nearly naught.

It is mush sometimes, but it’s really, really great mush. This is not abstracted noise, ambient or drone; it’s the sound of a pop-and-disco-fixated mind in flux. From a primordial nothing, an utterly unique and haunting melody will unexpectedly reveal itself before disintegrating again. In “Place I Know / Kid Like You,” that moment arrives at the midpoint with the line “My friend said something that put me on fire.” Without a beat underpinning it, this version of “Wax The Van” rushes forward for two minutes in a fascinating tangle. With all borders removed, what once belonged in the discotheque is allowed to spill out into the ether.