Arthur Russell made contemporary music as well as disco and often something in between. Today, Russell is a mythical figure whose self-image has been tried to be drawn out after the fact, writes critic Arttu Seppänen.
Experimental / album
Arthur Russell: Picture of Bunny Rabbit. Audi.
★★★★
The most amazing discoveries in life often start from not realizing anything at first.
When I heard Arthur Russell (1951–1992) for the first time, the impression created was a half-shaped cello peeking out of the underwater grass, like Picasso’s drawn by A broken reality, of which there was no opportunity to take a successful still image in order to curb one’s own restlessness.
Who imagines such a world? The reaction to the confusing and seemingly wrong-sounding music was both repulsive and interested.
Fortunately, humans tend to be naturally curious.
The American composer and cellist Arthur Russell died in 1992 of AIDS at the age of 40. His career was cut short. A huge amount of unpublished material was left behind.
More than ten years passed until Steve Knutson got an idea. The former of Tommy Boy Records, which focused on rap, basically sent his own label Audika Records. It began to focus on publishing Russell’s music.
Over the past 20 years, Knutson has gone through Russell’s archives and compiled new publications. He has done archival work in cooperation with Russell’s close circle. The composer’s life partner Tom Lee has made all the tapes available to Knutson.
Thanks to the project, more and more people have discovered Russell’s music and started to understand it. During his lifetime, he did not have time to publish much music. He had devoted followers already in his time, but a small number.
At least At first glance, Knutson didn’t like Russell’s music, let alone understand anything about it.
Knutson has told in interviews how he tried to turn up his stereo while listening to Russell’s new album World Of Echo (1986) to find out even something. Little did he think at the time that publishing Russell’s music would one day become his life’s work.
20 years of work is now coming to an end. Knutson has said that Picture of Bunny Rabbit is likely to be the last major Russell archive record for him. As a publication, it is a kind of closing of the circle: the material comes from the same time as World of Echo.
Russell did contemporary music as well as disco and often something in between. Imagination somewhere in an unlocated gray area has made Russell a mythical figure, whose self-image has been tried to be drawn out afterwards.
Picture of Bunny Rabbit does not present anything radically new, but illustrates one more wobbly earlobe from that self-portrait. If this is Audika’s last Russell release, it will be a fitting finale.
Publication has been worked on during the annual trade, while Knutson has been sitting on a huge pile of material. Russell’s approach to music was a perfectionist, which ultimately made his songs praises of unfinished business, with few things ever being finished.
It was typical for him to strum one and the same song for hours and try different approaches. As if he had planned all along that someone else would compile the best bits for publication later.
Performed on cello and guitar Fuzzbuster– there are three different versions of the instrumental on the album. They tie together a collection that is one of Russell’s most understated. Instead of disco-Russell, the focus is cello and vocals.
A fragment is not the same as an unfinished, but as a poetic reference point it communicates together in Russell’s way of making music. Russell created World Of Echo to a kind of techno-utopian dialogue with the real world.
In the one born at the same time Picture of Bunny Rabbit in the material Russell seems to be reaching towards naturalness. When our thoughts and perceptions of the world are often incoherent brain fog at the moment of birth: noise, colors, language, desire and emotions, protection mechanisms.
Containing scattered thoughts Telling No One, The Boy With a Smile, Not Checking Up and Very Reason describe those moments.
Like music that understands fragmentation and incompleteness resonates in a time when our faith and need for all-encompassing and unconditional explanations of the world is unprecedentedly great in its desperation and our ability to offer these explanations has significantly weakened.
Picture Of Bunny Rabbit the title track is its best. It is an improvisation lasting more than eight minutes with cello and effects.
It is playful, as was its author, although in retrospect, according to Knutson, there have also been attempts to make Russell a misunderstood and tragic figure, although in fact he had many networks and opportunities in his life that he himself chose not to use.
Russell’s music was a wild and untamed imagination of the world. End of the album In The Light Of A Miracle showing glimpses of it to the curious as if dazzled by a strobe.
Indie, folk / single
Sufjan Stevens: So You Are Tired. Asthmatic Kitty.
★★★★
Sufjan Stevens returns to the bittersweet but lush chamber folk with which he broke through in the early 2000s. The first single from the album, which will be released in October, has all the Suffeli elements that fans love. They have So You Are Tired slowly growing into colorful splendor like a well-tended garden.
At the base is an impressionistic piano and a wistful whispering song, for which a favorable growth environment is created with folk guitar strumming, vocal harmonies and strings.
So You Are Tired is a personal-sounding breakup song that flips through the scrapbook after tears and doesn’t shy away from seeking comfort even through the gusts of bitterness that arise from the initial shock. Lyrically, the song’s strength is presenting itself as the weak side.
The upcoming album may contain some surprises, but the biggest one would be the tour. Stevens hasn’t toured since Carrie & Lowell (2015) album.
Folk / album
Julie Byrne: Greater Wings. Ghostly International.
★★★★★
Also Julie Byrne has a rich and thrilling folk sound. The fourth album Greater Wings are the most beautiful album sets of the summer. Everything is a rich cloud right down to Byrne’s singing voice.
The open space created by the songs is downright amazing. Tender but in its sensitivity, the grand orchestration feels weightless like a summer day in the hum of the grass.
The album begins Greater Wings – with the title song, the first line of which sounds like a classic and a perfect intro to the album’s world: “I drank the air to be closer to you.”
The album’s lyrics are about sublime presence: a longing for connection with nature and others, a dream of stronger wings. Wings almost always symbolize freedom and the imagination of weightlessness and carefreeness.
Byrne delivers his songs as if that freedom and connection are already achieved by default. “The sky is moonless and the sea surrounds me”, Byrne sings in the song Moonless.
Produced by Byrne, who created the album in the middle Eric Littman died only 31 years old. The rest of the production on the album was completed by Alex Somers. Death can be heard in the closing song of the album Death Is The Diamond.
In it, one descends to the surface of the earth, which is allowed to shake below: “Let the sun go down / I don’t want to feel anything but the moving ground.” The melancholic song binds together of Greater Wingswhich is downright euphoric music.
Album / Contemporary music, classical
Oleksandr Yurchenko: Recordings Vol. 1, 1991–2001. Shukai.
★★★★
Ukrainian the record company Shukai has focused on publishing mainly Soviet-era marginal music from the territory of Ukraine.
It is one of the many projects in recent years that are directing Western eyes that previously looked past to new perspectives. The latest release takes place in the 90s and honors the composer Oleksandr Yurchenko (1966–2020) memory.
The main work of the collection is also the most central of Yurchenko’s career: 25 minutes long Count to. 100. Symphony #1, where he used a string instrument he invented and built himself. It resembled a long and unusual citra.
In this noise symphony, an instrument driven through echo effects is combined with cassette loops often used in contemporary music. Yurchenko also built other instruments himself, such as an electronic cello. What he did was marked by the glamor of marginal contemporary music: he made the recordings at home on cassettes.
As a counterweight to the turbulent times, Yurchenko relied on meditative, safe repetition in his music. The intro is based on a beautiful loop, Merta Zara #3 has taken influences from Central Asian folk music.
Electronic / Album
Kaukolampi: Inside the Sphere. Optimo Music.
★★★
Timo Kaukolammen nerdy analog painting is justified in dark spaces. His synthesizer-created percussion bounces up and down like wall-stretching exercise balls in an industrial hall.
Inside the Sphere is a typical electronic album of this millennium, driven by the concept and its immersion rather than usability. Reactions to this kind of music are meant primarily to be felt internally rather than to be seen externally.
Some of the songs are named like in the first practices of the heavy band – Fields of Metal! – and they bring a nice banal relief to the frowning camp house electro.
Inside the Sphere the exploration of sounds accommodates pressure as well as an intuitively light spiritual cross-sitting. It is well executed, but the charm of the music itself is ultimately fleeting.
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