This was an opportunity we couldn’t miss. Today sees the release on the Audika label of Corn – an album of alternate versions, demos and outtakes by the late, great Arthur Russell. While for some artists, this kind of tape-mining can immediately invoke the law of diminishing returns, for Russell it’s something very different. He was an insanely productive musician but released comparatively little in his lifetime despite touching on disco, pop, country, modern classical and minimalism, always with a sense of innocent exploration born of his devout Buddhist faith – so his archives, featuring untold experiments and radically different versions of track (including, on Corn, the classic “This is how we Walk on the Moon”) are still goldmines despite several posthumous releases.
Russell was a compulsive collaborator, driven by a love of people and possibility, and through his Zelig-like life worked with everyone from Alan Ginsberg to Philip Glass to Talking Heads. So when a load of his most regular studio and on-stage partners came to London to perform a set of his Instrumentals, we jumped at the chance to find out more about the milieu of late 1970s / early 1980s New York where Russell’s greatest work was created. I sat down with Peter Gordon (producer, arranger and composer and founder of the Love Of Live Orchestra), and Ernie Brooks (former bassist for The Modern Lovers, and member of several bands with Russell including The Flying Hearts), together with synth master, DFA Recordings mainstay and Russell acolyte Gavin Russom who has formed part of the band for the Instrumentals tour. They went deep into the nature of NYC then and now, the magic of Russell, and an awful lot more besides.
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