Arthur Russell arrived in New York as an experimental cellist and composer. Then, in 1977, an unexpected visit to a disco changed the direction of his work.
Instead of treating club music as intellectually inferior to experimental composition, Russell became fascinated by repetition and by what happened socially when people shared it on a dancefloor. He went on to make influential disco recordings while continuing to work with cello, voice, improvisation and the downtown avant-garde.
By World of Echo, the borders had almost disappeared. Cello and voice pass through echo and feedback until the processing feels inseparable from the composition itself.
What I like about Russell is that he makes our genre categories look unnecessarily rigid.
Disco and experimental music are often placed on opposite sides of an imaginary wall. One supposedly belongs to bodies and clubs, the other to listening rooms and ideas.
Russell seems to have heard repetition in both.
A cello phrase repeating through delay can become as hypnotic as a dance groove. A disco record can be as formally strange as an avant-garde composition.
His career is a useful reminder that experimental music does not need to sound difficult.
Sometimes the experiment is simply refusing to respect the border everybody else has agreed to keep.
