A news piece in Dazed and Confused’s October 2007 issue
“Another Thought: The Arthur Russell Revival Peaks With New Documentary”
Arthur Russell has always cried out for a biography. An obscenely gifted classical cellist, singer and disco producer, he was a student of north Indian music in Buddhist communes who moved East to NY when disco was bubbling under and collaborated with everyone from Phillip Glass to Larry Levan In eighties New York, he perfected his mix of outsider pop and spectral, mutant disco until his tragic, AIDs related death in 1992. While Soul Jazz and Rough Trade’s superb compilations, and Jens Lekman’s recent EP of Russell covers have brought him out of the cold, much of the man behind the music remains obscured by myth. A new film is set to change all that with a documentary about his life and times. “I wanted to take a fairly experimental approach to Arthur’s music. What I ended up doing is closer to a documentary with a full story told by Arthur’s friends and family, one that’s saturated with lots of visual material and archival clips,” says director Matt Wolf. “Arthur’s story is about more than just his experience as an individual—it’s about a particularly fertile period in downtown New York’s cultural history, it’s about the experience of being gay and living with AIDS, and also it’s about the cathartic process of making art and pursuing popular success at a time when those two things seemed possible and within reach. Arthur could certainly be perceived as an eccentric figure—but I was also really drawn to the ordinary moments in his life: watching the Muppets Show with his boyfriend on the couch.”
www.arthurrussellmovie.com/
The film will be released in early 2008.
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