Fever Ray x Dummy

Fever Ray / Karin was extraordinary in every possible way.

Sipping weak coffee backstage at the Southbank Centre on a muggy Saturday, thinking about interviewing Karin Dreijer Andersson. A chat about her music seems a bit prosaic. As an artist, she does not have much time for the niceties of the modern music industry, much less explaining herself to dolts with Dictaphones. For one, The Knife , the Swedish electro band that she plays in with her brother, has a reputation for being an outsider act: they performed behind curtains of mist, were rarely photographed without 17th century Venetian masks and hardly ever granted interviews. Musically, the group trod a similarly de/personal route on their three albums, the last of which – Silent Shout – stormed the Swedish Grammies even though it was a dislocation of euphoric trance’s rhythmic template, shifting European house’s home from urban havens to the tundra of the far north.
So, when news got out that Karin was working on a solo project called Fever Ray, it was hard to imagine – what does a constituent part of such a singular band sound like? As it happened, from when lead single If I Had A Heart started popping up on blogs toward the end of 2008, Fever Ray has turned out even more critically acclaimed and artistically fulfilled than the Knife. The album, released on Rabid in March, locked into the terror in the air, delivering an astonishingly bleak and personal take on industrial/EBM, minimal wave, 21st century neo-primitivism and 1980s electro pop.
Thankfully, her stage show, choreographed by Swedish video director and artist Andreas Nilsson, is as extraordinary as the album or of anything The Knife have done. Chatting before her Royal Festival Hall sound-check, for the gig she was playing as part of the Ether Festival of digital art, she seemed light, charming and surprisingly open.

Tell me about the ideas for the tour and the stage show.
Sure. I’ve been working with Andreas Nilsson, who directed the video for If I Had A Heart. He also did the Knife’s stage set design, so I have been working with him for this one. I think we started working this October, discussing what to do. I think we wanted to build something out of the primitive and more primal feeling of the music and as a contrast to that also something very, very hi-tech. We are like five or six people on stage, with primitive cultures face paint and more folk orientated outfits, and also we work a lot with lasers.

I really like the album’s tribal, almost religious feeling.
I just wanted to make something very slow, and something that took time to get into. I didn’t think much before I started about what I was going to do. The tribal feeling or that primitive feeling, you get that feeling when you work with so few elements. I work with very, very simple instruments and beats, and it’s quite monotone – I think it’s very repetitive in its arrangements.

So folk music is a result, not a starting point?
Yeah, I don’t know what makes you want to do a certain thing. I watch more films to get inspiration than I listen to music. I try to create atmosphere more than, sing a song.

Does that cross over into the live show?
I think the live show is a way for the music to continue developing and changing. I think it’s very important for the music and visuals to have the same idea to start from.

It’s almost like you’re offering a three-dimensional experience.
That would be good if that happened. Yes, I think that just to open it up maybe, to continue where the album finished – that’s where the live show starts.

Do you find yourself wanting to limit the instruments you use?
Yes. I think I work quite minimally with as few tracks as possible.

It’s quite an old style of minimal music you play.
I suppose I still like to listen to Plastikman, who is very minimal. In the production, I listened a lot to this Phil Collins track In The Air Tonight which, I think, is quite minimal. There’s very few instruments in it, but every sound is so taken care of, I think it’s very deep when it’s very big, but when just a few things get their full potential, that’s very interesting.

Do you find it strange intellectualising music?
I don’t. I don’t think that is good to do with my own music.

Why?
I work so much with raw feeling and emotions, they are like instant things. I’m not good at talking about my music. And I’m not interested in doing it. I can talk about other’s music [laughs]. I don’t think it’s good to tell too much and I think it’s important for music to keep the possibility to work with ideas and emotions, and if you explain too much, you destroy that, their own interpretation, their own possibility to have their own ideas. It is better to just give small hints.

That’s generous.
We talked about that this morning: What is this live show about? I think we’ve done nine shows together so far, and I think we’ve got something going on onstage. If you come to this show with an open mind you can be part of what’s going on, but if you don’t – if you expect a certain thing and expect us to do it for you, then you’ll get excluded in a way. I don’t think we’re very communicative. It’s important to come with no expectations.

It’s interesting you say communicative – another one of my questions is about the place of storytelling. Which seems unusually direct for you?
You mean the lyrics?

Yeah.
I try to be direct without saying too much. It’s a good contrast to have very physical words and very straightforward words, in contrast to the music, which may be very monotone and not saying very much. It’s also about creating dynamics in between the music and the words.

Is it about the sound of the word?
It can be, that is very important, the sound of the word. Also the meaning of it, but even more so the sound. The performance is also important. How to sing a lyric – with what kind of voice you want to use can change a lot – how you want to say it, what makes it more obscure or more direct with a low-pitched voice or a high pitched voice. Whether you scream it out or whisper it – that makes a real difference. I think I work with that a lot.

Personally, I found what she said about hiding herself behind the ideas and the emotions really interesting. The obliqueness of the Knife and Fever Ray’s performances are not reclusive. It’s construction, not concealment. In the past she has, with that Nordic sense of cost and dignity, subtly criticised the cheapening of music by its licensing to advertisers, and I think that ties in. She sees her take on some of the most ephemeral forms of pop music (Eurotrance, 1980s synthpop) as high sonic art – though she’ll never shout about it. Fittingly, the next project on Karin’s list is an opera, Tomorrow In A Year, about Charles Darwin’s Origin Of The Species. But Fever Ray, in contrast to The Knife, is more than cold artistry. Much has been made of the deeply personal direction of the album. Its themes – the darkness and wonder of childhood, friendship and nature – are direct and clear, from the videos following a groups of children down a Styx-like river to the lyrics on gardening, friendship and dishwasher tablets. It’s the sound of an artist, a Major Talent even, opening up, looking out.

Something that I really like about the lyrics is the constant repetition of nature, particularly the sea.
I grew up on the west coast of Sweden. 12 years ago I moved to the east coast, where there is no salt water, which makes it not a real sea. I have a very romantic idea about the sea. I also really like to read. I don’t really know why, but it means a lot. This wide-open space, the beach by the sea, it’s very interesting.

You seem a little detached.
I just live in the city, where you just look at things.

Tell me about the opera you’re doing.
We started about a year ago. This Danish company, Hotel Performa, asked us to write music for an opera about Charles Darwin. I think what led us to this thing is that they’ve done so many interesting things, they work so much with a mix of performance, theatre, music, film and modern dance. And we have been working with The Knife for seven years or so, and we really wanted to do something else. It premieres in September, so we’ll be finished soon.

Was it nice to get your teeth into something so big?
It is opera in the old-fashioned sense, but we were free to do what we wanted. It is very much a Knife opera.

Was it your idea or theirs to make Charles Darwin the subject?
It was theirs.

It seems a very Knife-y subject.
His thoughts and ideas have been used for very many bad things, but when you start to read his own writing, like The Origin Of The Species, and his notebooks and letters, you hear his own thoughts, you really understand that he was a great humanist. This Origin Of the Species, it’s so fantastic – it’s just all about diversity of everything. It is so free, and it has no hierarchy. That is what we focus on, the original idea. That’s what a performer wants to work with as well, to show how much it is like everything in life and not about the religious aspect. That is also, of course, interesting, but it gets very political if you focus on too closely on that side of his writings. He was a very modern man.

Is there a sense of evolution to the way you work? Have his writings influenced your work?
There is a steady ongoing evolution to everything. And to be doing it for a year it gives you a totally new time perspective. After reading Charles Darwin, you get a completely new relationship to time.

How do you mean?
It’s something so huge! I mean, in one sense, with geological time, it’s since the world started until now, and you have a human’s life in time, that’s also something, and something about now, very contemporary things. That’s how we work in music, with three perspectives, three layers around time. It has been great – I have read his writings, his letters and so on. It’s been a great year.

You mentioned on the album that you’re “very good with plants”. Are you a keen gardener?
I have an idea about myself having green fingers. But, no, I don’t have so much time for it [laughs].

Would you like to?
Maybe when I get old. But that is also something interesting about time and plants. To go out into nature and work with things that have this year’s cycle, plants that come out in Spring, and die or go to sleep, this thing that continues and keeps on going on and on. That’s a good way to be. I think people who are like gardeners are happy.

I heard that a lot of the album was written when you were really, really tired. Are you getting more sleep now?
Yes. Sleep is not always possible, but I try to sleep more.

Is it having an impact on your music?
Yes! I think it is a good impact. I don’t think there will be any more albums like this one.

The Knife’s opera, Tomorrow, In A Year, opens in September. Fever Ray has various European and festival dates over the summer.

The Big Pink for Dummy

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful (wall of) noise-pop from ex-squatter and basically the king of Stoke New. Dummy piece, yep, Next.

“He was stood over me with a needle and mentioned in passing ‘I don’t sleep very much’. I kind of stopped wanting a tattoo then.” Robbie Furze from the Big Pink, a tender, scuzzy band who stand somewhere between the Big Black, Love and GZA, is telling a story about the time he played with his old Digital Hardcore band, Panic DHH, in a vast Berlin squat. He played across the squat empire of Europe for the last few years, and ran a label called Hate Channel with his best friend Milo Cordell, who is also in the Big Pink. “We wanted it to be the most aggressive, pure sonic assault you could take! But noise gets self-indulgent. I mean, where can noise go? Melody is much more interesting and song structure is really, really cool.” This is why they set Big Pink up – a shared desire to make very fucking loud music that was really, really beautiful.

After getting together halfway through last year, they released 200 copies of Too Young To Love last year on their friends’ label House Anxiety, complete with a typically tender and brutal hardcore Dennis Cooper image that their live bandmate Daniel O’Sullivan, who also plays in Sunn O))), sorted out. (Milo: “we got in touch, and he was really cool and let us have it. Otherwise we would have stolen it.”). Since then, they’ve been, in Milo’s words, “playing loads of shows, touring with TV on the Radio, writing more songs , chasing girls, staying up late, basically expanding our minds.”

When we were talking about how played out noise is, Milo jumps in, and points out how many bands on his label, Merok (like Klaxons and, of course, Crystal Castles), started out doing pure noise. “You know, the line isn’t that clear. We still love noise – it’s not like Right, that’s the END, you know? Sure we have songs and tunes, but we’re not no longer an extreme band.”

The Big Pink do this point-counterpoint a lot in the course of conversation – ideas change, confrontation is embraced, and contrariness is chased. You know, I think that this stance of aggressive passion, ripping-up-and-restarting is what makes the Pink stand head-and-shoulders above the other Throbbing Gristle-referencing bands that seem to be everywhere at the moment. One sec they’re painful, brutal, cloaked in feedback, the next they’re breaking your heart. “One day we say never, never, never, never will we ever have strings, but we could be dying for them the next,” says Milo. “You know, consistency is boring. Maybe that’s contradictory, but hey, fuck, better that than hypocritical, right?”

August post-punk label 4AD signed them a couple of weeks ago. At the beginning of the interview, I asked them why they wanted the Big Pink on their books, and they were like, ‘Yeah, we’re good looking, and great people. And the Pink are awesome,” and then they fell about laughing.

Salem Next piece for Dummy

Salem, one of the most exciting bands from the end 2008, in a Next piece for Dummy

This duo from Chicago make beautiful, terrifying slowed down crunk that turns every day into night and every night into the Northern Lights. When Merok Records put out the Water EP from the Chicago-Michigan-New York trio (John Holland, Heather Marlatt, and Jack Donoghue), it sold out straight away, as did their Yes I Smoke Crack EP on Acephale.

On the one hand, their music is a blend of chopped’n’ screwed compositional music, hard-edged industrial and that violence-stained disco that Chromatics have perfected, and their visual output is fittingly beautiful/horrifying. On the other, they have hardly any pictures (John apparently has never been photographed, though their Butt magazine interview seems to have one blurry one) their interviews are kind of scant, and they don’t seem that bothered about social networking sites.

Biog-wise, Heather and John met at an arts boarding school (“He asked me if I wanted to be his friend and we have been since,” Heather emailed), and Heather met Jack in Chicago eighteen months ago, and started working with Acephale in early 2008. They’re finally going to start playing to the public soon.

Here’s some stuff about what they like: “We like blue raspberry flavor, Marvel vs Capcom 2, dirt bikes, baths, our snake Sasha,” they write over email. On the rap influence: “Its not really big where we’re from. When John was in Junior High and all the other kids were into grunge, he would go home and watch MTV Raps. So he is very knowledgeable. We like screwed and chopped music, but there’s better rap we’re affected by than screwed/chopped, Atl Trap , Footwork . [We’d like collaborate with] Gucci Mane, DJ Nate and Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em”. I mentioned something about the cold, and they said “We like winter when it snows everyday. Winter is so much prettier then spring. We sort of segregate ourselves from the everyday I guess, we don’t have TV or anything. We are more influenced by nature as seen on youtube.” On sleep, Jack said “I’ve never slept that much. I feel like I’m giving in to my body when I sleep, and I don’t remember my dreams anyway, so it seems like a waste of time.”

Apache Beat for Dummy

Another Brooklyn band, pretty good.

Bands should kill boredom. I’m chatting with Apache Beat, a Brooklyn band who play crisp, doomy and slightly tropical rock music before their gig in Camden, headlining a tour here for the first time. They just finished their album, Last Chants, produced by Martin Bisi (who also did LPs by Boredoms, Sonic Youth and Afrika Bambaataa), about two weeks before, and they say it’s pretty weird playing the songs out. Ilirjana Alushaj, the singer, says: “We just finished our album, and we realised that we needed to make it sound reasonably like it. We made it so complex. We just want it to sound big. We never play the same song twice. It’s fun to play but you’ve got to avoid the routine. It’s strange committing because we’re so indecisive. There’s a lot of good ideas – writing’s a process of whittling it down to the essential thing, whatever the song really is.”

Apache Beat came together in Brooklyn around at the end of 2006
a few years after Ilirjana moved to New York from Sydney Australia (she also lived in Serbia for a bit, it’s in her accent slightly). She set up a band with her guitarist friend Phil. Named after Klaus Dinger’s name for the Motorik sound, they started actually playing together properly a few months later (Phil: “People started wanting us to play. That was weird”). Not too long after a 7” single, Blood Thrills, came out on Summer Lovers Unlimited (“Owner Doug [Ko] was great. He let us do whatever we want, and didn’t mind when we took way to long to record the stuff and wasted his money in the recording studio”, says Mike Dos Santos, the bassist) about nine months ago, followed by the stunningly melodramatic Tropics in October 2008, in between which they’ve toured with everyone from Crystal Castles to School of Seven Bells.

When I ask Ilirjana about her music writing (she runs a really great online magazine called The Pop Manifesto ), she almost plays it down, saying “I was always in music, making zines or throwing parties, and I’ve always been in a bands – I have a very short attentions span.” With Apache Beat, there’s this kind of flowing, twitching thing, a total urge never to be boring. Sometimes it can be overpowering, but mostly it’s really fucking good.

Angus Tarnawsky, the touring drummer says about something interesting about: “It’s not easy. But it definitely is fun. we all come from improv backgrounds, and a lot of that spontaneity is flowing into the performances. which can only be good. You can go through a big psychological thing – Is this good enough.. This is bad. But then it hits you – things are also good. This is the thing we all signed up for, whether we it or not.”

My Tiger My Timing for Dummy

Next piece on really cool new band called My Tiger My Timing

“I made a resolution to take up Pilates and form the band. Now I’m only doing the band.” Anna Vincent is talking about forming My Tiger My Timing , a minimal and earnest London electro band that she sings and plays keyboards in. Jamie Harrison, vocals/guitar/bass, finishes the story: “We decided to set up the band at a New Year’s Eve 2007/8 party. January’s usually written off, this time we formed a band. We’d been wandering around in a dream-like state. Now the band is the dream. ”

We’re sitting around Spitalfields Market late on a chilly afternoon. They both seem really, really nice and pretty smart. They joined by Anna’s brother James, Gary Drain and Seb Underhill in the Arthur Russell-referencing, New Cross-based band, My Tiger My Timing. On their own label, Silver Music Machine, they put out pop music with its middle stripped. Their debut single, This Is Not The Fire, came out a few days ago, and it sounds distilled, concentrated – it’s electro with its bones showing. Anna: “We wanted to do something that was more about rhythm and texture, without any frivolous bits. We’ve been quite puritanical about the way we make up the song. If you allow yourself to do anything, it can be limiting, whereas a narrowed field can be freeing.” As Jamie says, even their visual element is stripped down, using only primary colours: “It’s become basic but vibrant, and the more striking for it, and the music is primary. Rhythm and melody. Texture and atmosphere. It’s almost a dissociative technique – you’ll listen, and realise that you’re hearing something created by a pop song. There’s something about a synthesiser that offers that difference of interpretation. You’ve totally taken away the emotion – you allow people to add it for themselves. “

If the idea of a south London band playing deconstructivist electro pop rings a bell, then it’ll come as little surprise that Hot Chip are all over this. Joe Goddard has produced some songs for them, joining Andy Spence from New Young Pony Club, who produced This Is Not The Fire. There’s a similar, almost unnerving not-fucking-about sense to MTMT’s plans, from releasing their music themselves, to playing in the with the lights off to prove they can. Jamie: “We never wrote down a manifesto, but we should have. Focus isn’t a dirty word. We rehearse the set for hours and hours and hours, so we can play it the dark, which we do.” Anna agrees: “That’s what the single is about – that moment before you unleash something, when you know the fire is just round the corner.” Jamie: “Even our name is determined… Ferocious and precise. It was either that or Super Bingo Bingo Time, which I still think is a great name.”

Arthur Russell for Clash

One of many hagiographic Arthur Russell pieces I've put my name to, this little blighter came out in Clash in the Autumn of 2008.

New York, 1983. On the Staten Island ferry, a man, alone but not lonely, is gazing into the distance over the water, his head full of music blaring from his Walkman headphones. It’s probably his own – he likes to listen to the songs he made while looking over the Hudson into the Jersey lights. This is Arthur Russell, the undisputed king of the downtown disco scene, a man who quietly made some of the most extraordinary music of all time until his AIDs-related death in 1992. As well as being a supremely gifted dance producer, he was also a renowned composer, folk singer, classical cellist and experimental musician who counted people like Philip Glass, Richard Hell and David Byrne as mates. When he moved to New York in 1973 from a San Francisco Buddhist commune, Allen Ginsburg let him siphon his electricity. He produced six albums, over a dozen 12” projects and several hundred unreleased cassettes, hundreds of reels, dozens of DATs, and countless thousands sheets of music and lyrics. Yet, despite his talent and beyond-prodigious creative output, he died in almost total obscurity. Gradually though, something extraordinary happened: as word slowly spread of the eccentric mastermind standing at the heart of late-20th century music, Arthur’s work is taken up, rereleased, played out. Biographies were written, minds blown, and everyone from filmmakers to forward thinking party organizers took up his cause. Now, in 2008, with a new LP, Love Is Overtaking Me and film, Wild Combination, Arthur Russell is finally finding the mass audience he craved – and deserved. Over the next few pages, we’ve compiled our own Arthurian legend: five DJs, producers, singers, fans and fanatics on the most important musician you’ve never heard.

JD Twitch (Optimo)
As part of the DJ team Optimo, Twitch has been playing Arthur Russell to crowds around the world for more than a decade

I’ve was vaguely aware of Arthur Russell’s existence for as long as I can remember – a song like Go Bang never leaves you when you hear it, but it wasn’t until I read a review for Another Thought in 1994 that I started to connect the dots between his disco stuff and his other work. And it just wiped the floor with me! I was having a particularly bad year emotionally, and though it sounds cheesy to speak of music “saving lives”, in this case, it’s true: Arthur Russell’s music really did save my life. And after that, I just became completely obsessed with the man and his work. Every time I play ‘Is It All Over My Face’ out, it always sends ripple of pure joy through the crowd. There’s just something about it – whether people have heard it a hundred times before or just that evening, they love it! There’s something so beautifully playful about it, so totally unlike any other dance music. Maybe it’s the words… “Is it all over my face… You got me love dancing”. Sometimes we play ‘Kiss Me Again’, this Dinosaur track, as a reward at the end of a really, really good night, and it’s been so wonderful to hear the crowd upstairs singing it on the way home – this song is still framing these great times. One of the reasons for his resurgence, apart from what you could call the internal logic of the zeitgeist, is as part of this general interest in dance music’s pre-history; which is itself probably to do with the fact that not so much exciting new stuff is coming out at the moment, since minimal disappeared up its own arse. It’s funny, when I was growing up disco was this dirty, dirty word, but that was only because of what I was hearing on the top 40 and in my mum’s car. So when I heard that Dinosaur L stuff, it was amazing to hear dance music that was that imaginative, that out-there – it really felt as if I found someone who understood the way we saw music! He just covers so many different schools, and covers them so well. From his well-known disco stuff to that ambient work to that Love Is Overtaking Me, which is essentially a country record! I mean, it’s just so out there – it could have been made twenty thousand years ago, it could be made tomorrow. But the most wonderful thing, I think, is that so many of these amazing songs were written just waiting for his boyfriend to come home from work.

Tim Lawrence
Journalist, author and academic Tim has written the first full length biography of Arthur, Hold On To Your Dreams, out next year.

I was really drawn to the figure of Arthur Russell after hearing about him while researching Love Saves The Day, my history of Dance music in the 1970s. I was drawn into this strange, evocative dance music – and the way that he was this central figure in all these different scenes in the late Seventies/early Eighties. He was really there at the formation of these incredible experiments in rock, disco, hip hop and “compositional” music: his story is really the story of creative New York during that time. Any kind of eclecticism was genuinely, genuinely shocking until very recently, and I think that Arthur in some way heralded in this post-tribal musical age – which is why he strikes a chord with us in the Age Of The iPod. Everyone now had Girls Aloud next to Mongolian folk music next to Hip Hop next to Steve Reich on their iPods – something Arthur would have no doubt been happy about. However, it’s essential we don’t think just because we can download a song in seconds on our laptops, we are somehow more enlightened, that we have somehow progressed, that we’re kind of close to Arthur’s incredibly genre-less taste. For him, it was never about easy access and standing on the sidelines: it was about active engagement and being in the thick of a real, physical, social commitment to music.

Andy Butler
Andy Butler plays in a dance band called Hercules and Love Affair

You know what I just found out? That Arthur Russell was a really, really big fan of the Muppet Show, like me. It’s funny because I’ve always thought that his music had a real Muppet-like sensibility – it’s really almost child-like, the quality it has, and like most children’s music it has this colourful, vivid imagination and simplicity. It’s magical. It’s just the sound of this lunatic musical freedom – and the way that those records worked collectively: it wasn’t the sound of just one person, but the noise of a whole bunch of people expressing themselves! It was super, super inspirational to hear that kind of collective, family atmosphere – where the attention is spread out over the whole band – itself a very punk idea. Derrick Carter actually first bought me a copy of Dinosaur L’s Go Bang – before I had heard that line sampled in so many house songs [Todd Terry’s Bango (To The Batmobile), to name but one – Ed], dancing at Body and SOUL, places like that, and he was such a huge part of that community. Dancing there, arms in the air, to these amazing songs that first played in the Paradise Garage: I was participating in the traditions. Arthur Russell, for me, was all about finding my roots.



Lola Love
Singer and dancer Lola Love collaborated with Arthur on Go Bang (under the name Dinosaur) and Wax The Van (under the name Lola)

I got to working with Arthur through my then-partner [disco producer] Rob Blank in the early 80s. I had just come off tour with Mr. James Brown and heard this wacky, funky, popping sound playing in our apartment – I loved it! It was just so avant garde, so experimental – and that’s what were my roots were. So we got to working together. We hit it off so quickly. He was such a perfectionist, like me, but his a perfection was a room of people losing their minds – that was what interested him – how wild people got. He’d always say “Wilder!” And you go crazy. Then he’d say “Go wilder! Wilder still! Wilder!” That was his collaborative style, you see: he didn’t order you around, he’d just make you be who you are. Working with him such a free, beautiful, creative experience. It was… it was [sings] “Bang a bang a go bang go – OW!” That’s how it was! And you’d never hear him go wild himself, like some producers do, but when it sounded right, he’d let a smile spread across his face. That’s all: a nod, and a smile. Even when we played at the [Paradise] Garage, that was the way he was: he’d never soak up the glory in front: he’d just sit at the back with his cello, letting the others tear it up. It was like a crazy, intense acid trip at the time: every night would be so wild. So wild you can’t imagine, honey! People would just loose their minds when we played. It was an interesting time, and downtown [New York] was an interesting place – and Arthur Russell was the most interesting person there. Whenever I’d invite him round for a party, he wouldn’t really socialise, he’d just stand in the corner, taking it all in, watching. He was like a ghost, you know! He’d just appear in a flash of smoke, and there he’d be – the most sweet, kind guy in the world, and then he’d disappear again, right away. And all that would be left was the smoke. The smoke would still be there.

Steve Knutson
Steve Knutson, as head of Audika Records, is devoted to rereleasing Arthur’s work.

My introduction to Arthur's music came from the legendary DJ, Walter Gibbons in 1986. Walter was a buyer at Rock & Soul, one of the infamous DJ shops in New York, and I sold him records while doing sales at Tommy Boy. We became quite friendly and invariably spent a lot of time discussing music. He told me about this odd genius he was working with. A few months later he gave me a copy of the Sleeping Bag 12", "Schoolbell/Treehouse" that he remixed. Hearing it changed my life. The intimacy of his voice and instrument first grabbed me. What I heard was pure consciousness. No separation between the voice and instruments. Holistic and deeply spiritual. Allen Ginsburg said it best, "Buddhist Bubble-Gum Music". After my introduction from Walter, I searched around for everything that I could find of Arthur's music. It was tough as there was little to no information out there (this is still the mid-80's), and I relied on simply searching through used bins in record stores, or asking my fanatical dance music friends for insight into his various pseudonyms. I was easily confused and taken aback by the (what I thought to be) disparate styles and elements of his music. I vividly remember buying "World Of Echo" when it first came out and being really disappointed. It wasn't a disco record, it was something else and I did not understand. But after finding the album "Instrumentals" I had an epiphany. What I heard in Arthur's music wasn't genres, I was very simply hearing "Arthur Music". Being the selfish sort, I had to hear this music, and the only way it was going to happen is if I compiled and released it myself. I'd known Will Socolov from Sleeping Bag for years and one day I asked him for Tom Lee's [Arthur’s life partner] phone number. I called Tom and we got on like a house on fire. The first time at his apartment Tom immediately began bring out cassettes of unreleased music. It was heaven! All in all around 1,000 plus tapes of music exist. And then there are dozens of manuscript books, hundreds of pages of lyrics and song sheets. It's almost never ending – it’s been all consuming at times, and I must has spent hundreds of hours compling these CDs! In the process, I've met with and corresponded with dozens of Arthur's friends and musicians. No one has ever uttered anything but love and respect for the man. Frustration, yes, but also deep respect, and love.

Matt Wolf
Filmmaker Matt Wolf’s Arthur Russell documentary Wild Combination has played around the world, including a very successful run at London’s ICA, the Berlin Film Festival and New York’s IFC, where it was the highest grossing film in its class.

Arthur's story is about more than just his experience as an idividual—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. I think disco presenting a really liberating social context to create music. The early underground discos were very different than what people commonly associate with the genre: Studio 54, John Travolta, etc. The Loft was a kind of social experiment where David Mancuso brought together an incredibly diverse group of people: black, white, gay, straight, hippies, artists, and they danced together. There was a kind of essentially positive attitude in this context—you might compare it to a child's birthday party. But the repetitive serialism of minimalist composers and the structure of Buddhist mantras could certainly be correlated to the patterns of disco dance records. As a counter-cultural space, disco seemed like an obvious extension of Arthur's experience in a Buddhist commune in San Francisco.My favorite moment in the film is the scene where Arthur and his boyfriend Tom meet in the East Village. It's a very romantic, tender story and we use really beautiful Super 8 imagery of an old school, rundown ice cream shop in the East Village to bring that story to life. Arthur could certainly be perceived as an eccentric figure—he was constantly thinking about music, listening to endless variations of his songs on headphones. Another moment that really strikes me is a videotape I have of an early performance where Arthur plays the guitar. When he's finished, he takes off his pumas (presumably his "performance sneakers") to put on his vans, or I guess his street shoes. He was such an endearing weirdo in that way. But I was also really drawn to the ordinary moments in his life: watching the Muppets Show with his boyfriend on the couch, brainstorming the name of a record company while listening to James Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag." There was a time that Arthur told a collaborator and business partner Will Socolov that "Music can heal. That music isn't something that you just go dancing to, but that it can really heal you." That really stuck with me. I love Arthur's persistent connection to childhood and childlike experience. He struggled; he created obstacles for himself and frustrated his collaborators and his loved ones. But I think, unlike many other people, Arthur was able to connect to this primal place of childlike innocence and fun. And I love going there with him.