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Travels Over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life review – down the rabbit hole with a musical maverick
He played cello for Allen Ginsberg, nearly joined Talking Heads and was sampled by Kanye West. Now the singular, genre-spanning Russell has the exhaustive study he deserves
Photograph: TBCAlongside experiments destined for the dancefloor, Russell continued to record sparer electro-acoustic compositions, all the while soundtracking austere dance or theatre pieces, earning the respect of composer Philip Glass and playing in various ensembles. He could also turn his hand to relatively conventional singer-songwriter material – witness the posthumously released Love Is Overtaking Me album – but Instrumentals, a 1984 rendering of a Russell composition from a decade prior, with modular parts that musicians could theoretically begin at random points in the score, is perhaps more typical. King has been given access to Russell’s considerable archive, housed in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, to compile this intimate coffee-table tome: an array of his letters, written in careful pencil, plus event flyers, scores and charts, sleeve artwork and cool ephemera (numerological workings-out, invoices for studio time).
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