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James Blake, “The Wilhelm Scream,” Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 7/14/11

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Hearing JB brought this MCOTD fave to mind (originally posted 11/23/09).

Here’s Arthur Russell, the “seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songwriter, cellist and disco producer” who died in 1992 at the age of 40 (of AIDS-related complications)  and is the subject of both a recent documentary, Wild Combination, and a new book, Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992. 

Arthur Russell

“Get Around To It”

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“You And Me Both”

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“This Is How We Walk on the Moon”

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“That’s Us/Wild Combination”

(Yeah, the fact that I’m posting four tracks by this guy shows how much his music, which I just encountered recently, has been getting under my skin.)

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[Russell’s] various distinctions—folkie, art-music songwriter and improviser, dance-club maven—seem incoherent until you hear several of his records. When musicians get angry about being categorized by critics, I usually feel frustrated: readers, after all, want to know what the record sounds like. With Russell, I take the musicians’ angle. Just listen to it and you’ll understand.

—Ben Ratliff, “The Many Faces, and Grooves, of Arthur Russell,” New York Times, 2/29/04

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For Arthur, there was no cachet to being eclectic. Rather, he played across genre because it would have required a colossal and entirely counterproductive effort on his part to stick to one sound. . . . Drifting into an ethereal, gravity-defying zone, Arthur had come to embody the interconnectivity of music.

—Tim Lawrence, Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 (2009).