New Arthur Russell Reissue Due Next Month

When the Disco Not Disco compilation appeared four years ago, yanking from obscurity three of the many dance tracks Arthur Russell had produced, the artist had been dead almost a decade, and his work was not so much forgotten as scattered to the winds. Followers of contemporary classical music have longer memories than us pop geeks, though, so they still remembered Russell as a footnote in Philip Glass' career. The disco faithful, meanwhile, remembered Russell's one hit, the 1980 single "Is It All Over My Face" (released under the moniker Loose Joints). A few albums of haunted cello-based pop music also stamped Russell's name right on the frontal lobes of the few people who'd heard them.

What Russell's legacy didn't have at the time was a critical mass of people all in one place that cared about the guy. However, things change fast when you're swept up in a wave as gnarly as the sudden massive trendiness of artsy disco. Now the New York label Audika Records, formed recently to release and promote Arthur Russell's recordings, has announced a date for its third project of 2004: The debut CD release of 1986's voice-and-cello masterpiece World of Echo. Due out October 27th (our hold-breath-turn-blue attempt to secure an immediate release having failed), the album will be supplemented with four unreleased bonus tracks and a DVD. Read it and sigh:

01 Tone Bone Kone
02 Soon-To-Be Innocent Fun/Let's See
03 Answers Me
04 Being It
05 Place I Know/Kid Like You
06 She's The Star/I Take This Time
07 Tree House
08 See-Through
09 Hiding Your Present From You
10 Wax The Van
11 All-Boy All-Girl
12 Lucky Cloud
13 Tower Of Meaning/Rabbit's Ear/Home Away From Home
14 Let's Go Swimming
15 The Name Of The Next Song (bonus track)
16 Happy Ending (bonus track)
17 Canvas Home (bonus track)
18 Our Last Night Together (bonus track)

Those titles will be more familiar to some listeners than the actual music, as Russell had a habit of remixing and re-recording his songs ad infinitum (leaving literally hundreds of hours of tape for his loved ones to trawl through when he died in 1992). Just for example, the "Let's Go Swimming" mentioned above is totally different from the disco version you may have heard six months ago on The World of Arthur Russell. The audio for World of Echo was remastered for CD by engineer Ray Janos, who worked with Russell extensively during his life. Steve Knutson of Audika spoke to Pitchfork via e-mail about the release, and said that the results sound great, particularly since "the original LP ran too long for the format, and the pressing was really lousy and noisy." You mean it's not supposed to sound all hissy and faint? Oh... we always thought it was sort of a soulful Mountain Goats thing.

The DVD that comes with this release features two films: Terrace of Unintelligibility, which was finished around the time of the album's original release, and Some Imaginary Far Away Type Things, which consists of unedited footage of Russell performing. Audika plans to repress its expanded Echo without the DVD and sell that single-disc version (for cheaper, we're guessing) in 2005.