Arthur Russell’s work remains fascinating because it can never be solved. His music mixed disco, modern classical, singer-songwriter folk, new wave, and dub; sometimes all that would come together in one place, and more often, one or two elements would be focused on for a track or an album-length project. Beyond the slippery nature of the music, there’s also the fact that whatever amount of fame he achieved happened some years after he died at age 40 in 1992, so we never got much of a chance to hear from the man himself. And then on top of all that, he almost never finished anything—even he had trouble figuring out what his music should be. Russell left behind fragments and half-completed tracks with a lot of empty spaces and unanswered questions.
Those empty spaces are where we, the listeners, come in. The members of Russell’s audience, most of whom assembled long after he was gone, each individually provide the missing pieces of the puzzle, and so reactions to his music tend to be very personal. The first time I heard of Arthur Russell someone on a message board called his music "Nick Drake in dub," and that descriptor always stuck with me. It captured his essential contrast, between the most close-mic'd and hushed bedroom singer-songwriter, whose music epitomizes a life alone, and the expansive, outward-looking productions designed, ultimately, as a tool for the massed activity of dance. Russell loved dance music and the collective possibility of the disco, but he also holed up by himself in rooms and created songs that sounded like one-to-one confessions. So his music speaks to an oddly paradoxical existential state that nevertheless feels very familiar: a warm and playful state of communal loneliness.
In his lifetime, he released just one full-length under his own name (his strangest and also arguably his best—World of Echo). But since he recorded and tinkered constantly, we’ve been met in this century with a raft of compilations, "lost albums," and coulda-been albums, all of which, save the still-brilliant The World of Arthur Russell, the Soul Jazz comp that kicked off the Russell appreciation in 2004, and 1994's Point Music-released Another Thought, have been overseen by Steve Knutson of the Audika imprint. Because the vast majority of people who have heard his music experienced it in the context of an archival release more than a decade after his death, Russell has developed an unusual cult consisting mostly of record obsessives. Arthur Russell, as we know him, is the product of contemporary reissue culture.
Corn is another lost album that, unlike Love Is Overtaking Me or Calling Out of Context, was close to being released at some point in the early 1980s, according to some notes and test pressings. That’s somewhat ironic, though, because, of the major Russell reissue projects so far, the nine tracks on Corn sound the most like demos. Solid demos, to be sure, with complete arrangements and decent fidelity, but there’s something skeletal about these tracks that separates it from both the fizzy new wave of Context and the clear, full acoustic tracks on Love. A number of these tracks have also been released in other versions, in some cases with better sound quality, and a few of those are his most well-known tracks. "See My Brother, He’s Jumping Out (Let’s Go Swimming #2)", best known via the Walter Gibbons mix on World, is one, and the take of "Keeping Up" on Another Thought, with background vocals by Jennifer Warnes, still seems definitive compared to the one here. A more fleshed-out "This Is How We Walk on the Moon" was collected on Another Thought, but in this dry and ultra-stripped down version the smallest unit of sound is given so much weight.
Despite the familiarity, Corn holds together remarkably well. These songs feel like they belong together and are meant to be heard on this record, in this sequence. And where previous Russell reissue projects tended to cluster tracks in a similar style together, this record shows the full range of what he was up to and makes it coherent. Broadly speaking, the record is mostly drum machine-driven electro-pop, without the abandon of Russell in disco mode or the intimacy of his acoustic tracks, but all of his styles are in here somewhere. "Lucky Cloud" is as straightforward a pop song as Russell allowed himself. The two versions of "Corn" and "Hiding Your Present From You" are more free-form jams, with Russell soloing on a cello run through a distortion pedal. And the closing "Ocean Movie" is an abstract instrumental, almost neo-krautrock in its heavily textured spaciness. In a sense Corn feels like a lo-fi, weirder version of The World of Arthur Russell, in the way it serves as an introduction to all his different approaches while also demonstrating so clearly the threads between them.
It’s unusual to recommend so highly an album like this one, where you can realistically say that it’s the third- or fourth-best posthumous release from an obscure artist. And there is no doubt that this isn’t the place to start with Russell. But while the default reaction in cases like this are cynicism—barrel-scraping to cash in on a legacy—the Audika project has been something else. My guess is that being in the Arthur Russell business has never been a good way to make a lot of money, not while he was alive and certainly not now. Regardless, because these collections are presented with such care, put together and sequenced in order to give the listener an experience, they come over as acts of generosity.
