Now I know what it's like to assume you know what Arthur Russell sounds like. Back in the day, those comfortable with his modern classical accomplishments were baffled by his acetates of loopy leftfield disco. Likewise, lovers of these dance tracks were confounded by their beatless, beatific recasting on World of Echo. And then there were listeners astounded by the intimacy of his voice and cello work, stymied by both the pop songs and the classical works, all spinning in a vicious cycle of artistic assumptions.
Smug with the presumption that I could accept all of his work, here comes the first release from the label now responsible for the Herculean task of gleaning the contents of hundreds of hours' worth of unreleased music from Arthur's tape archives. Culled from an unreleased album from 1985 called Corn and another slated for release on Rough Trade but never solidified, Calling Out of Context's twelve tracks are unlike anything I've ever heard from the man.
Consider the immediately striking "The Platform on the Ocean"; gone is the personal, arm-hair rubbed dub of cello, the atom-heart palpitations of layered drum skins, the murmuring, translucent voice in the chilly discofloor of space. In its stead is the rigorous drive of programmed drums and a heavily distorted cello that fuzzes like The Jesus & Mary Chain, chopping up the surface of the song. Arthur's killer whalesong voice, often a lone entity, bobs in multi-tracked rounds like schools of jellyfish on the unplumbed depths. He sings about seeing the fish beneath him, yet he also hears the steam room churn behind him, and it makes for seven minutes of cycling pop strained between the pull of fluid motion and a more mechanistic push.
I'm so used to hearing Russell be ahead of his time (the cover even shows him anticipating hipster style with a crooked trucker's cap!), that I'm surprised to find these twelve pop songs are simply of his time. While long-time collaborator Mustafa Sidahmed provides a good deal of percussion, he bolsters the beats with drum machines that would sound more familiar on a Mantronix track or Patti LaBelle comeback. The keyboard intro to "That's Us/Wild Combination" could pass for a Mike Post theme song, but while the production is shiny at points, there's just enough of that innate, anachronistic ability of Arthur's that-- though it marred his career during his lifetime-- has guaranteed critical resurrection ever since his passing in 1992.
With all these cheesy earmarks of an era, Arthur makes it seem unfamiliar: synth-pop in an alternate reality. "I Like You!" takes simple sentiment and slices it with tin-canned handclaps, serrated cello, and ancient arcade game bleeps. "Calling All Kids" takes a digital keychain and sets it as a destabilizing sound effect throughout the song, robotically intoning that "grown-ups are crazy." Despite the factory presets that date "Arm Around You", Arthur's watery vocals convey that endearing, universal gesture of touching a lover's face yet never quite overcoming the space in-between. A poignant koan reiterates throughout the song: "All alone and right next to you/ What I'm doing in a fine, this fine stretch of time." As the title track runs on, the comforting cello and percussion rises up between the drum machine hits, and Arthur echoes through the space, conjuring both the Iowa fields of his youth and the Indian Ocean. There's that axis of intimacy and unrecoverable distance, of the tangible and ethereal, dealing with the hardware that makes music and the soft machines that do, too, inseparable no matter what song form gets explored.
The disc proves Russell to be a changeling artist whose only parallel might be Miles Davis, constantly placing his individual sound in new contexts, constantly searching. But whereas Miles' explorations-- from cool nonets and electric washes to on-the-one funk and Cyndi Lauper-- came over a forty year period, Arthur did it all at once; the genres undifferentiated in his mind and compacted into the infinity of a single decade.
