Composer, singer, and disco producer Arthur Russell never finished anything. As described in a 2003 feature in The Wire by David Toop, Russell spent endless hours up until his death in 1992 reworking his own music in studios or his apartment. And even when something was "done," Russell would just as soon hand it to someone like legendary remixer Walter Gibbons, who'd mess with it all over again. Russell's music-- with often very little holding it to verse-chorus-verse structure to begin with-- was a series of musical elements that simply coexisted in a world of echo, elements to be pushed, prodded, subtracted, repeated, or tweaked beyond recognition.
So fans shouldn't be too worried that Audika had commissioned a DFA remix of Russell's unfinished "Springfield" on this new EP, the most recent installment in the label's Russell reissue program. By the time the track was begun in the mid-1980s, Russell's aqueous disco already moved to the electro-funk and proto-house beats that are the DFA's whole reason for existing. Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy merely construct a funky, bass-y spine for what, on the evidence of the long and winding "original" mix and short rough sketch on the EP, was a gorgeous if rather amorphous swirl of Russell's signature buzzing walls of synthesizer, raw-toned cello, and little-boy-lost voice.
If all of Russell's music is watery, "Springfield", especially in its original mix, is a jacuzzi, percussion bubbling, as weird as Ricardo Villalobos at his most maximalist and haunted by ghosts of the late 80s, right down to the corroded AOR brass (shades of near-death Miles Davis) and house pianos. As usual, Russell's falsetto and love of smeary reverb means you only hear every other word of what he's singing, but it's more about the way he sighs "never been kissed." The DFA are smart enough to blow all the extraneous sounds away around five minutes into their mix to bring Russell's voice right up into your ear. It's as shiver-worthy a moment as 2006 has produced, even if the voice was recorded nearly 20 years ago and its owner is long dead.
The rest of Springfield is a testament to Russell's life's-work-as-obsessive-and-endless-self-remix project. "See My Brother, He's Jumping Out" is a drum-happy rework of all-time classic "Let's Go Swimming," a swirl of synthesized congas, bongos, and bass drums booming from the ocean floor. This is post-disco as rhythm and nothing but. Like my Villalobos mention above, we wouldn't hear much like its pointillist, psychedelic percussion again until Perlon-style microhouse over two decades later, but of course Russell's fat midrange synths and '80s technology (some of those fills sound like highlife drummers let loose on hexagonal syndrums) mean his sound is thicker than the spiky, spare Germans.
"Corn #3" sounds like a remix of materials (more quavering keyboard tonalities, strings, slow and deliberate beat) from the Calling Out of Context era, though I didn't pull it out to A/B them, so I can't be sure. And "You Did the Right Thing When You Put That Skylight In" is a tiny song-sketch with a joke that's all in the title and proof that head-in-the-clouds cosmonaut Russell could be direct and whimsical at the same time. Springfield probably could have done with being beefed up by a few more tracks into something like a proper release, but as it stands, the two mixes of "Springfield" and "See My Brother" are important new pieces to completing the ever-expanding Russell puzzle.
