Arthur Russell

Arthur Russell was an Iowa-born cellist, composer, and singer who spent the 1970s and 1980s quietly demolishing the walls between avant-garde composition and the New York dancefloor. He served as music director at the downtown performance space The Kitchen, produced underground club hits under aliases including Dinosaur L and Loose Joints, and counted Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg, and the Talking Heads among his collaborators. His two albums issued under his own name—the orchestral Tower of Meaning and the hushed, voice-and-cello World of Echo—barely hinted at the enormous archive of folk, country, and experimental recordings he left unfinished at his death from AIDS in 1992. That archive has since generated a steady stream of posthumous releases on Audika Records, each one enlarging a reputation that scarcely existed in his lifetime.