Calling Out Of Context
A hushed sense of anticipation preceded a late-night preview of Matt Wolf’s Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell at the ICA last Friday. How sensitively would the young director handle the life of the much-loved disco auteur? How, more to the point, could Wolf even begin to deal with the many sides of his musical output? Allen Ginsberg, who appears several times, called Russell’s music ‘Buddhist bubblegum’ – a pretty good catch-all for a busy career that, aside from the emaciated disco and cello-and-voice folk for which he’s best known, ran from almost joining the Talking Heads, to scoring Samuel Beckett’s final play, producing a failed hiphop project fronted by a young Vin Diesel and performing with Philip Glass at the Kitchen (where Russell was musical director). (Despite the oft-noted connection between classical minimalism and disco’s loops, Russell was the only musician whose career successfully passed between the two.)
A trailer for Wild Combination
Full review to follow, but Wild Combination is an excellent – and sometimes heartbreaking – film that follows the awkward Iowan teen from Buddhist seminary in San Francisco to (relative) fame as a dance producer, through to his slow decline due to AIDS-related illnesses and eventual death, at 40, in 1992. Wolf has said that he was sometimes restricted by footage that was either non-existent or hackneyed, which I’d guess accounts for Russell’s best-known releases – the records he put out as Loose Joints and Dinosaur L – being skimmed over in favour of his World of Echo album of reverbed solo cello. This aside, the film does an awful lot in just 71 minutes.
During his own lifetime Russell’s music went largely unheard outside of Manhattan. But, with Audika Records diligently released managing Russell’s vast archive of unreleased tapes (the next of which, Love Is Overtaking Me, comes out at the end of October) and Tim Lawrence forthcoming biography, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92 , his singular legacy of Buddhist bubblegum is in good hands.
A hushed sense of anticipation preceded a late-night preview of Matt Wolf’s Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell at the ICA last Friday. How sensitively would the young director handle the life of the much-loved disco auteur? How, more to the point, could Wolf even begin to deal with the many sides of his musical output? Allen Ginsberg, who appears several times, called Russell’s music ‘Buddhist bubblegum’ – a pretty good catch-all for a busy career that, aside from the emaciated disco and cello-and-voice folk for which he’s best known, ran from almost joining the Talking Heads, to scoring Samuel Beckett’s final play, producing a failed hiphop project fronted by a young Vin Diesel and performing with Philip Glass at the Kitchen (where Russell was musical director). (Despite the oft-noted connection between classical minimalism and disco’s loops, Russell was the only musician whose career successfully passed between the two.)
A trailer for Wild Combination
Full review to follow, but Wild Combination is an excellent – and sometimes heartbreaking – film that follows the awkward Iowan teen from Buddhist seminary in San Francisco to (relative) fame as a dance producer, through to his slow decline due to AIDS-related illnesses and eventual death, at 40, in 1992. Wolf has said that he was sometimes restricted by footage that was either non-existent or hackneyed, which I’d guess accounts for Russell’s best-known releases – the records he put out as Loose Joints and Dinosaur L – being skimmed over in favour of his World of Echo album of reverbed solo cello. This aside, the film does an awful lot in just 71 minutes.
During his own lifetime Russell’s music went largely unheard outside of Manhattan. But, with Audika Records diligently released managing Russell’s vast archive of unreleased tapes (the next of which, Love Is Overtaking Me, comes out at the end of October) and Tim Lawrence forthcoming biography, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92 , his singular legacy of Buddhist bubblegum is in good hands.
