Rough Trade Email Marketing Manager Mathilde Bataille shared her admiration of Arthur Russell’s musical genius and his ability to defy genre expectations. Russell was an avant-garde composer and cellist who broke down barriers between classical music and the dancefloor. He studied contemporary composition and Indian classical music and later ventured into new wave, voice-cello dub, folk, art pop, and disco, producing a string of hit dance singles and underground club cuts.
Bataille anticipates Richard King’s biography, “Travels Over Feeling: Arthur Russell, A Life,” which will be released on April 16, 2024. The book will feature ephemera and documentation from Russell’s and other private archives, including handwritten scores, lyrics, photos, letters, drawings, and original interviews with Arthur’s collaborators, contemporaries, family, and friends. It aims to give readers a better understanding of Russell’s mysterious works, and Bataille is excited to delve deeper into his mind-blowing eclecticism.
Russell’s music is an endless discovery, and Bataille shared her personal highlights of his distinctive discography, emphasizing that everyone’s list would be different. Her recommendations include the title track of Russell’s eponymous compilation “Love is Overtaking Me,” the beautiful collection of Russell’s diligent songwriting titled “Iowa Dreams,” and the classic post-disco and undeniably groovy “Get Around To It.”
Apart from his musical genius, Russell was also a spiritual person who joined a Buddhist commune in San Francisco in his late teens. His spiritual enlightening played a great role in his life, and his dedication to Buddhism is explicitly heard in his music, as with “Instrumentals” Vol. 1, Pt. 1, and “Tower of Meaning III: Tower of Meaning.”
Russell moved audiences emotionally and physically with his music, and Bataille’s admiration of him is shared by luminaries like Phillip Glass, David Byrne, and Allen Ginsberg, who were all fortunate enough to work with this genre-defying producer, composer, cellist, and Buddhist
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