Arthur Russell
Another Thought

Part One: electrified cello and voice. But how?

I didn't want to believe it for years. I grew up hoping to have a bit of Arthur Russell's dimension. I would have met girls(!), attended vernissages, played on TV, succumbed only to a company’s billion-dollar temptations of beauty products or only during old age, I would have campaigned. But for me, this album remained on the shelf like a dream waiting to be fertilized by reality, suspended by time and space where that rain-laden voice gravitated. I went through the worst period of my life right in that adolescence, yes, because dreams aren't fertilized by reality and because, more simply, they are unexpressed eternal potentialities. Arthur Russell is exactly this: a dream, an adolescence, a life.
And then he didn't know many girls, didn't attend many vernissages. He simply burned, burnt alive for life. And at a certain point, he wrote "Another Thought". In the meantime, I have grown up. Arthur Russell died of AIDS on April 4, 1992. With him went the greatest dream of my life. I can never become Arthur Russell. Not even for a day.

Part Two: where music is talked about

I have no more saliva. When I hear this voice, near and distant from other bliss (I think of Roy Harper, I think of Stephin Merritt) I feel the chill in the heart, my legs tremble. I see an intense moment of pleasure stretched over a kilometer-long void, and Arthur's lips floating in the void, telling spatial love stories with echoes that pierce the exposed part of the soul, forever. I see waves silently approaching from afar, refluctuating distant from the shimmering chimes of a mysterious chordophone. I see the guitar can also speak in an empty room with the chandelier spinning, wondering where the voice is coming from.
Then suddenly I don't see anything anymore. This album has defeated me as always. I don't remember a single song but I have a feeling not unlike intoxication.

Rest in peace and God forgive those who remember you only for that advertisement.