Arthur Russell
World Of Echo

I am afraid of death. I can't bear the thought, it plunges me into the deepest anguish. Sometimes it surprises me and when I come to my senses, after a few minutes, I find myself frozen and motionless, probing with my brain inside my body hoping that my organs respond one by one to roll call, without causing trouble. For external causes, I give up. It’s unpleasant to talk about it, it might be unfair to those who suffer, I realize that. But my hypochondria is triggered precisely when I see people fighting for life. I wouldn’t have the audacity and strength of many, I am weak. The other night, I woke up flogged by a bad dream. It doesn’t happen often. In fact, it's the first time in my memory that something like this has happened. Sleeplessness wasn’t an option and so off I went to the stereo with a chamomile to see how to find some tranquility. I am a person very attached to life, I like my condition of being human, I’m materialistic and I don’t see why I should give up this state. I am so well and badly off that I am madly in love with it. In seeking an anecdote to these fears, I found an illusion to cling to.

In 1986 Arthur Russell releases "World Of Echo". Which is exactly the state in which I would like to be to escape death. I would live forever inside "World Of Echo". “But then you get tired, what are you going to do with it, afterwards you don’t even know what’s there”. I don’t give a damn. If I really have to close my eyes, I want to remain tied to the earth in here and never come out again. I'm not even interested in the original idea of the artist's work. I don’t know if he conceived it to make us feel what absence of gravity sounds like, to make us listen to a dream, to reconcile his past dance/club experiences with his cello studies. There would be much to say about him. But today it doesn’t matter. I only know that various meanings of the word universal are connected to this release. Twenty-four years later, for me, it is one of the avant-garde points still unreached by human expressive capacities. It is cosmic and chamber, it is immanent and local, calm and paroxysmal, it is accessible to all but I don't know how many would appreciate it. The tracks that make up World Of Echo are serial transfigurations. Reverberations of cello and voice, alienation of the mind in full meditation, syllables, weightless sound waves, discovery of the immaterial value of a good, a score from which even Eno could learn something. And I think he would, rest assured. It is difficult for a work to stand without a pulse, without boring the listener in this state of perpetual emptiness. Russell succeeds, as he says himself, by hiding the present. This subtraction that creates a rich minimalism erases many ties with the earthly but denies the idea of other possibilities. Simply, it suspends. In that state in which I would want my end to be, as late as possible. The deconstruction of the song frees every moment of this album from formalism and makes the perception of the pixels of the sound textures appreciable and easier. Leaving you in peace, without fear and aware that what you would like can exist today and forever. Russell paints the perfect landscape around you, intimate but marketable on a large scale, better than dark wood. Fundamentally, Russell didn’t know what he was getting into but he perceived it. Maybe. I don’t know. I like to think so. I like to think that he thought of everyone when he went into the studio to record these realistic and comforting echoes. In six years he will die very ill. But his composition is divine, it has no boundaries of time, and it’s so unclassifiable that perhaps even calling it avant-garde is insufficient.

I do not delve into the reassessment of the artist and his latest works. These are matters for more attentive and aware listeners. I know some of his work, but this album introduced something within me that was previously unknown to myself. And it gave me a certainty that is the most foolish but also the most reassuring: knowing in what condition I want to live/not live. Then there are within the guidelines of a careful and proactive vision for pop music, classical music, for cello study or dance music, well, that matters to me at the moment. I like the suggestions music brings, its power to entertain, its evocations, the immaterial aspects. My tributes to super-technical players, especially when they know how to make you dream. But fewer points for coldness and for flaunting abilities. A constellation of extra points for those who know how to make a person move, who can generate and extinguish fears, who know how to raise questions and create images one could live in. Arthur Russell is all of this. I am just a consumer of others’ intuitions.