The Brooklyn Rail

In Travels Over Feeling, we meet all of Arthur Russell’s friends at once, to echo his 1982 disco hit “Go Bang! #5”, and make a few of our own, too. Welsh music journalist Richard King tours the avant-garde cellist and composer’s life, presenting a panoply of letters, postcards, musical scores, and photos alongside insightful interviews with over twenty of Russell’s companions and colleagues. Rather than give an idealized portrait of the musician, King acts as an open-hearted travel guide to Russell’s world, largely eschewing commentary and allowing the archive to speak for itself in all its messy beauty.

Russell’s life spanned musical genres and physical landscapes, a dynamic King captures well in the broad spreads of this coffee table book. Born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, in 1951, Russell began playing cello at a young age, before moving to San Francisco at eighteen to escape the constraints of rural life. From very early on, Travels Over Feeling reproduces the act of travel on the page, through extensive letters—not always easily legible—to and from friends and family. A teenage letter to Russell’s friend Pat waxes poetic on the “new jazz” of Ornette Coleman and mentions Allen Ginsberg, with whom Arthur developed a friendship in the Bay Area. Russell relocated to New York in 1973 to pursue more commercial success—he was in touch with influential record producer John Hammond—but carried a quirky Buddhist sensibility from the West Coast. His mashup of disco, minimalism, folk, and pop took root in New York, and expanded exponentially until his death from AIDS-related illnesses in 1992.

King serves almost as a curator, compiling material from the Arthur Russell archive at the New York Public Library, and we get some delightful samplings of Russell’s brain here. On just one page of staff paper, Russell shifts from musical reminders—“(don’t forget to use shifting length single lines as drones or background for songs)”—to witty musings—“The open ocean / filling up on chips + dip / I’m hot!”—to Buddhist-inflected sayings—“(potential is emptiness)”. In the back of an early letter to his San Francisco girlfriend, Muriel Fuji, whose voice animates the book’s first section, Russell jotted obscure musical markings alongside a hasty map of the West Village. In a postscript, slyly dubbed a “note (from ancient bottle),” he mentions touring with Alice Coltrane. King reproduces a smudged folded napkin below, with a question in green ink: “How big is a piece of pie?”

Importantly, as Russell grew into his own in the late seventies and early eighties, King presents a portrait of a mature artist working confidently across multiple scenes. Russell applies for a grant for a new recording of his pop-inflected minimalist composition, Instrumentals (1974). Mustafa Khaliq Ahmed recalls hearing the influential “Go Bang!” on the radio the night his son was born, saying that “Arthur knew the cats and he influenced the cats to be the men we are today.” A poster for one of Russell’s many short-lived bands, The Singing Tractors, with frequent collaborators Elodie Lauten and Peter Zummo, advertises how they “[turn] up a rich loam of musical sensibilities.” Russell never achieved the mainstream recognition he at times desired, but as Peter Gordon observes, “there wouldn’t be that huge archive of tapes if he had been out there spending his time hustling”—he was working. Here, King comes as close as possible to merging the sonic archive with the visual one. Despite the alluring story of Russell’s posthumous discovery in the early 2000s, shepherded by Steve Knutson at Audika Records, King rightly asserts that “[his] life ended neither in obscurity nor failure.”

King omits a couple noteworthy details, like the cultlike nature of the Buddhist commune Russell joined in San Francisco, and he unfortunately elides Russell’s association with David Byrne, but the capaciousness of the book more than makes up for these gaps. The most tender moments come through the presence of Tom Lee, Arthur’s partner from the late 1970s until his death. King includes postcards Lee sent Russell from Brighton and Cancún; in 1991, as Arthur, increasingly sick, was still making music, Lee sent a lovely drawing of the Bay Area landscape, writing, “I wish you were sharing this time with me since we both like it here so much.”

One especially moving spread comes near the middle of Travels, where Arthur’s dad writes from Iowa to return a tape left in a car, and his sister Kate recalls Arthur’s visits back to Iowa in an interview. On the opposite page, the following lyrics appear on a Danceteria envelope addressed to Tom: “I’m on an island am I near or far / I’m stopping short so we know where we are.” I’m so grateful to be on that island with Arthur, knowing where I am thanks to his music, his friends, and King’s wonderful book.