Visiting Nicky Siano’s downtown club The Gallery, Russell had a dancefloor epiphany of the kind it seems you only read about anymore. He fell in love with disco, immediately drawn to the ways in which it seemed to mirror modern composition through repetition: disco vamps as Reichian pulses. Make no mistake though, Russell’s love of disco wasn’t born from some backwards progressivist notion of “intelligent dance.” He loved the night life, had to boogie. He wanted to be a pop star in the worst way. But, crucially to his success, on his own terms.
In a fever of the new convert, he wrote and recorded a track with Siano entitled “Kiss Me Again” (featuring guitar work by David Byrne — this ain’t no disco, indeed) which eventually became the first disco 12″ released on Sire records in 1979. His real fame as a dance producer, however, was cemented with “Is It All Over My Face?,” co-written with Steve D’Aquisto and released as Loose Joints in 1980. One of the first mixes by proto-house legend Larry Levan, “Is It” became an anthem at Levan’s equally legendary club the Paradise Garage. From these auspicious beginnings, Russell led two lives: avant performances downtown at the Kitchen and sublime disco singles, a singularly hospitable vision of dance music that’s rarely been equaled.
Russell, however, doesn’t share the credit for these records alone; they were chopped, re-edited and dubbed out by his DJ/producer partners, including Francois K, Larry Levan, but most importantly Walter Gibbons. Gibbons probably deserves an article of his own, an early master of what we would now call remixing. Gibbons coaxed new songs from existing material, more a dubby midwife than a studio boffin, the sheer pleasure of his productions belying their structural complexity. Partnered with Russell they were disco’s Lennon and McCartney or Ferry and Eno; their working relationship pushed their own individual talents into some rarefied hot-zone reached by few, exploited by less.
Russell was obsessed with bodies of water, even taking the name Indian Ocean for a few releases. This fascination – tidal ebb and flow, unceasing motion — would translate into a pair of records that can be called genius without reserve: “Schoolbell/Treehouse” and “Let’s Go Swimming.” Layer upon layer of keyboard, cello, voice, percussion and other instrumentation was piled atop each other in a shifting sea of harmonics. Gibbons then went to work paring them down, adding and subtracting as necessary. The results throb with an avalanche of unfettered joy, what Russell neatly summarized as “a futuristic summer record.” Their ecstasy is palpable, tactile; you want to lounge in their shimmering pools of percussion, get caught up in the jet stream of melody.
That joy of Russell’s records comes from how they create that space apart from the world. In a recent review, Roger Ebert castigated filmmakers for not utilizing one of film’s main strengths: “films that show me landscapes and cityscapes that exist only in the imagination.” Music’s potential for the creation of similar alternative psycho-acoustic spaces is also underused; how many records can you name which create a sense of space and place, without resorting to cod signifiers? (The way a group like Labradford, with their pinched Morricone-isms, call up dry, arid desertscapes through our collective cultural memory.) Russell’s do. And they do it in the best possible forum: pop music.
And then there’s that voice: a lazy, amniotic drift like some ageless, graceful neuter, swathed in a nimbus of echo and reverb. On first listen, Russell’s singing voice, especially on “Swimming,” sounds almost painfully naive and out of place. But disco/house singing has never been about the natural; all those melisma-laden divas (male and female) who think-they’re-goin-out-of-their-heads and the cocaine mulch mouth of Sleazy D style monologues have about as much to do with the natural beauty of the human instrument as Roger Troutman. If Russell’s records are a sort of future pop which never was but which is all around us, then his voice is that of a superstar from some Star Trek world where the inhabitants have evolved beyond our clumsy flesh shapes into amorphous blobs of pure energy or floating crystalline shards.
In 1986, Rough Trade released the widely acclaimed but now largely forgotten World of Echo. It was yet another link (if one were needed after more than a half-decade of cross fertilization between the corpse-us of guitar rock and funk, dub, and modern composition) between the post-punk, the disco, and the avant garde. The songs were written and recorded between 1980-86; in many ways, they can be seen as the rough drafts (although they stand magnificently on their own) of their disco 12″ counterparts. And while Russell continued recording and writing throughout the 80s, the strain of his personal life eventually took a toll on his productivity, thinning his output to a trickle.
In 1995, David Toop wrote an article on Russell for The Wire after the release of Another Thought. Russell speaks with a resigned melancholy from beyond the grave about “a damaging conflict between me and the record business” and how “if you try and do something different in dance music, you just get branded as an eccentric.” Russell loved disco and loved pop but seemed positively stymied as to why it so often limited its vision they way it does. “A lot of DJs take the tapes I make and try to make them into something more ordinary.” Disco singles weren’t just throwaway entertainment for Russell; he invested as much of himself into a dance production as any more lofty composition. Why couldn’t idiosyncrasy and booty shake exist in one peaceable kingdom?
The answer, of course, is that they can as the 90s have borne out. Many of what must have seemed Russell’s most outré ideas in the 1980s — for instance the notion that “music with no drums is successive to music with drums” — would come more or less true in the form of the post-house Diaspora, Chain Reaction’s vapor trails of ghost percussion being a notable example. Like the view presented in Another Thought, it’s impossible to think what the musical freedom of the 90s would have meant to Russell. Would he have embraced modern dance music, itself having incorporated (unknowingly?) so many of his own ideas? Part of me likes to marvel about the possibilities if he did. But another, more realistic part of me knows that Russell never would have retreated into established ground. One doesn’t spend an entire life crafting a world only to declare it an evolutionary cul de sac.
Jess Harvell