that's_us raze there are some songs that make no sense on paper. they shouldn't work. but they do work, and the paper turns itself to dust out of shame for not knowing what it thought it knew the way it thought it knew it. this is one of those songs. arthur russell was an interesting character. he was so prolific, the word "prolific" doesn't seem strong enough to express just how much he created in his too-short life. and yet only one full-length album was released with his name on it while he was alive — the staggering "world of echo", a testament to what one person can do with little more than a cello, some effects, and the sound of their own voice. some bits sound like idm before idm existed. one song's opening moments sound like "loveless"-era my bloody valentine before my bloody valentine existed. but really, none of it sounds a whole lot like anything anyone else has ever done. it doesn't sound like it was recorded in the 1980s, though it was. it doesn't sound like it belongs to any time at all. arthur made some of the most creative disco music you'll ever hear, but you might never actually hear it, because a lot of it's almost impossible to find. he left behind more than a thousand cassette tapes, a few dozen of them nothing but different mixes of one song he couldn't perfect. he never felt like anything he did was finished. death must have been a strange idea to grapple with for someone who avoided so many endings, and he knew it was coming. "world of echo" itself consists mostly of songs that had been recorded before as something like dance music, stripped to their guts and turned inside_out to the point of becoming unrecognizable, something different, something new. he also recorded songs like this — love songs that could melt into cheese in someone else's hands but are warped into something beautiful by his inimitable open-hearted muppet wail of a voice. if you break it down, you've got a drum machine keeping time, a keyboard that sounds like it's something cheap set on a stock half-fake-electric-piano-half-fake-organ patch, cello burbling away in the background in place of a bass part, doubling as additional percussion, and that's about it, except there's also jennifer warnes singing harmonies. the same jennifer warnes who duetted with joe cocker on "up where we belong" and recorded an album of leonard cohen songs that makes cohen sound like 80s pop in ways that are sometimes fascinating, sometimes just puzzling. somehow all of this combines, and arthur's and jennifer's voices combine too, to make something beautiful beyond reason. sufjan stevens' cover of "a little lost" is a great example of what could happen to an arthur russell song if you took his voice and sensibilities away. i like sufjan (don't have any respect for him, for reasons not worth getting into here, but enjoy some of his music, because those two things can be separated sometimes), but he takes a song that sounded in its original form like a simple, perfect little declaration of love, and makes it sound instead like a paper cup filled with something that looks like chocolate mousse until you take a sniff and you take a taste and you realize it's diarrhea. arthur had a way of singing that made it sometimes difficult to understand his words, but when you listen to his music you sense he wanted you to know what he meant and worked hard at getting across the feelings inside of the sounds. "hearing but not understanding," he sings on one of the songs on "world of echo", and he might as well be singing to you while you're listening. "seeing the clouds but not the sky." in sufjan's hands, you can understand all the words just fine, but he doesn't sing them like they mean anything to him. he makes the cheese happen, melts it down, turns unfettered joy into flatlined mediocrity, and there's nothing there. that feels like a worse insult to the music than any ambitious train wreck of an attempt at retooling the song ever could have been. so why is this other song (covered by the scissor sisters on the same tribute album sufjan contributed to, but i'm going to pretend that didn't happen and not listen to it), given a weirdly perfect music video by some brilliant person who thought to sync it up with scenes from "the muppet movie", so good? i don't know. it just is. people can cover his songs all they want, but they can't replicate his heart, and maybe that's it right there. watch + listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwlsdSutsQw 141223 what's it to you? who go blather from