Arthur Russell and Josephine Foster
by Bernardo Rondeau
Arthur Russell
First Thought Best Thought
(Audika)
Rating: 5 out of 5 rock-ons
Thanks to a minor blitz of re-issues back in 2004, the works of Iowa-born, New York-based Arthur Russell lapsed from obscurity to regain some well-deserved prominence. However, the releases honed-in on the cellist’s output from the eighties to his untimely passing in 1992 from AIDS: the ecstatic disco mutations of The World of Arthur Russell, the mantric, pop-like whats-its of Calling Out of Context and, arguably his masterpiece, the minimalist melancholy of World of Echo. First Thought Best Thought delves into Russell’s mid-’70s tapes and unearths a portrait of the artist as a young vanguard. Comprised mostly of material that was never properly released, if at all, this two-CD set is entirely devoid of Russell’s distinctively awkward and disarming voice. Instead, it covers a decade’s worth of instrumental material—1973 to 1983—that finds Russell a far more spectral presence. Just as his later work is remarkably intimate, the opposite may be true of First Thought Best Thought. Russell himself plays on only two of its five compositions. His fuzzy electric cello and occasional count-off are noticeable on the first and previously unreleased volume of “Instrumentals,†a suite of ten mini-symphonies with rock instrumentation that suggests some lost Brian Wilson sessions amidst the Smile daze with bearded boho Moondog. Russell returns at the disc’s end on “Sketch for the Face of Helen,†a dusty tonescape of field recordings and synthesizer experiments. In between there’s the modal majesty of radiant strings melting into brass glows on both the second volume of “Instrumentals†and “Tower of Meaning†and, best of all perhaps, the otherworldly, seemingly telegraphed, Fender Rhodes duet “Reach One.†Two years after his posthumous return, the (re)discovery of yet another astonishing expanse of the vast, secret continent that is Arthur Russell is most welcomed.
Josephine Foster
A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing
(Locust)
Rating: 4 out of 5 rock-ons
A startling but not objectionable development in the discography of freak folk associate Josephine Foster, A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, finds the stately chanteuse and classically-trained opera student returning to sheet music with a smudgy, acid-dipped pencil. Lacing the Teutonic romanticism of Schubert, Brahms, Wolf and Schumann with lysergic abstraction, Foster’s sparse and spectral arrangements for A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing rely on her skeletal acoustic strums, the occasional fried fretwork of the Supposed’s Brian Goodman and, most importantly, her inimitable voice. Recorded amidst indiscernible creaks, faint rainfall and far thunder, she lulls on “Die Schwestern†while on “Der König in Thule,†there’s a passage of erased instrumentation wherein an eerie choir of overdubbed Foster doppelgangers suffuse the room. Her bare voice returns on the cavernous “Auf einer Burg†where, accompanied by distant feedback activity, it reverberates, flickers and distorts as if playing back on decomposed magnetic tape. Supported by a grant from Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, released through local label Locust and garlanded in a sleeve sketched by hometown comix giant and part-time scuzz supernaut Plastic Crimewave (AKA Steve Krakow), the key referent for A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing may be the history of the Illinois metropolis itself. From the communist-anarchist stirrings in the Haymarket Riot to the rise of the nickelodeon, the once second largest city in the United States was a Germanic berth. Indeed, by 1892 Mark Twain would even joke that Berlin was “the Chicago of Europe.†A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing is the magnificent tombstone to this Deutsche Atlantis of the Midwest.