World of Echo

It is perhaps a fool’s errand to pluck one defining project from Arthur Russell’s vast, multidimensional musical practice, but of all his recordings World of Echo is certainly his most idiosyncratic and personal. Constructed only of voice, cello and “echoes” (as they are literally accredited in the liner notes), the album unfurls an entire harmonic universe from these simple elements, complex forms arising from chains of effects applied to the subtlest of murmurations and gestures. Through this highly experimental approach arises something boundless, an illusionary refraction of virtuosity that casts his instrument and voice into a hall of mirrors which simultaneously obfuscates and accentuates its meaning. Recorded with help from famed minimalist composer Phil Niblock, the album was first conceptualised through rigorous home experimentation intertwined deeply with his Buddhist meditation practice, further refined through live performances at Niblock’s loft and other avant-garde spaces in New York. By overlapping and modulating different delays and reverbs simultaneously, Russell envisioned “different kinds of echo co-existing, like plants growing within plants”, nested hyper-real spaces telescoping in and out within each other and casting his cello’s airy, sul ponticello bowing and percussive pizzicato slaps into virtual space. This abstraction also extended to language, with the album’s lyrics (polished with feedback given to him by long-time friend Allen Ginsberg) sung in an intentionally unintelligible style that allows the listener to construct their own notions of meaning around the text—turns of phrase are poetically blurred, circling in repetition and continually slipping out of view. Testing positive for HIV shortly after the album’s release, Russell himself would start to slip out of view (“as though he simply vanished into his music”, as Kyle Gann wrote in his 1992 obituary of Russell), but World of Echo sits outside of time, a boundary space between rarely accessible planes of existence.