What He Says / On Being Unintelligible

So I got bored of hearing myself think.

I started asking people what songs they felt deserved more appreciation.

Some of them agreed to write essays about those songs.

I’m honored and delighted to share the first of those with you today.

Bradley Trumpfheller is a friend and poet who has a wonderful meditation on the new-to-me, but late cellist Arthur Russell.

Take a listen. I think you’re going to love this song.

Carl

by Bradley Trumpfheller

I think I was alone the first time I heard Arthur Russell singing. Most of the new music I found came through the YouTube algorithm; this particular video was fan-made, a little ink drawn animation of a dolphin and a child swimming together set over (under?) the song “A Little Lost.” Lines that stood in for waves whirled in strange time with Arthur’s cello, the dolphin arcing in and out of the green-beige water. Like much of his discography, it’s a straightforward enough love song: “I’m so busy, so busy thinking ‘bout kissing you,” the chorus goes, his voice coming up and over. The voice is why I love him. Almost incomprehensible and totally sincere, shot through with feeling that pulls the sound away from sense. Where a singer like Elisabeth Fraser lets the words blur in her vocals’ staggering range, one hallmark of Arthur Russell’s songs is their quietness, their proximity to a baritone-ish hum. It’s as if his voice follows the music, lags a bit behind it, like a sketch for what a voice should do. “It’s all unfinished,” he sings on ‘A Little Lost,’ or maybe it’s “I’m so unfinished.” The lyrics pages are of no help here. Both translations have the texture of something true. The video was taken down later.

Some biography: Arthur Russell was born in Iowa, moved to the Bay Area as a teenager to live in a Buddhist commune and study composition, then relocated to Manhattan in 1973. He became involved in the experimental dance scene in New York, concentrated at a handful of performance spaces; disco would remain a major influence in his work, alongside more avant-garde classical and electronic music, minimalism, funk, and some of the weirder contemporary rock music of the time. He collaborated widely and recorded voraciously. Only a handful of records and singles were officially released in his lifetime, but for weeks at a time all he would do was make song after song in the East Village apartment he shared with his partner. Listening to his catalog now, the earlier disco tracks get put side by side with orchestral pieces recorded for Phillip Glass’ label, and the solo work jostles from two-minute pop tunes to long, meandering ambient pieces. This jostling is especially apparent on 1986’s World of Echo. It was the only solo studio record released in Arthur’s lifetime and sold fewer than 1000 copies. At a certain point, Arthur had the label put a sticker on the remaining printed copies that said “UNINTELLIGIBLE.” He was diagnosed HIV positive shortly afterwards, developed a throat cancer that required chemotherapy, and continued, to the best of his ability, to make music. Much of the solo work, “A Little Lost” included, was written during this period for ever-further pushed back and incomplete albums. He died in 1992, a few weeks shy of 41.

World of Echo is a massive record. Not only for its eighteen tracks clocking in just over an hour. Each song, however brief, is roomy: Arthur’s voice, thickened with reverb and (appropriately) echo, woven through the buzz and improvisations of the cello and the noise of various electronica. Something bright dropped down something long. I never know how much time has passed. The spare instrumentation––one reviewer described it as the instruments clearing their throats––gives the album its watery, alien texture. The purple-green of the original cover art gets it right, I think: each song a little island dis- and reappearing out of the night fog. The music demands space, the language of spaciousness. Where precision opens up; note blurred out to tone.

The lyrics, in the midst of the weird non-pop poolwater-drenched sound space, offer up no real architecture. Yet it is what I cling to: on each song, the sung parts are mostly repeated over and over, laddering out their disassociation. On “Answers Me,” the structure feels iterative: each new image or phrase said over until it shows the way to the next. “Baby lion goes where the islands go, baby lion goes where the islands go,” the song begins, and then dissolves into mumbling, singing around the shape of where lyrics should go, or went once. So unfinished. I haven’t seen two lyrics transcriptions of the song that arrive at the same version. No moment of clarity comes in the retrospect. “Words you used to tell me what the answer is.” “Answers me,” the song keeps saying, fading out into silence. Like “A Little Lost,” it’s a love song––and a sort of demand. The fragment “answers me” designates no question, no other. It’s pure promise: something answers. Something speaks back. It doesn’t really make sense to close read a song like this. The words, so pressed down among the stuff of Arthur’s music, take me past analysis into sensation, in which the fragments of another’s language shimmer. Do you remember being in the pool and seeing someone’s body from underwater? And where is that light coming from. If not from inside their body. And towards you.

Towards you: also what I’m trying to say. This sense that I’ve always had about Arthur Russell’s music, of being reached for. Which of the five is that? Almost proprioceptive. Reached for, but not actually gotten ahold of. Knowing the hand that was there has moved closer to where your hand is. It isn’t quite being desired. But I think it does have to do with loneliness. Close enough to anything, there’s a real way that all the senses bend towards touch.  The voice follows the music. Weft. It presses down into it.

In the twenty-minute video, the camera starts impossibly close to him. The only light comes from a flickering projection on some sort of screen behind him, just visible under the contours of his nose and lips, which take up a third of the shot. He’s rocking back and forth, in and out of the light––towards the microphone, then away from it. “Terrace of Unintelligibility” was filmed in 1985 by the artist and composer Phil Niblock in his loft: a solo performance, just Arthur and his cello. Maybe there’s an audience, but the video offers no sense of the room as a place in any sort of real time.

In part because it doesn’t firmly begin or end anywhere, and in part because of what sort of performance it actually is. Arthur doesn’t stop playing. In essence, he’s doing a five-times-extended version of “Answers Me.” Verses and choruses, if they existed there in the first place, are made malleable in length and placement. Some of the lyrics are elaborated on. “What he says answers me, answers me / What he does answers me.” When I called it a love song, I was thinking of this version. There’s another person there, though they’re not really being sung to. Someone doing the answer, both in speech and gesture. One effect of the song’s weird elongation is how it endows, for me, the rest of his music with a sense of contingency; that each version might respond (answer) its context with its form. This is part of the appeal of the live album to me generally, the allowances it makes for play and failure. For Arthur, I want to say, music was all play, all failure. To keep the song ongoing, perpetually open to becoming perfect. “Terrace of Unintelligibility” lights what is elsewhere left implicit.

Right before the 8-minute mark, a phone rings. Proof of an audience! Arthur’s face has by now gone out of the frame, and all that’s visible is his fingers on the neck of the cello, the shadow of the bow arm swinging in and out. Niblock films the instrument the same way he does the singer’s body. Pale gold light from the projector blinks off the strings. I am far in time from this and yet. The title of the video, however it was arrived at, gives a clue, I think, as to why we’re in so close. Or the other way round. Unintelligible, on the one hand, because Arthur’s voice, as it always does, slopes in and out of the articulate. Whole minutes of “Terrace” are mumbled, hummed through. I want to lean closer but I can’t. It’s only a video. And still, how close I am already. The people in the room with him are nearer to the sound’s fullness through speakers, but no nearer to the actual voice or the soul somewhere inside of it. Most songs probably have something to do with the interior; Arthur’s song calls out from it. Sirenic. Woven with the promise of legibility if only the listener can get close enough. How could the camera not relent to that same desire? What comes toward you might be what pulls away and beckons.

But is legibility itself what I want? Underneath it, I think, is the desire to understand, to know––to hear him. To genuinely listen, to give myself over to the listening, to actually encounter what goes on inside or behind all the stuff of being sung to. Where the other person is. It has to do with loneliness because that (impossible) encounter is the opposite of loneliness. “Answers Me,” in this version, is a song that is listened to but not heard; not heard so much as it is overheard, as though the ear is pressed up against the shut door of a bedroom. Arthur’s voice beckons so much because it is so uninterested in a certain kind of intelligibility. Music made on the precipice of waking; singing that trusts in leaving language in order to follow feeling into sound. If I’m overemphasizing where all of this places the listener, it is because this is how I want to listen. And that is what I love most about Arthur’s strange, sad music. It makes that listening seem possible, no matter how naïve it remains, how idealistic. Even for just these twenty minutes, I’m fastened to a voice that is not my own. Not even a lover’s or a friend’s. I feel like I’m closer to the presence of this other than I’ve been to almost anyone, so close that it brushes against my skin. And at the same time, like there is so much further I have to go to get there. He died five years before I was born and I miss him very dearly.

It's all unfinished, and it has to be. Dying when he did, in the way that he did, he left behind a vast amount of demo tapes and work in progress. For as much as has been released to the public as solo albums, there’s a massive amount of Arthur’s music that won’t be listened to. It is a very strange thing to imagine the unmade art of someone who died young. For queer people, it can be a familiar strangeness. Would have he completed these songs, had he lived? Would he have abandoned them or worked on them endlessly?

Just now I searched for the “A Little Lost” video with the dolphin again. It’s been re-uploaded, for the time being. And it doesn’t really look how I remember it: the drawing’s more filled out, a little more sepia. The lines are stronger, the shore more cleanly drawn, less sketched. It’s almost as if Arthur’s voice had leaked out into the visual parts of the memory, incompleting the scene. More or less what memory does. His songs sound like remembering a song. I can almost hear him.

Bradley Trumpfheller is a graduate student at the Michener Center for Writers. They are the author of a chapbook, Reconstructions (Sibling Rivalry Press), and their poems have appeared in The Baffler, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere.