World of Echo

Julius Eastman (1940–1990) was a composer, conductor, singer, pianist, and choreographer. A singular figure in New York City’s downtown scene of the 1970s and ’80s, he performed at Lincoln Center with Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic and recorded music by Arthur Russell, Morton Feldman, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Meredith Monk. “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest,” he said in 1976. “Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.”

Eastman was young, gay, and Black at a time when it was even more difficult to be young, gay, and Black. He swerved through academia, discos, Europe, Carnegie Hall, and the downtown experimental music scene. And in 1990, at age 49, Eastman died in Buffalo, New York, less than a decade after the New York City Sheriff’s Department threw most of his scores, belongings, and ephemera into the East Village snow.

Eastman’s music shines like a retroactive beacon to today’s musical creators. Any term used to characterize today’s musical landscape—“genre-fluid” or the like—was anticipated by Eastman decades before. Yet he was punished for being ahead of his time, both in the treatment of his music and, tragically, his person. Eastman’s music flowed freely from—and through—his myriad influences and was terribly served by the musical infrastructure of his day. In our unique approaches to Eastman’s work, we’re pushing ourselves to work in dialogue with the composer’s creative impulses, channeling his individualistic spirit, augmenting the pieces with our ideas and concepts, and trying to stay true.

Arthur Russell (1951–1992) was a cellist, vocalist, and composer known for his fusion of classical and popular music.

Originally from Oskaloosa, Iowa, Russell traveled to the West Coast in 1970, joining a Buddhist commune and studying Indian classical composition at the Ali Akbar Khan College in Marin County. In 1971 Russell met and performed with Allen Ginsberg who brought him to New York for a recording session produced by John Hammond that also included Bob Dylan, Perry Robinson, and Happy Traum.

Russell moved to New York in 1973 to study at the Manhattan School of Music. Quickly gravitating to the then burgeoning downtown music scene, Russell wrote and performed his minimal compositions, including the bubblegum pop-inspired “Instrumentals,” and was music director at The Kitchen in 1974, along with recording his own pop songs for John Hammond.

Throughout his life Russell collaborated with a who’s who of some of New York’s most influential artists including Christian Wolf, John Cage, Peter Gordon, Peter Zummo, Ernie Brooks, Jon Gibson, Mustafa Ahmed, Rhys Chatham, Jill Kroesen, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Larry Levan, Phillip Glass, Robert Wilson, Julius Eastman, Arnold Dreyblatt, Walter Gibbons, and Phill Niblock.

Russell’s music shifted dramatically in 1977 after an unexpected visit to a disco. Inspired by the sonic repetition and sense of community, Russell wrote and recorded some of the most influential records of the disco era including “Kiss Me Again,” “Is It All Over My Face,” and “Go Bang.” By 1984 Russell began stretching the boundaries of disco and composition, becoming entranced with echo, and its use in his own songwriting. The completed album, World of Echo, combined Russell’s rich composition skills with echo, feedback, voice, and cello, and remains one of the most influential documents of the era as a work of timeless beauty.

When Arthur Russell died from complications due to AIDS in 1992, he left an overwhelming archive of unreleased material that has since been rereleased and compiled by Audika Records in association with Russell’s partner Tom Lee. As a cellist, songwriter, composer, and disco visionary, Arthur Russell consistently challenged our expectations of what pop music could be.