I recently discovered Arthur Russell via a post a friend made linking to a remix of a version of Arthur Russell’s Our Last Night Together.

I did a little digging to find some lyrics and came across this post about the album which Our Last Night Together comes from, A World of Echo:

I paid about 1£ for this when I found it in a discount bin in a Norwegian record store in 1992. I had no idea what it was but it said Rough Trade on the cover so it could not be too bad. I listened to the first side over and over for a week or so before I understood enough to flip it over to the second side. When that happened my life and my understanding of music had already changed. Next I spent years trying to find out exactly who Arthur Russell was and why nobody else had heard of him or his music. When the internet became part of our lives at the end of the decade I decided that I wanted to create an Arthur Russell message board just to see what would happen. After a year or so I got an email from a friend of Russell, who was kind enough to fill me in on his story. I replied with a long e-letter, describing my profound love for World of Echo, relieved that I had finally found someone out there that actually knew what I was talking about. It’s kind of ironic that I had to make it all the way to Russell’s inner circle to experience that and my “love letter” even made it all the way to Russell’s “widow”, Tom Lee, who reportedly was touched by my deep feelings for the work of his lost love. I would yet have to wait over half a decade after that for the album to be released on CD. The impact it made on the world when it finally happened did not surprise me.

If you like artists like Thom Yorke, James Blake or Antony and the Johnsons, you’ll like Arthur Russell, R.I.P.