The avant garde cellist is mostly known for his popular disco productions (including Loose Joints’ “Is It All Over My Face?”), but he also left behind an astonishing archive of tapes containing proto-folk masterpieces, all composed while waiting for his boyfriend to get home to their East Village apartment where they lived next door to Allen Ginsberg. Tall and extremely handsome despite his prominent facial scars, Arthur can be described as a forgotten gay icon.  The Iowa-born New Yorker’s songs juxtaposed the light with the dark—they can be both sparse and lush, intimate and distant, or ecstatic and sad—perhaps in reflection of the wild nightclub and gay sex scenes of 70s and 80s which were punctuated by the AIDS epidemic (to which Arthur himself fell victim). Whatever your relationship with Arthur Russell may be, Rough Trade released much of his unreleased material this week in a record entitled Love Is Overtaking Me, and it’s highly advised you let it take you over.

Arthur Russell – “That’s Us/Wild Combination” (mp3)
Arthur Russell – “Get Around to It” (mp3)

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Wild Combination at the ICA (Dazed Digital)
Arthur Russell “Love Is Overtaking Me” (Rough Trade)