Audika Records
2006
Springfield
About This Album
Cynics might level charges of barrel-scraping against Springfield, Audika's fifth archival Arthur Russell release, which features unfinished material and alternate versions of available tracks. However, to characterize these works in progress as inessential misses the point that, as an artist famously devoted to reworking and revising, Russell focused on the creative process, not the end product. That ethos resonated in the styles he explored, eschewing conventional, well-wrought forms or a narrative movement toward closure. He gravitated to disco's emphasis on open-endedness, rhythm, repetition, and being in the moment; by contrast, on 1986's spacy World of Echo he pursued a more oceanic fluidity. Springfield incorporates both tendencies. The title track (one of Russell's final pieces) appears in three guises: an unfinished eight-minute rendering and a brief fragment, plus a DFA mix. Russell's full-length original marries beats and synth with his minimalist combination of reverbed tenor vocals, sawing cello, and slurring horns; the DFA's treatment doesn't transform the track but rearranges the order in which its elements emerge, also giving those elements sharper definition with space between them.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,4,5 and 7)

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