Travels Over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life review – down the rabbit hole with a musical maverick

His prodigious output and his refusal to have that work pinned down has, in the decades since his death from Aids-related illness in 1992, birthed a small cottage industry of admiration and exegesis: compilations, reissues, covers albums, biographies and even a film.

Photograph: TBCAlongside experiments destined for the dancefloor, Russell continued to record sparer electro-acoustic compositions, all the while soundtracking austere dance or theatre pieces, earning the respect of composer Philip Glass and playing in various ensembles.

He could also turn his hand to relatively conventional singer-songwriter material – witness the posthumously released Love Is Overtaking Me album – but Instrumentals, a 1984 rendering of a Russell composition from a decade prior, with modular parts that musicians could theoretically begin at random points in the score, is perhaps more typical.

King has been given access to Russell’s considerable archive, housed in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, to compile this intimate coffee-table tome: an array of his letters, written in careful pencil, plus event flyers, scores and charts, sleeve artwork and cool ephemera (numerological workings-out, invoices for studio time).

The visuals are linked to oral-history style accounts from intimates and contemporaries, including Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis, whose funding helped keep Russell afloat, and printer Tom Lee, his life partner.

King’s moving account keeps you guessing as to how the cornfields of Iowa birthed such a curious (in both senses) musician; one tangential clue might be that the house Russell grew up in was designed by his uncle, a modernist architect who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright.