Arthur Russell’s 1994 album Another Thought will be issued for the first time on vinyl this autumn, via a new label run out of Bristol’s Multiverse Music, Arc Light Editions. Originally released posthumously – two years after the seminal New York composer and songwriter’s death – it contains tracks dating from between 1982 and 1990. They were compiled by Mikel Rouse and producer Don Christiensen, and issued on CD via Point Music, and largely consist of works-in-progress, with individual songs varying in their stages of completion.
Despite that, say Arc Light Editions, "it is perhaps the most sonically coherent album ever released of Russell’s material", which was renowned for cutting across disciplines, with Russell drawing ideas variously from disco, post-punk and the experimental avant-garde. Listen to the album’s ‘This Is How We Walk On The Moon’ via the embed below. Among the additional musicians playing on Another Thought is Peter Zummo, the New York trombonist whose excellent Zummo With An X – featuring Russell on cello – was reissued last year via Optimo Music.
The Another Thought reissue – which will be released on double vinyl with impressive looking artwork – is the debut release from Arc Light Editions. The label is curated by The Wire‘s Jennifer Lucy Allan in conjunction with Bristol’s Multiverse, the studio/label collective co-founded by Emptyset’s James Ginzburg and which also runs labels such as Subtext and Pinch’s dubstep institution Tectonic.
The label’s aim, says the mission statement on the website, is straightforward: to press "important albums" to vinyl. "We do not claim to be crate diggers, nor are we interested in expensive monolithic deluxe reissues. We hope to make available on vinyl some releases which have been out of print for too long, are extortionately priced second hand, or which have never been graced with a vinyl release."
The artwork for the reissued version, by Jennifer Lucy Allan, can be seen at the top of this article (the original artwork for the CD edition, featuring Russell in a rather fetching newspaper hat, is below). For more information on the label and the Another Thought reissue, click here to visit the Arc Light website.
