Arthur Russell was an indecisive, brilliant composer

Arthur russell was a perfectionist. He could never decide when something was finished. When the musician died of aids-related illnesses in 1992, at the age of 40, he had released only three solo albums and was barely known beyond New York’s experimental arts scene. But his apartment was overflowing with stacks of boxes containing notebooks, letters, handwritten scores and nearly 1,000 tapes of recorded material. His music spanned genres as disparate as disco (under the aliases of “Dinosaur L”, “Indian Ocean” and “Loose Joints”), folk, pop and country.