Regardless of the stripped-down setup, the 2 units cowl a whole lot of floor. Sketches for World of Echo begins with a feint: two and a half minutes of dissonant and seemingly formless cello burnished with bracing suggestions. Russell feels like he’s searching for one thing, stumbling in the dead of night. However then a squelchy, laser-zapping synth drone fires up, and the temper turns beatific as he launches into an prolonged instrumental raga. For greater than 10 minutes, he traces swish curlicues in opposition to the pedal tone—tender, whimsical, hypnotic. The album concludes with an equally liquid improvisation, “Sunlit Water,” which shimmers and swirls, blissfully directionless, for greater than 10 idyllic minutes.
In between these dreamlike bookends, Sketches usually appears like a treasure hunt. Look, right here’s “Let’s Go Swimming,” the exact same recording used on World of Echo, however drawn out right into a six-minute trance, slightly than the tantalizing wisp of the canonical model. And right here’s “Protecting Up,” a bittersweet spotlight of 1994’s posthumous One other Thought. The place that recording struts gaily, propelled by programmed drums and proudly decked out in Jennifer Warnes’ attractive close-harmonized vocals, this one feels extra relaxed, extra harmless. Elsewhere, the traces are foggier—bits of World of Echo’s “I Take This Time” and One other Thought’s “Dropping My Style for the Nightlife” flip up, fleetingly, however folded right into a five-song sequence by which Russell principally appears to be channeling extemporaneous ideas over shape-shifting melodies. It’s curious: If “Let’s Go Swimming” and “Protecting Up” invite us to consider the methods by which songs are like folks, rising and altering over time, at different factors it’s virtually as if Russell desires to indicate us that songs don’t exist as standalone entities—they’re all simply a part of a single stream of sound.
That feels very true of Open Vocal Phrases The place Songs Come In and Out. The opening “That’s the Very Motive,” three minutes lengthy, is an ideal pop tune, as pristine as something in Russell’s catalog. (Curiously, it shares seemingly nothing with “Very Motive,” a tune from his archives that was included on the posthumous Image of Bunny Rabbit, although chances are you’ll grasp a fuzzy resemblance between the 2 in case you squint.) However little else from this efficiency feels fairly as clear minimize. “Tower of That means/Rabbit’s Ear/House Away From House” meanders for almost 20 minutes of see-sawing cello patterns and looking vocal harmonies; he’d later minimize the recording all the way down to the 4:38 enshrined on World of Echo. (“There’s a zillion edits all through,” Knutson has mentioned of that album, “as a result of he’s simply taking these little items—a minute right here, 10 seconds there—to weave all these concepts collectively in a means that was solely in his head, that solely he may hear.”) “Completely satisfied Ending,” “All-Boy All-Woman,” “Tiger Stripes,” and “You Can’t Maintain Me Down” all blur collectively in an prolonged passage of skeletal bowing and circuitous vocal melodies—the songs elusive, however the stream transfixing.