No one listens to Arthur Russell just once. (Well, almost no one.) If you have heard his music, it is likely that you have internalized his singular voice and unique melodic sensibility, folded them into some innermost corner of your being. He has this effect on people, despite the fact—or maybe because of it—that the vast majority of his fans never heard a lick of his music while he was still alive. Yet this pair of decades-old live recordings reveals Charles Arthur Russell, Jr., gone now 33 years, as you have rarely, if ever, heard him before: just cello, the electrical heat of the microphone, the buzz and sway of a few pedals, a cocoon of empty space around him—and that voice, unmistakable, ethereal yet embodied, both distant and impossibly close, as familiar as the voice in your head.

These reissues come from two tapes recorded at Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation, a homey loft space in lower Manhattan where Russell frequently performed. He recorded the first on June 25, 1984, at a performance billed as Sketches for World of Echo (admission: $2.50), and the second 18 months later, on December 20, 1985. Steve Knutson’s Audika label—which in collaboration with Russell’s partner, Tom Lee, has given the world far more posthumous work from the artist than he ever released in his lifetime—first put out Sketches for World of Echo digitally and on cassette in 2020; the second live set, now titled Open Vocal Phrases Where Songs Come In and Out, remained unheard until now. While available separately on Bandcamp and streaming platforms, both recordings have been paired on a 2xCD release, which is appropriate: They feel like segments of a single continuum, snapshots of a long, unbroken moment.

These are not unplugged sessions, exactly; Russell was an inveterate tinkerer, and in both sets he fleshes out his cello and voice with a modest battery of effects pedals—stereo delay, reverb, distortion—and a rudimentary tone generator. Yet rather than obscure his playing and singing, those add-ons only seem to heighten the sensation that we are sitting alone in the room with him. There is an uncommon purity to these recordings that suits the guilelessness of his music; it is rare to feel like you have been granted such a direct line to an artist’s mind at the moment of creation. He would later stitch segments from both nights into the 1986 album World of Echo, combining them with material recorded at Battery Sound studios, and some elements are echoed elsewhere in his catalog in radically different forms—the avant-disco masterpiece “Let’s Go Swimming,” famously mixed by Walter Gibbons; the Nicky Siano-produced disco anthem “Tiger Stripes,” which Russell recorded under his Killer Whale alias—but by and large, these recordings are less collections of discrete songs than extended fantasias, improvisational meditations in which lyrical hints and brief melodic figures dissolve in the ceaseless onward flow.

Despite the stripped-down setup, the two sets cover a lot of ground. Sketches for World of Echo begins with a feint: two and a half minutes of dissonant and seemingly formless cello burnished with bracing feedback. Russell sounds like he’s looking for something, stumbling in the dark. But then a squelchy, laser-zapping synth drone fires up, and the mood turns beatific as he launches into an extended instrumental raga. For more than 10 minutes, he traces graceful curlicues against the pedal tone—tender, whimsical, hypnotic. The album concludes with an equally liquid improvisation, “Sunlit Water,” which shimmers and swirls, blissfully directionless, for more than 10 idyllic minutes.

In between those dreamlike bookends, Sketches often feels like a treasure hunt. Look, here’s “Let’s Go Swimming,” the very same recording used on World of Echo, but drawn out into a six-minute trance, rather than the tantalizing wisp of the canonical version. And here’s “Keeping Up,” a bittersweet highlight of 1994’s posthumous Another Thought. Where that recording struts gaily, propelled by programmed drums and proudly decked out in Jennifer Warnes’ gorgeous close-harmonized vocals, this one feels more relaxed, more innocent. Elsewhere, the traces are foggier—bits of World of Echo’s “I Take This Time” and Another Thought’s “Losing My Taste for the Nightlife” turn up, fleetingly, but folded into a five-song sequence in which Russell mostly seems to be channeling extemporaneous thoughts over shape-shifting melodies. It’s curious: If “Let’s Go Swimming” and “Keeping Up” invite us to think of the ways in which songs are like people, growing and changing over time, at other points it’s almost as if Russell wants to show us that songs don’t exist as standalone entities—they’re all just part of a single stream of sound.

That feels especially true of Open Vocal Phrases Where Songs Come In and Out. The opening “That’s the Very Reason,” three minutes long, is a perfect pop song, as pristine as anything in Russell’s catalog. (Curiously, it shares seemingly nothing with “Very Reason,” a song from his archives that was included on the posthumous Picture of Bunny Rabbit, though you may grasp a fuzzy resemblance between the two if you squint.) But little else from this performance feels quite as clear cut. “Tower of Meaning/Rabbit’s Ear/Home Away From Home” meanders for nearly 20 minutes of see-sawing cello patterns and searching vocal harmonies; he’d later cut the recording down to the 4:38 enshrined on World of Echo. (“There’s a zillion edits throughout,” Knutson has said of that album, “because he’s just taking these little pieces—a minute here, 10 seconds there—to weave all these ideas together in a way that was only in his head, that only he could hear.”) “Happy Ending,” “All-Boy All-Girl,” “Tiger Stripes,” and “You Can’t Hold Me Down” all blur together in an extended passage of skeletal bowing and circuitous vocal melodies—the songs elusive, but the flow transfixing.

Open Vocal Phrases’ most audacious playing comes toward the end, with the 11-minute “Hiding Your Present From You/School Bell.” Russell kicks it off with an uncharacteristic blast of harmonica, then lays into abrasive, fuzzed-out cello that sounds like his version of heavy metal. Plucking and bowing tangle up in delay; disconnected lyrics float over the top. Halfway through, a chugging electronic rhythm sets in, an unstable succession of siren bursts and white-noise clicks. Toward the end, he repeats a whispered, “School bell,” picking up the refrain from another classic Indian Ocean / Walter Gibbons 12″. It sounds like a playground chant; it sounds like caveman techno. For a moment, we witness Russell traveling as far out as he ever got.

It is reasonable to wonder how much is left to learn about Russell and his music, after two biographies, a documentary film, and a copious run of posthumous releases. But these two recordings suggest that however much you thought you knew about him, there is always more to discover. They deepen our understanding of his creative process by injecting us directly into the slipstream of his playing and his thought.

Despite their extreme beauty, these are not particularly orderly recordings, and they are not always easy to listen to. They can be abrasive, prickly, hard to follow; they toss up obstacles, outrun your attention, lag behind when you want to move forward. Following along can sometimes feel like trying to keep up with a strong-willed child (“Keeping Up,” indeed). The usual modes of pleasure do not always pertain—until his voice hits a certain pitch, and his cello harmonizes just so, and the effect is like sunlight emerging from behind a cloud.

What might be most striking about these performances is that despite the obviously broad appeal that his music has had for so many, it is an intensely private affair. What I find so uncanny about the recordings is the way they capture the sound of Arthur Russell as I hear him in my mind, stripped of anything extraneous; at their best, they epitomize the essential spirit of his music. At the tail end of Sketches for World of Echo, nearly buried beneath what might be the amplified thump of his bow, a muted burst of applause is very faintly audible—picked up, perhaps, by the pickups on his cello. The first time I registered it, I was startled, snapped out of my reverie; I had forgotten that there were other people in the room with him as he played. You wonder if the sound felt equally far away to him.