Instrumentals

In Instrumentals, Arthur Russell set music to a series of color slides by Yuko Nonomura, some of which are pictured above. His explanation for this format hinged upon an interest in American popular music—whereas the lyric is generally the focus of the pop song, Russell displaced speech as the focal point of the music, and structured it instead around the color slide. He did so in order to try to imagine what an instrumental version of this pop organization might sound (and look) like—hence the title—while not diminishing, as Russell wrote in the press release, the “bubblegum and easy-listening” dimension.