Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell is a visually adventurous, amazing journey into the life and world of a nearly forgotten but seminal avant garde composer, singer-songwriter, cellist and disco producer. After fleeing rural Iowa in the 1960s, Russell joined a Buddhist commune in San Francisco, and met his lifelong mentor and collaborator, Allen Ginsberg. The two collaborated on a number of recordings. But when the commune tried to take away Arthur’s cello, forcing him to secretly play in a closet, he followed his greater musical ambition, and joined Ginsberg in New York. Arthur began working with Philip Glass and other composers in the avant-garde music world and discovered the liberating social and aesthetic possibilities of underground discos. He produced playful and eccentric disco records that became hits of the pre-Studio 54 era. The rules and codes of established genres didn't apply to Arthur. The serialized patterns of minimalist symphonies resonated with the repetitive rhythms in dance music. Likewise, the utopian social settings of the early discos were like the Buddhist commune Arthur had once known. With childlike innocence and fun, Arthur ambitiously explored all of these possibilities, falling in love with his boyfriend Tom Lee, and moving in together in the East Village, next door to Allen in a building populated by poets, musicians, and artists. Arthur's transcendent solo cello-and-voice songs, "World of Echo," were like intimate diaries that fit somewhere between lullabies and art songs. But the devastation of AIDS cut Arthur's career short. When Arthur died, he was puzzlingly lost in obscurity. But now fifteen years after Arthur's death, his music is being rediscovered, Wild Combination explores the compelling cultural history of New York in the 1970s and '80s, the experience of being gay and confronting AIDS, and the cathartic process of making art and pursuing popular success at a time when those goals were mutually attainable.

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