Everything Is Recorded "Temporary"

Richard Russell has introduced the world to several generation’s worth of era-defining musicians. But since 2017, the XL Recordings founder has used the Everything Is Recorded project to prove he’s not merely a visionary record producer, or the founder of the most consequential independent record label of the past 35 years. He’s a visionary artist in his own right, with a temperament so generous that his records are filled with the voices of the artists he’s encouraged, shepherded, or spotlit along the way. 

Everything Is Recorded albums are feasts of collaboration, and his soul-enriching new album, Temporary, is no exception. The guest list overflows with incandescent talent: Florence Welch, Sampha, Bill Callahan, Jah Wobble, Kamasi Washington, Nourished by Time, Alabaster DePlume, Noah Cyrus. The silvery thread linking all these voices together is, of course, Richard Russell himself, by design the least visible member of Everything Is Recorded, but the only one who could have dreamed up this expanse to begin with. 

The theme to Temporary, as the title hints, is loss, but the music is neither dark nor dour. Russell began recording his collaborators’ musings on death and loss early on in the process for Temporary, and although they only survive in two carefully crafted audio collages (“October,” “The Summons”) on Temporary, their power suffuses the record. These are the most luminous and relaxed compositions of Russell’s career, reflecting a late-breaking fascination with British folk that dovetailed, not coincidentally, with Russell’s own brush with mortality in 2013. What is folk music, after all, if not a record of the voices of the dead?

Russell draws on the recorded voices of artists past as guiding spirits: Gyptian, Jackson C. Frank, Shawn Smith, Camille Yarbrough, Molly Drake. His music dissolves the borders between sampled and recorded, between modernity and antiquity, life and death, now and forever. This is how Richard Russell hears the world. It probably explains why he’s built so many beautiful things inside of it, even as the world feels dark, ruinous. He grasps the true meaning of his album’s title: We may be, in fact, temporary. But our longing – for each other, for peace, for love and communion – goes on forever.