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.
