Some artists have eras, experimental phases, detours, creative dalliances; Arthur Russell’s career, for all its seeming contradictions—classical minimalism and lascivious disco, Zen Buddhist mantras and winsome country pop—was a continuum. Gaze back over the broad sweep of his work and it comes to resemble a river: forever changing, forever the same. Yet a pair of back-to-back shows Russell played in the spring of 1979 looks, in retrospect, like a turning point. Fusing avant-garde provocation and compositional rigor with lusty dancefloor energy, they would serve as the genesis of one of his most beloved and ambitious songs: “Go Bang! (#5).”

Russell was a fixture among the Kitchen’s community of composers and artists. He had served as the intermedia arts venue’s Music Director in 1974-75; he had aired Instrumentals, a longform work performed by an improvising ensemble, at the Kitchen just four years earlier—to the day, in fact, on April 27, 1975. (Russell was a student of numerology; perhaps something about 4-2-7 resonated.)

For the two-night run dubbed 24 to 24 Music, he had something new up his sleeve. It would be a far cry from the orchestral performance of one of Russell’s pieces at the Kitchen the spring prior, with firebrand composer Julius Eastman conducting. This time, Russell’s cello would be accompanied by organ, tenor saxophone, trombone, guitar, and, crucially and unusually, a drummer and two percussionists. Over the past two years, Russell had immersed himself in the sound and energy of the underground disco music that DJs like Nicky Siano and David Mancuso were spinning at clubs like the Gallery and the Loft, where gay men like Russell were forging their own community, their own rituals, their own methods of experiencing time. Now he planned to bring the disco to the Kitchen.

This was not an uncontroversial move. While the Kitchen had increasingly opened its doors to fusions of minimalism and rock music practiced by fellow downtown composers like Rhys Chatham, the avant-garde had not cottoned onto disco. There was an air of provocation to Russell’s gambit; his friend Steven Hall called it “a careful, well-staged affront to the Kitchen people and their sensibilities.”

We know from a recording of the second night, released by Audika in 2021, exactly what it sounded like. It’s not disco, exactly, but it’s not not disco, either, thanks to the coiled grooves of Jeff Berman’s drums, Mustafa Ahmed’s congas, and Rome Neal’s percussion; Russell’s pizzicato cello carves a slanted melody like a maze through a cornfield, and Julius Eastman’s thick slabs of organ mass like thunderheads. Conjuring visions of Terry Riley at the Loft, it sprawls for more than an hour, droning, psychedelic, and dissonant; it is brainy and druggy in equal measure.

In the back of the room, some audience members danced—including the Gallery’s Nicky Siano, who had introduced Russell to dance music at his club. But by and large, “nobody knew what the hell to make of it,” recalled composer Arnold Dreyblatt, who surmised that few Kitchen regulars would have been familiar with the underground club scene and its queer demimonde. In contrast to artists like Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, whose sheets of guitar noise were weighty as anvils, “here was this music that had a disco beat, lovely melodies, strange twists, and bizarre lyrics.” Some believed that Russell had sullied his reputation as a serious composer, according to Hall: “The people running the Kitchen were shocked that he had the audacity to bring this world of sleazy music into this highbrow situation. It was very bold of Arthur, and he was very proud of that break.”

Around the same time as the 24 to 24 Music nights at the Kitchen, Russell was cooking up something similar on tape. If the Kitchen performances were meant to teleport the disco from one context to another, what was going on inside Bob Blank’s studio was an attempt to explode it into a million dimensions, forming a whole new cosmos out of the pieces—disco’s version, perhaps, of the Big Bang.

Russell was gradually becoming more adept at making disco records. In late 1977, he had cut his teeth recording his first disco single, “Kiss Me Again,” which he created with a mixed lineup of artsy downtowners (including David Byrne on guitar and hillbilly minimalist Henry Flynt on violin) and studio professionals (including, much to their bewilderment, dueling drummers and dueling bassists) and released, with Siano as his co-producer, under the alias Dinosaur. Then, in February 1979, on the night of the full moon, Russell and co-producer Steve D’Acquisto had tracked the foundations of a number of songs, including “Is It All Over My Face?” and “Tell You (Today),” that he would later release as Loose Joints, working this time with the Ingram brothers, a crack rhythm section comprising five Philadelphia siblings, with influential downtown producer and engineer Bob Blank on the boards.

The sessions for those songs were freeform affairs; for backing vocalists, D’Acquisto recruited a group of revelers from the Loft who arrived straight from the party with Mancuso in tow. But the sessions that would yield “Go Bang! (#5)” and the album 24→24 Music were even more unbridled. Once again, Russell was determined to collide worlds: The Ingram brothers and bassist Wilbur Bascomb brought professional precision and deep-in-the-pocket funk; other players, like saxophonist Peter Gordon, trombonist Peter Zummo, punk guitarist Denise Mercedes, and a motley crew of backing vocalists, including Eastman and composer Jill Kroesen, came from the downtown avant-garde. In additional sessions for the record, Russell would recruit Lola Blank—Bob’s wife, and, more importantly, a backing vocalist with James Brown—to lay down playful, semi-nonsense lines: “Bang go-bang-bang go-bang-go! Go bang bang bang go-bang it back!”

No songs had been written in advance; instead, Russell brought graphic scores and experimental directives in the tradition of conceptualist composer John Cage. “Arthur might have had a sense of what the finished product would be, but I saw it as a process,” Zummo recalled. “He’d put some music in front of me and I’d say, ‘Where do you want me to play from?’ He’d say, ‘Just play.’” When the sessions were finished, Russell took the 24-track tapes and began playing back portions on a pair of decks running in parallel, creating new compositions from the colliding parts; the title 24→24 Music reflects that recombinant process.

Attendees who had been at the Kitchen for the back-to-back shows in 1979 might have felt a shiver of deja vu when 24→24 Music was released in late 1981 on Sleeping Bag, the label Russell had co-founded with his friend Will Socolov. Eastman’s queasy organ spreads across the whole album like an oil slick, iridescent; certain motifs recur in different configurations, held together by a hissing disco beat. One song, “#7,” is a two-minute outtake from the Kitchen concerts.

If any one track captures the expansiveness of Russell’s process and vision for the project, it’s “#5 (Go Bang!)” (rechristened “Go Bang! (#5)” as a single). It feels not so much like a song as the cross-section of a field of possibility, a nursery in which the seeds of potential songs are sprouting up in green, willowy shoots. It begins simply enough with eight bars of drums and percussion, dense as a funky briar patch, Eastman’s organ glistening faintly in the background. Then, abruptly, everything shifts: a jaunty electric bass ushers us in, jangly guitar chords pivot us into a new key, and Jill Kroesen pipes up with a non sequitur for the ages: “Thank you for asking your question,” she begins, her voice faltering. She sounds cordial but exhausted, or perhaps just a little bit drunk. If mainstream disco typically projected unstoppable power, she sounds almost quixotic. Her voice is warbly, coquettish one minute and deranged the next, morphing with every syllable as she continues:

Showin’ us the face of delusion

To uproot the cause of confusion

I wanna see all my friends at once

I need an armchair to put myself in your shoes

And then, like some kind of genially unhinged Greek chorus, Eastman’s voice chimes in, arcing from his baritone range all the way up to a falsetto squeal: “Baaaaaaaaaaaang!” “Oh, thank you!” Kroesen answers, her voice cracking with the force of orgasm.

After those almost country-fried verses, we’re thrust deep into the groove once again: layer upon layer of disco percussion gliding and popping; Rhodes keys buckling like macadam in an earthquake; walking electric basslines greasier than the floor of a body shop. You understand why Russell wanted this particular mix of players: The Ingram brothers lock into the rhythm with a balance of metronomic precision and elastic give-and-take that attests to their stature as seasoned funk professionals; Russell’s fellow downtown mischief-makers assist him in piling on the noise, particularly in the song’s closing stretch, whose lumpy atonality suggests Teo Macero by way of a lead-throwing Richard Serra. At nearly eight minutes long, “#5 (Go Bang!)” itself feels almost sculptural, monolithic.

One of the lessons of the disco scene, thanks to prophets like Mancuso, Siano, and the Paradise Garage’s Larry Levan, with their reel-to-reel machines and their instincts for what could turn a crowd of individuals into a single organism, was that a song is never really completed; it can always be blended, extended, fine-tuned to better suit the circumstances. The practice of remixing songs may have had a utilitarian aspect to it—honing beats and basslines in order to move a crowd more efficiently—but it wasn’t so far off from Russell’s own methods, in which a given recording or performance was nothing but one iteration of an idea both amorphous and transcendent. Part of the brilliance of “Go Bang! (#5)” was the way that it left the impression of other, potential songs that just as easily could have come to pass—a kind of Choose Your Own Adventure of wormhole disco and witchy improv. It fell to New York DJ-producer François Kevorkian, who had recently had a hit with his remix of Musique’s “In the Bush,” to find the floor-filling anthem lurking inside “Go Bang! (#5),” and in the process, he turned it into one of the definitive avant-disco productions of its era.

It wasn’t an easy job; Kevorkian struggled to make heads or tails of the “gratuitous” structure of the master tapes, which he called “an absolute, utter, and total mess. It was just so thick,” he said. “There were all these great ideas, but every 30 seconds there would be a change of direction. There were at least 20 songs that could have been put together from those tapes.” Still, Kevorkian persevered: honing the drums, dubbing out Zummo’s horn, making psychedelic hay out of oily electric basslines, and injecting the whole thing with some much-needed space. Kevorkian makes the most of Lola Blank’s chirpy ad-libs and Eastman’s almost guttural interjections; more importantly, he turns a chanted stretch—“I wanna see all my friends at once/I wanna go bang”—into a refrain that encapsulates the song’s potent nexus of sexual desire and social energy.

What in Russell’s hands is wonky and mischievous turns psychedelic and enveloping in François K’s mix—the groove more clearly defined, the structure more legible, the vocals a chanted call to action. Rather than taming the chaos of Russell’s production, Kevorkian did something more significant: he doled out key sounds like so many breadcrumbs, offering dancers the chance to find their own way through the mix.

The night that Socolov brought an acetate of the remix down to the Loft, Mancuso played it and then, when the song was over, lifted the needle and dropped it right back at the start of the song. By the end of the night, he had played it four times, to an increasingly rapturous reception. (Only the idiosyncratic and perfectionist Russell was unhappy: “François fucked up the EQ of the drums—we’re ruined,” he groused to Socolov.) At the Paradise Garage, Larry Levan would go on to make the remix a peak-time staple; once you’ve heard the way Kevorkian leans on the song’s miasmic organs, coaxing them toward a mind-melting climax, it’s not hard to understand why Levan timed it to coincide with the explosion of the club’s confetti guns.

“Go Bang! (#5)” continued resonating even as disco gave way to house music; Todd Terry sampled the song for the 1988 underground hit “Bango (To the Batmobile)”; Common interpolated the chorus in 1992’s “Two Scoops of Raisins”; the song has been covered by Hot Chip and Icelandic techno producer Bjarki, and samples or interpolations of its elements run through countless club tracks. I suspect that James Murphy had the song in mind when he wrote the lyrics to LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends,” with its refrain, “If I could see all my friends tonight.” In fact, to contemporary ears, there’s something especially poignant in the original song’s chanted line, “I wanna see all my friends at once,” given the way that AIDS would soon decimate the creative and social community that had given birth to the song, taking Russell himself in 1992. There’s even a bit of slippage, however unintentional, in the way the word bang is frequently pronounced in the song: It would be easy to mishear the chant as “I’d do anything to get the chance to go back, I wanna go back.” It’s as though the jouissance of that dancefloor communion already had the mourning for its absence built right in.

Looking back at its genesis and evolution, “Go Bang! (#5)” looks less like a song than a snapshot of a constellation. Russell offered one perspective, one way of making sense of the fruitful chaos of the song’s recording sessions; remixers Kevorkian and, later, Walter Gibbons shook up the kaleidoscope and came up with a new spin on the same fragments. That method is true of all of Russell’s work—again and again, ideas begin in one form, morph, and take shape in a completely different guise over the years. “Go Bang” was no different: an expression of collective joy and collaborative mischief that was born at the Kitchen and blossomed under the light of a full moon, Russell and all his friends exploding the known world into a million pieces that are still traveling outward.