Unless you were a regular at The Kitchen or The Gallery in the 70s and 80s, today is the choicest day to be an Arthur Russell listener. In 2004, Audika Records began releasing posthumous albums compiled from Russell’s vast troves of unreleased material. Since then, critical consensus has caught up to him—while Russell had a thriving network of collaborators, a membership at Paradise Garage (where a handful of his veritable disco hits could be heard), and friends in high downtown places, he was received with less than enthusiasm by the executives of his day. One leaked Warner Bros. memo on a Russell demo tape infamously reads, “This guy is in trouble… Who knows what this guy is up to—you figure it out.”

Of the many albums now credited to Russell, his disco-not-disco record 24→24 Music is one of only a couple he released before his death from AIDS-related illness in 1992. He first debuted his “orchestral disco” to mixed reception at The Kitchen in 1979: While half the audience got up and danced, the rest were less enthused about Russell whistling the lowbrow into the downtowin air. There have been plenty of defenses mounted against the dismissal of disco as mindless (see Lou Reed: “So what’s wrong with that? So is lying in the sun”), but Russell was dead serious about disco: like the avant garde minimalism he’d been steeped in, he saw duration and repetition as its central forms.

Disco doesn’t end when it’s supposed to. Its strategies of extension prolong pleasure by holding onto it for us, airborne and just out of reach. If you were a self-conscious experimental composer, new to the city and gay life (and who among us, in our own way, hasn’t been there), the disco was where you could stop thinking about desirability and go meet desire.

Russell’s disco initiation took place in 1977, when a new friend brought him to hear Nicky Siano DJ at The Gallery, a party modeled on David Mancuso’s legendary nights at The Loft. In the late 70s, disco was “non-blond, queer, and hungry,” as Bill Brewster puts it, driven by an ethos of “‘60s idealism refueled by the promise of Black/gay liberation.” The disco scene meshed with Russell’s wide-ranging collaborative sensibility, and he kept going out dancing nearly to the end of his life, floating (and sometimes writing letters) at the edge of the dance floor.

Post-Kitchen performance, Russell got his collaborators, including fellow gay avant garde composer Julius Eastman, back together to record. In these sessions and Russell’s intensive editing process, the piece coalesced into distinct tracks, gained vocals (we love), and lost (to my chagrin) a cow bell and gym whistle.

One song recorded in those sessions, “#5 (Go Bang!),” feels like the point in the lengthening night when you lean into someone you’ve just met: somehow both bouncy and subdued almost to the point of sleep, nothing less than ready. Its lyrics, “I wanna see all my friends at once / I’d give anything to get the chance to go bang,” describe the kind of sex you have just by showing up to the dance floor.

Over two nights in L.A. this past spring, the Wild Up ensemble put on a workshop performance of 24→24 Music at 2220 Art + Archives. I knew the group from their joyous performances of Eastman’s compositions, the bulk of which had almost been lost altogether after he was evicted from his East Village apartment in 1981. Like Russell, Eastman has been getting long-overdue attention, as scholars like Mary Jane Leach have been reconstructing his scores, and projects like Wild Up have been re-recording and releasing his pieces.

At the thought of this show and the devoted conservation that has gone into bringing us this music, I felt so acutely

that I had to fly to Los Angeles.

The evening begins in dispersed proceedings, designed to produce an awareness of the impossibility of seeing all that goes on in any given minute. You can’t really see all your friends at once—you can just know that they’re here and so are you. So it is that musicians warm up in different rooms, their sounds bending around corners to find and miss each other.

Derek Stein sits alone with a cello on a small stage, and Darian Donovan Thomas posts up with violin by the bathroom. As we debate whether it would be in the spirit of things to slip past him in search of a stall, Brian Walsh slides across the floor on his back, a taped-up iPhone muting his clarinet.

Conductor and artistic director Christopher Rountree is on another stage, buzzing his hair before passing the floor to saxophonist M.A. Tiesenga, who tells the assembled about their trusty pair of Doc Marten chelsea boots: requisite gear for making over an hour of disco.

As we filter into the main space, Thomas plucks out Russell’s “Wild Combination” (in my view, a perfect love song) on the violin before passing the spotlight to Jodie Landau’s ukulele rendition of “I Never Get Lonesome” (“When I’m feeling better / I don’t feel so bad”).

Circling up to face one another, Wild Up sings among themselves in the round: “A rose is a rose is a rose” becomes a question, “Is a rose is a rose is a rose?” and resolves back into a statement. Then everyone climbs on stage and into ensemble formation. The audience is invited to come in closer—“You can sit, but we hope you dance”—and about half of us spring up to do so.

The disco ball casts crescent moons around the room, scattering the eclipse shadows everyone in New York was posting earlier in the week, while I was in a chain of meetings. I won’t, I feel, be caught missing out again.

In fact, I think I understand masculinity for the first time when Sidney Hopson smiles and beats a conga drum with his elbow (biceps!) like he’s splitting a board that keeps springing back for more.

On the dance floor and on the stage, it feels like everyone’s grinning.

Landau, taking Eastman’s vocal part, doesn’t try to launch us into space with “Go Bang!”, the album’s big hit, but chants with an inflection somewhere between punk show and rally, “Are you getting free?!”

I suspect I’m not the only one blissing out. Performance artist Dynasty Handbag is bopping, a hand in the air and a sweatshirt tied around her waist. The guy dancing behind me has balanced his bike helmet on a tote bag. None of us are dressed for the occasion, but, as Tim Lawrence tells us of discos past, “the dance floor functioned as a space in which distance—and therefore irony—was impossible.” Diffusing emotion beyond an authentic inner reality, or any fact-based status as lovers (or even dance partners), disco draws pleasure out into the skin, where it meets the air we dance through. All is abandoned; the music plays on. At one point, Thomas jettisons the stage to dance through the crowd with his violin.

Later, Landau tells me about experiencing the audience from the stage: On the first night of the two-show run, the crowd was “much dancier but less raunchy! They were screaming less but moving more.” I admit I may have sounded chaste, but, as Landau said of what it’s like to play Russell and Eastman’s music, “My experience has been predominantly joy and ecstasy.”

As of last year, Russell aficionados can visit his archive at the New York Public Library. Among the sheet music, photos, and notebooks, there are hours of digitized material from the 24→24 Music recording sessions. These were the raw material Russell drew on to form the album. His method: playing the tapes two at a time on twin 24-track machines and sifting to find points of shared consciousness. Collaboration didn’t end when everyone set their instruments down—once it reached the air and landed on tape, the music became its own readable, touchable mind. Russell’s process was much like a first date with Eastman, as told by a younger lover: He takes off his boot, and you lick it together, tongues meeting at its tongue. After a time of moving between links in different library tabs, I realized I myself had been listening to multiple tracks at once, mixing a frenetic overlay. The layers of sound, versions of the same songs rub up on each other, talking with their physical contact, and their tongues in each other’s ears.

On this night, the show lets us out in a mass that hasn’t yet deformed back into an atomized, working order. “Let’s take it together,” one of us says, and we run that way across the huge, empty street.