Arthur Russell spent endless hours in the 80s riding the Staten Island ferry by himself. He’d float back and forth over murky New York harbor, Walkman cranked, spare pair of AAs in his ski vest pocket, listening to unmixed dubs of his latest batch of tunes. Maybe the steady churn and breeze reminded him of those winds that swept through Iowa cornfields when he was a kid. Maybe he just liked the view. On at least one of these rides, he hit play and a demo of “That’s Us/Wild Combination” started up. It was a sweet-tempered piece of pop with a tempo aimed at the dance floor, but the overall sound still felt a little shy- more bedroom solo dance party than blown out club. Thirty years later, enter Estate, an electro collective from Minneapolis, who pop the cassette from Arthur’s Walkman, unspool the tape from its plastic chassis and stream it out across a solid piece of propulsive bass and glittering synth machinery. Arthur’s beautiful ideas are still intact, they’ve just been bolstered to meet the needs of a packed floor bouncing its way through Saturday night.

– Spoolwork