In Oskaloosa, Iowa, a town constructed of a richly colored local brick, the native son Arthur Russell is not particularly well known. The cellist and composer, who released only one full solo album, “World of Echo,” during his short lifetime, grew up here, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, acne-scarred and painfully shy. From a table of elderly men at Oskaloosa’s Smokey Row café, the name today garners only vague recollections. “The Russell boy,” they call him, or “Charlie Russell.” He walked Market Street, with his cello, and then, at sixteen, he ran away, eventually settling in New York to make his music. Hearing Russell’s name mentioned, a green-haired, twenty-year-old barista lights up, and offers directions to his childhood home. Among certain people, Russell acts as a kind of passcode. Name him, and other rabid fans, usually young, will appear and begin to call out the names of the songs that changed their lives: “What It’s Like,” “Being It,” “Wild Combination.”

Russell died, of AIDS, in 1992, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, at the age of forty. He left behind, in his sixth-floor walkup apartment on East Twelfth Street, a cache of mostly unreleased music, the result of obsessive, endless tinkering, along with piles of notebooks, letters, and written scores. (A selection of these items will go on display at BAM in March, in an exhibit titled “Do What I Want: Selections from the Arthur Russell Papers.”) His body of work defied categorization. Some of it his friend and collaborator Allen Ginsberg called “Buddhist bubblegum music.” Some of it, singles that Russell released under different names, became a staple at night clubs in lower Manhattan; his exuberant single “Is It All Over My Face” became an instant classic at vogue balls. Some of it sounded, in the words of Russell’s collaborator Peter Gordon, like hymns that “could have been made two hundred years ago.” Always, it sounded as if it could have been made only by this particular person, a classically trained cellist from the heartland who hated that people compared his voice to James Taylor’s, who became entranced by classical ragas and Muzak, and who never quite got to finish.

After Russell’s death, his partner of twelve years, Tom Lee, saved most of his archive and other belongings in a series of storage units, transporting them with him from Manhattan to Queens to Brooklyn as he moved. Unready to start letting go, he even kept Russell’s favorite aquarium fish in the freezer. In the year after Russell’s death, Lee worked with Steve Knutson of Audika Records to release seven albums of Russell’s work. Knutson told me that Russell’s limited commercial success during his lifetime was in part a result of his relentless perfectionism and introversion. Even when presented with, say, a studio session with Columbia Records’ John Hammond, the man who signed Bob Dylan, Russell “kind of fucked everything up for himself,” Knutson said. “Arthur had access. But everything that was put in front of him he was able to basically squander.” The albums that Knutson and Lee have released are loosely organized by genre: lovelorn folk, mutant disco, New Wave, sweeping instrumentals.

Knutson admits that Russell himself might have objected to such categorizations, and to the very idea of reviving his legacy. "Arthur was a contrarian by nature," Knutson said. "If you told Arthur you liked his music, he didn’t trust you—there was something wrong with you." But the posthumous albums have been effective in cultivating a whole new generation of Russell fans. Twenty-five years after his death, he has still not reached mainstream popularity, but he has achieved a dappled but intense fame that is most pronounced among his fellow-musicians. Kanye West sampled a Russell song on a track on his album “The Life of Pablo.” Frank Ocean is a fan; Devendra Banhart and Dev Hynes cite him as a kind of deity. Russell’s sister told me that on Mount Desert Island, Maine, where she, her mother, and her sister live, a man once walked into the library were she worked wearing a shirt with her brother’s face on it. This new popularity has spread primarily through word of mouth; Knutson and Lee do no publicity for the albums they release. “I think it’s in really poor taste to market dead people,” Knutson told me. With Russell’s music, he went on, “I think it’s worked because when it resonates with somebody there’s always a sense of discovery.” According to Knutson, Spotify users streamed Arthur Russell about five million times in 2016.

Russell’s music provokes a sense of discovery in part because he was such an explorer himself. Here was an artist who independently studied fish, numerology, and the I Ching, who walked and ran the streets of lower Manhattan for hours, who would stand in the corners of dance clubs such as Paradise Garage and analyze what brought people out onto the dance floor, at precisely what moments the music moved their bodies. On the lovely, aching “Ballad of the Lights,” Ginsberg, backed by Russell, describes Russell’s habit of sitting by the Hudson River, looking out toward New Jersey. Russell’s vibrato-free, Iowa-inflected voice often obscured his lyrics. Listening can feel like catching only snippets of an underwater conversation. But, when they’re allowed to shine, his words radiate both vivid imagery—an orange birthday cake, a platform on the ocean, a thrumming cornfield—and intense, cryptic emotion. “Baby lions go where the islands go,” he intones on Kanye’s single “30 Hours.” In “Is It All Over My Face,” he says, “You caught me love dancing.”

Dustin Reid, who produced a Red Hot Master Mix tribute album to Russell, in 2014, and who has Russell’s initials tattooed on his arm, speaks of the musician in the present tense. Reid goes camping frequently. “At night, listening to ‘World of Echo,’ I hear him imitating the world around us,” he told me. “I hear some of Russell’s sounds in the way the trees bend. I get a sense that he’s trying, especially with this record, which was written after he was diagnosed with AIDS and he was thinking a lot about his mortality and what it is to be human, conscious, and alive. . . . He is trying to capture these moments of sound and time.” Several fans have told me similar things: that they feel, listening to Russell, as if he is in their skulls, sharpening the world they see in front of them. The musicians who were close to Russell often emphasize his playfulness, his interest in injecting joy into “serious music,” writing structures that could be played almost endlessly, and in myriad ways, with a great deal of fun. “So much of music is the kind you sit down for and frown and try to understand,” Gordon told me. “Arthur’s music retained a sense of joyfulness, a sensual wonder, a sense of beauty.” He went on, “There’s always this pure honesty in Arthur’s music that is timeless. It’s transparent enough that people are able to project themselves into it.”

Tom Lee is now sixty-three years old. He lives on Mount Desert Island, near the Russell women, and considers Arthur’s mother, Emily, his best friend. Speaking of Russell’s archive, which he donated to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, last year, he told me, “I just got lost in it after Arthur died. I would leave my house with cassettes based on how long I would be away. Four hours, six hours? I would take that many cassettes. It was this spiritual thing.” Once, when I call Lee on the phone, as we spoke seriously and softly about Russell, he told me to hang on, and shuffled for a minute in the background. Then, a click, and Arthur’s voice came on. It was a forty-five-minute version of “Being It,” one of Lee’s favorites, from an unreleased cassette. It sounded like a whale song—Russell stretching his voice out from some great deep. “Nothing in my life has ever reached the emotional peak of Arthur dying,” Lee said. “I measure everything against that, in a way.”

Shortly before his death, Russell and his family took a small boat out to Baker Island, a flat rock half-covered by seaweed, four miles off the coast of Maine. The musician sat on a slab of granite and recorded the sound of the waves breaking against the shore. The next year, the Russells scattered his ashes from the same rock, and they watched as the waves slowly pulled him away. The world of Arthur Russell is full of serendipitous connections. On summer nights, for decades, unbeknownst to Russell or his family, locals have boated out to this same rock. They play music, and move together under moonlight. They call the place the Dance Floor.