Residents - The fantastic-primitive freak

The story of the Residents, more than a true rock biography, is a fantastical adventure stitched together from diverse, almost heterogeneous components. Among the factors that have most contributed to the success of their difficult musical proposition is certainly the aesthetics of obscurity. A sort of sophisticated version of traditional occultism, this decisive choice appears today (even with the benefit of hindsight) to be dictated by an unshakeable anti-star-system will that keeps the relationship between icon (expression) and artistic substance (content) in watertight compartments, relegating them to non-communicating sets, or ones that communicate only in a supernatural dimension.

The masks of the four nameless members – who settled in the downtown suburbs of San Francisco – are bold constructions of unsettling dream-logic, or reproductions of unconscious presences within the collective imagination. If rock up to that point had also been a use of the body as a lascivious totem (glam), or as a vehicle for new sensory perceptions (psychedelia), or again as a guide for a problematic rereading of the present day (singer-songwriters and folksingers), the Residents transform it into an abstract emblem, pushing the grotesque contours of appearance to the point of exasperation. In this sense, the foundations of the band's philosophy lie entirely in their presenting themselves as imaginative, fantastical clowns who neither laugh nor cry, and as surreal puppets of nonsense babbling a fictitious return to the purity of origins in the midst of ultramodern dissolution, or in some unspecified (but destructive) future era.

This comic utopia, however, has an almost scientific seriousness at its foundation. The Residents don't avoid the present at all; rather, they draw on it heavily, fishing out the entrails of spoiled consumerist waste. Theirs is a meticulous reconstruction of the anthropological apparatus of contemporary society: media, advertising, entertainment, the culture industry; everything is mixed together and reproduced obsessively, exploiting to the full the concept of depersonalizing reproducibility inherent to mass consumption. Precisely for this reason, the sender of the artistic message must keep their own identity hidden: for the Residents, rock music is now a ghost that no longer even stirs the counterculture, but acts invisibly in the infinitesimal folds of society.

This theory (bold but rigorous, halfway between musicology and sociology) thus takes the name of "theory of obscurity," and it's reasonable to assume it was instilled in them by the equally obscure figure who would remain the band's fixation for their entire career, N. (Neil or Nicolas) Senada, a Bavarian composer of dubious origin (and dubious existence). Perhaps Beefheart in one of his disguises, perhaps Harry Partch, perhaps a guru-shaman, Senada sets off the band's fundamental mechanism: replacing the flattening daily grind with a new world, entirely invented, that runs counter to the dreams of the hippie counterculture — that in fact brutally distorts them, uglifies them to the point of claustrophobic terror, renders them grotesque without any inhibition (for Senada there is in fact a mythological exaltation of the south-polar lands, the supreme cradle of intelligence, the favored habitat of the human brain as a super electrical circuit that functions best at low temperatures).

Beyond the music in the strict sense, which very often revolves around a radical contamination of percussive-microtonal avant-garde, crude music-hall and Broadway-style ditties, and varied sound manipulations, there also appears – in a colossal but unfinished work such as "Vileness Fats" – a whole series of unsettling iconographic and lexical elements, from nightmarish characters to little monsters, from childish nonsense to irreverent charades.

With the Residents, the term "devolution" is used for the very first time. The human race has reversed the course of its millennial progression: the natural balance with nature, shattered for decades now, has been definitively transformed into a perverse survival game within the hostile post-industrial environment threatened by nuclear discoveries. Before the recognized forerunners of new wave, such as Devo and Kraftwerk's "Robots," turned it into an optimistic, almost enthusiastic take on the new way of life (or at any rate into a more harmonious absorption of it), the Residents' devolution relies on a sort of regression of technological means of expression, rediscovering them as the result of the most mocking possible application of McLuhan's postulate ("the medium is the message"): their deliberately amateurish playing, a bit out of sync and a bit spartan, and above all an audio definition that in their early masterpieces borders on mediocre quality, is where a good part of their mission resides. Perhaps only Moondog's avant-garde craftsmanship, Bo Diddley's stylizations and the heterogeneous arrangements of the Art Ensemble Of Chicago are true precedents.

Theirs is a technique, an art, a philosophy that is undoubtedly mixed. Mixed is the modus operandi, almost always built on a percussive substrate (as elementary as it is insistent) assembled from instruments built for the purpose in the manner of Harry Partch, and structured by completely deformed vocal harmonies, or by ugly, grotesque performances of foolish, possessed, hysterical crooners whose vocal range never rises above a larval state, and by automatic sources of surrealist derivation, such as primitive tape sampling, crude detuned synthesizers, and sadistic electronic timbres. No less important, however, is the contribution of traditional instruments from the band's three main collaborators (these too with well-defined identities): Hardy Fox, a multi-instrumentalist who adds sax, piano, cornet, kazoo and fanfares (echoing the noble experiences of Faust, the Magic Band, the Mothers Of Invention and almost the entirety of the Canterbury scene, which in fact responds in kind by drawing in figures like Frith and Cutler), Homer Flynn, his disciple, the vocalist Enigmatic Foe (later known as Randy Rose), and Philipp "Snakefinger" Lithman, a British-born guitarist (previously active in a few pub bands, including Chilli Willi & the Red Hot Peppers) once again inspired by Canterbury, whose characteristic wah-wah would stretch the band's dissonant apparatus to the point of paroxysm.

Experimentation then meets tape collage and field recordings of real-world sounds, following a wholly original electroacoustic technique, arriving at a visionary (but above all archaic) interaction with natural experience. Added to this is the aforementioned alienating use of singing and sub-human voices, themselves distorted by a series of elements capable of transfiguring them back to a remote, pre-verbal era (guttural sounds, chirping falsettos, mournful nasal singing) based on a non-language borrowed from folk singers of tribal-aboriginal times. Far from being mere ethnomusicologists, the Residents imbue their suites with a kind of informal, material, and distinctly un-zen chance, no longer entrusted to the chaos envisioned by John Cage but nonetheless instinctive, springing from deliberate impulses as a reaction to chilling vital repressions.

If the medium is the message, then primitive means of expression, reworked with present-day technology, convey the corrupted contemporary world abruptly turned primitive once again. The natural element, for the band, is a powerful expressive glue that manifests both in an audio-visual sense and in a programmatic-prophetic one, and it is dada-surrealist hyperrealism as vivid juxtaposition, never an explicit proclamation.

As one might guess, this theoretical premise has more to do with quasi-musicological (if not outright anthropological) questions than with rock music. And yet both their roots and their legacy are closely tied to popular music; while late-psychedelic acts, the stylistic macerations of Canterbury (and the second Soft Machine album in particular), border-line Teutonic rock, the caustic demented antics of the Holy Modal Rounders, Godz, Fugs and Cromagnon, and the "bodily" avant-garde of Harry Partch are the launching pads, their insights would then scorch the earth within the new wave world (blank generation, dark-punk, body music, industrial, no wave and noise-rock). But their inextricable mixture of genres, styles, instrumentation and techniques, and their raw material (the comic registers calibrated on muzak to be mocked to the point of exhaustion), besides inspiring a good part of new wave — relaunching, in the same way as the later Tuxedomoon, Suicide, Pop Group and Pere Ubu would do, the great lesson of Velvet Underground, Zappa and Beefheart — is also a pretext for launching the historic freak marathon into orbit for decades to come: in order, Butthole Surfers and They Might Be Giants (80s), Primus, Bugskull and Bucktedhead (90s), Black Dice and Animal Collective (2000s), not to mention many other artists they directly influenced (Slava Ranko, Dogbowl, Mnemonist, Ween, Birdsongs Of The Mesozoic, Violent Femmes, Negativland, Camper Van Beethoven etc.).

Among the greatest independent producers of all time (they themselves founded both Ralph Records and the Cryptic Corporation, with Jay Clem and John Kennedy, through which they produced their entire output) and among the greatest practitioners of the concept album (which perhaps finds its philosophical-artistic peak in Eskimo), managing to focus their work on comic narrative scenarios bordering on childlike, cartoonish parody, the Residents achieve a flawless iconoclastic fusion of the ancient and the futuristic. Then, starting with the so-called Mole Trilogy, they would finally break through the barriers of the purely auditory medium for good, setting off down the radical path of visual treatment and full-blown live performance.

In the 90s the Residents, especially from Freak Show onward, would continue to explore the possibilities of the grotesque microcosm they had created, pushing even beyond multimedia to position themselves as pioneers of interactive and telematic technologies applied to pop, with such enthusiasm that it sometimes lost sight of the quality of the music itself. Their most recent work (straddling the middle of the 2000s) reveals a monotonous retreat into self-indulgent modes and forms, and an almost total lack of artistic backbone.

With the pharaonic film project Vileness Fats shelved — instigated by guru Senada but never completed (only years later would some musical fragments of the soundtrack resurface on Whatever Happened To Vileness Fats) — and with a handful of homemade demos produced under the most varied noms de guerre (Singing Lawn Chairs, Ivory And The Brain Eaters, Delta Nudes) discarded, the four's career is at first shaped by a more fitting short format. Santa Dog, their first EP from '72, still leans on the mechanisms of the most voracious kraut. And yet, between the maniacal Zappa-esque nursery rhymes (with a cappella accompaniment, absurdist stomp-comedy breaks and a sort of puddle of metallic cacophonies, already the embryo of their mature sound collages) of "Fire", the jazzy whistling with random percussion (plus animal murmurs, android reworkings of Henry Cow and tribal touches building to a crescendo) of "Lightning", the jingle-bell parody (reviled by an unsettling march with a wailing guitar and unhinged sax à la Faust) of "Explosion" and the pastiche of barking and trotting percussion (with a parenthesis of voices talking over one another that fades into a Salvation Army parody) of "Aircraft Damage", the band's personality is already fully formed in nuce.

It's hardly surprising, then, that Meet The Residents (Ralph, 1974), the debut once again built on total parody (starting with the defaced "Meet The Beatles" cover used as the artwork), stands as one of the most pivotal albums in art-rock, and one of new wave's illustrious godfathers. The opener, quoting the chorus of Hazlewood's "Boots Are Made For Walking" via a nervous-wreck announcer, doo-wop choruses and winded brass, is already a statement of intent; layered over it is an out-of-phase three-part harpsichord motif (a stylization of beat music and Tin Pan Alley), and a Middle Eastern dance voiced by sax with harmonized nasal singing. A piano riff is pushed to exasperation by rattles, dissonant clangs and short-circuiting distortion, while a female choir refrain arrives; everything is devoured by a complex polyrhythm, itself stripped bare by a mechanical rhythm of percussive jolts. The suite's final number, "Smelly Tongues", is one of the Residents' mythic tracks: brain-dead free-keyboard phrasing slowly destabilizes the motion of the noise compressor, and a sardonic harpsichord motif turns into a pressing snake-charmer's gait, which preludes a recitation like a debauched litany, in dismally low sound quality.

The second suite ("Rest Aria") is equally overflowing; a piano theme (a livid melodic shred like a Russian passacaglia) starts stirring rhythmically with a homemade metallophone and asymmetric horns; the variations mutate into outright distortions over the insistent pulse of the piano's low notes, and the absurdist marching bands end with a kazoo solo. Then "Spotted Pinto Bean" runs through, via disfigured piano and a snippet of male and female chorus (a genuine throwback commercial), a series of babbling intrusions: aleatory trumpet murmurs, chattering piano, troublesome overlaps of electromagnetic apparatus and out-of-phase fanfares with bass drum and elongated vocalizations. "Infant Tango" begins as an embittered scat vocalist's chant over a dance of wah-wah guitar and Native American tom-tom, then the quartet's mixing reduces it to an infernal rumble with a squeaking guitar, overlays brass onto it, veers it into a diaphanous hare krishna chant and closes it in a chaotic rummage of electronic sounds.

The same goes for the extraordinary "Seasoned Greetings" and the closing "Crisis Bles"; the former is a new, disconcerting reinterpretation of stuttering rhythms, topped by old Hollywood-style fanfares, demonic accents and Beefheart-esque rhythmic jolts and fresh tonal degenerations, while the latter merges an ante-litteram remix of a beat song (later literally annihilated by electronic distortion) with childish little tunes and deliberately imprecise staccato, culminating in a hymn that mumbles a new litany.

With Meet The Residents, the band arrives at a compositional idea dictated by a disconcerting instability: no idea lasts more than a minute, where each idea freely takes on the guise of a leitmotif, a melodic cell, a random cluster of notes. Ideas in abundance — all of them prodigious — are mixed here, intertwined, varied beyond belief to build an admirable vision of modern primordial chaos.

It is the first hallucinated vision of the contemporary world: thanks to this album, the foundations of "modern dance" are laid once and for all.

Third Reich'N'Roll, two years later, is the most representative work of their modus operandi. Demonstrative and inconclusive, on this record the band organizes (or rather, de-organizes) a monstrous carousel of putrefied shreds of billboard hits (with a preference for beat-garage and rhythm'n'blues). In "Swastikas On Parade", the opening track, there parade past: a couple of bars of "Let's Twist Again", an obsessively sub-human version of "Monster Mash", a "Horse With No Name" marked out by a zombie chorus, a deathly remix of Joe Cocker (whose impersonator, bordering on unintelligible, anticipates Waits), the dismembered riff of Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction", a "Little Girl" set amid Luftwaffe-style machine-gun scenery and clapped-out fanfares, a James Brown hit sung by a 1930s Teutonic soprano (one of their sharpest affronts ever), various garage songs turned into so many danses macabres, and two notes of Beach Boys-esque "Heroes And Villains" atop a carousel of noise mixing.

"Hitler Was A Vegetarian" begins by lining up a honky-tonk over repeated keyboard figures, Chinese-style whistling and a ye-ye girl mimicking a Lesley Gore tune. Then it falls into line: a version of "Light My Fire" rendered as a demonic litany, a patriotic song howled by a tavern crooner, a bubblegum tune that becomes a stylization of twisted nursery chants, the famous melodies of Them and Iron Butterfly (skeletal and machine-gunned by the percussion) and the all-too-familiar ones by Rolling Stones ("Sympathy For The Devil") and Beatles ("Hey Jude", poking fun at its reputation as an "excellent coda", though here pushed to the edge of unlistenability).

Of all the inventions of Meet, Reich'N'Roll takes relatively little: the iconoclastic citationism (which on Meet was confined to the opening "Boots"), endlessly replicated, and the taste for primordial mixing of unidentified sound sources. However unprecedented an event it may be, technically speaking Reich'N'Roll is merely a collage of covers. Musically speaking, it is the equivalent of "Lumpy Gravy" for Zappa (which in turn was his own "Rite of Spring"). Artistically speaking, it is a divertissement that only just manages to rise above mere curiosity.

Fingerprice, from the same year, introduces however a perverse notion of order. Half of the record is made up of miniaturized sketches that embrace the avant-garde far more decisively (especially the gestural language of Alvin Lucier and the paternal just intonation of Harry Partch). Tracks like the prelude "You Yesyesyes" (the "first" Residents drum machine, almost pre-Suicide, with vocal-group choruses and psychotic guitar, one of the very earliest declensions of the retro-futurist idiom of years to come), the filtered rap of "Godsong", building to a tremulous horror crescendo, the voodoo ritual softened by airy synths on "March de la Vinni", and the parodies of rockers and shouters with skewed brass flourishes on "Tourniquet Of Roses" are prodigious vignettes that mark a small record in their own alienating grotesquerie.

They are, in any case, mere introductory acts to "Six Things To A Cycle", the Residents' artistic pinnacle: with this suite, the cyclonic depiction of dehumanization reaches an almost terminal point. Here begins a genuine abstract excursus into the world of variation (while still maintaining the unsettling continuum of sub-humanoid alienation); the comic residues vanish, and the piece draws deeply on the grotesque, on insistent registers of cosmic nightmare, even on satanic obsession. Strangely, the track is also pervaded by an absurd, almost elegant dead calm, unprecedented for the band thus far and, above all, quite far removed from the insatiable frenzy of Meet.

The seventeen-minute epic opens with forest calls (indebted to the Fugs' "Virgin Forest" of almost ten years earlier); drums emerge quietly, cathartic, out of nowhere, building into a pressing accelerando-decrescendo. They then vanish abruptly to make way for the theme, a repeating pattern of fanfares, Argentine percussion and free-form rolls, later subjected to a wild dissonance that directly recalls Stockhausen's electronic poems. In the second part, a variation for equatorial percussion and guttural noise pushes its way forward, following a fresh crescendo. In the third part (a "remixed" blend of the first and second) analog cartoon sounds à la Raymond Scott take center stage, eventually spilling into an ungainly dance and a heavy stasis. In the fourth, a new variation, even more ungainly, frayed and out of tune, slips into a synth groove, then hands off to a murmuring chorus that mimics the leitmotif. A sustained note announces the fifth part, in a windy fade that foreshadows Eskimo, over which an enigmatic melody soon layers, taken up by an alarmed fanfare. A crescendo of orchestral and choral chaos then gives way, in the final part, to a variation for Eastern plucked strings and a chamber-string backdrop, almost a mimicry of Messiaen's ethnic-coloristic poems, where the basso continuo is nothing but the threatening presence of the percussion, growing ever more evident until it reaches pure dissonance.

Halfway between Zappa's "King Kong", a baroque fugue and a minimalist piece by Steve Reich, "Six Things To A Cycle" stages — more fully and more effectively than Reich'N'Roll — their modus operandi, built from an insistent refrain and a series of incoherent reworkings structured like harmonic panels. In this work, the issue becomes total: perhaps the Residents' entire career is one gigantic "Six Things To A Cycle" (by analogical extension, all of existence too is a complex musical suite).

With Not Available, a choral symphonic poem packaged like an opera, and one of the high points of postmodern art, the four reach a radical dimension (starting with the album's title and release date, the latest devices in obscurity: actually composed and recorded in 1974 — and marketed, fittingly, as "not available" — it was released only in 1978 for inexplicable reasons), shedding even the last parodic inhibitions of their recent past. From the very start — via an opening cymbal crash, a complex cubist pattern, airless fanfares and hair-raising choruses — it creates a dense, swamp-like atmosphere of unease. A new scenario, underscored by nerve-racking percussion and sobbing synth layers, leads into the psychotic song of a desperate soul, in an alienating reworking of the catastrophic first movement. An extraordinary Wagnerian-style caesura then leads to fresh distortions of the main movements, where ungainly soliloquies coexist with counterpoints that try to bring touches of humanity (perhaps the psalmodies of the cosmos's wretched souls).

In "The Making Of A Soul" the sounds, juxtaposed in a kind of spatial collage, seem to come from different dimensions, first introducing a malevolent little chorus, then a dreamlike interlude entrusted to the piano that further scatters auditory awareness, effects seemingly from the center of the earth and a sort of luciferian waltz. Everything then tends to lose itself in an aimless drifting within the acoustic spectrum: the singing grows muffled, almost smothered by some unspecified supernatural entity, and the sonic maelstrom intones a symphony of chaos and mumbled litany-babble before total sleep sets in.

"Ships A'Going Down" is the adagio of this ideal symphony. The icy runs of woodwinds at the start are almost a pantheistic apologia announced phonetically by the damned, and the timbral blends whirl together elementary rhythmic structures and sinister repeated piano notes, which seem to hint at some melodic element, yet instead carry on compiling this anthology of disconnected fragments. A new sinister (anti)theme appears, onto which a polyphonic choir is grafted – perhaps the Beach Boys of Dante's Malebolge – that seems to be sung by the chosen few seized by a premonition of cosmic destruction (the masterpiece within the masterpiece). The whole thing is shrouded in a thick fog that strips the sound down to the bone and projects images of innocence invisibly corrupted.

The incipit of "Never Known Questions" is shocking: clots of notes and wailing sax (the most benevolent character here, perhaps the sage); a hymn to the absurd that takes on markedly dark tones, delivered with a skilful play of harmonic tonalities. The near-quotation of Mussorgsky's "Promenade" is a feeble attempt to recall the sense of charity so lost to the corruption of the modern age; it seems as though all the malign forces yield to compassion for the damned: it's the only moment of pietas, though still shot through with the bitter disillusionment of devastated minds.

"Epilogue", the reprise of the attacca, is the implacable cyclical shape of the work: the opening theme, here even less accommodating, sets the catastrophe in motion. Every means at the band's disposal is deployed to shift inert masses of sonic magma according to a very precise design. The feminine piano theme returns to grant a quiet, illusory blessing of almost childlike terribleness: it is the end, the end of everything, as confirmed by the closing section (with a chilling harp glissando), the complete opposite of a happy ending, sealing the absolute absence of hope.

It's a record possessed of an internal tension on the verge of collapsing into devastation, nearly perfect in every part, but above all it's a work of universal dissolution, of cosmic mourning, a long testament of initiates, of those chosen to know the terrifying mystery of existence. A grandiose, elusive, inconsolable prayer, a desolate wasteland with no way out, disturbed by sardonic (and almost sadistic) sallies, the work is a cornerstone of mixed-technique or combined-methodology composition. Even more unsettling is its universal message: having definitively broken free of flower-power (which it has by now left isolated in its naivety), rock delves into an era of perpetual second thoughts: the Residents could not have found a better way to announce it officially, a message truly "no longer available".

Duck Stab (1978), on the other hand, is an EP offering another parade of grotesque caricatures, containing new gems in short form in the style of Fingerprice: the litany of "Constantinople", the percussive murmur driving the relentless industrial layers of "Sinister Exaggerator", the half-whispered guitar bacchanal of "Blue Rosebuds", the fake Gregorian chant over metaphysical beats of "Bach Is Dead" (one of their finest parodies of vocal groups), the piece caught somewhere between Lucier, Zappa and a resounding send-up in "Laughing Song", and the jangle of funky bass and clattering guitar on "Elvis And His Boss" (with a calypso rhythm and a crescendo of uncoordinated sounds that builds into overwhelming cacophony).

Buster & Glenn, the companion EP, still features the electronic pantomime of "Lizard Lady", the melodic parade with musique concrète of "Semolina" (a "hymn" sui generis), the near-industrial "Birthday Boy", with its choir of mad castrati, the tribal-electro lounge of "Krafty Cheese", the rhyming Persian dance of "Hello Skinny" and the orchestral garage oddity of "The Electrocutioner".

Goosebump boasts "Plants" (an analogue divertissement straight out of a video game), "Disaster" (polyrhythm with shrill little voices and electronic gusts), "Farmers" (a mini-suite of harmonic scenes, including an irreverent parody of "L'allegra fattoria") and a kind of psalm-chanting ecstasy for trilling keyboards ("Twinkle").

Babyfingers (1978) is an EP containing leftovers from Fingerprice, while Santa Dog '78 commemorates the debut EP with a brief remix of "Fire".

The golden period (which the Residents themselves would later dub the "Album Era") continues and closes with Eskimo and Commercial Album, the decade's respective peak and swan song.

On Eskimo (1979), considered by many to be the band's masterpiece (or at least their most mythologised album), the transition from musician-gurus to master chroniclers of Western society's absurd apocalypse reaches its full realisation. In truth, compared to the all-encompassing poetry of Not Available, the band here performs a retreat (also sealed by the look that became the quartet's symbol: tailcoat and eyeball mask) that verges on the extreme: ever further from rock music, Eskimo lays out genuine sonic landscapes built from primordial auditory elements. This compositional turn, which only seems simple at a superficial glance, allows them both to play with the nature of narrative and to pose as direct observers of the ideal (arctic) land they had so longed for, and finally to construct ad hoc stories made of pure sources (and little else).

On Eskimo, their constant game of subtraction leads to an uncontaminated sobriety, bordering on a documentary register.

Six harmonic-narrative panels (no longer, or not merely, suites) make up the work. The opening of "Walrus Hunt" lays out a chilling scene of storm, disordered splashing and alien mantras with bass drum; a sudden dissonance introduces new sound sources (subhuman cries, water, torments, etc.) under the sign of supreme anguish. In the transition to the second panel, "Birth", the storm and percussion multiply and intensify the atmosphere; in absolute silence an aurora borealis of ambient synth appears, which – via a shamanic vocal performance overlaid with powerful moans – serves the group in conveying a striking idea of labour.

A terrible hurricane then announces "Arctic Hysteria", the pivotal track of the work. An atonal stringed instrument and a nasal, trance-like chant unleash a series of ultrasonic miasmas that end up merging entirely with the wind, driving the scene to a crescendo of noise-laden sonic chases. Then the collective roar of tom-toms resurfaces, over electronic dissonances in the form of creaks and a spectral organ note. A parade of total percussion (indistinguishable from pure noise) presses on until it incites battling war chants. "The Angry Angakok" starts over from electronic "verses" in dialogue, overwhelmed by a high-pitched choir and a mighty tribal apparatus, from which layer upon layer of invoking choral formulas emerge, until the shaman's scolding silences everyone. A crescendo of indefinite sounds preludes a "turn" by the wind (the true protagonist of the work) in sub-frequency, performing timbral expansions at the limit of audibility.

"A Spirit Steals A Child" opens as a gallop of percussion and primitive xylophones; a deformed vocal explosion opens up an oasis of infernal murmuring, with weeping and satanic voices; in a new appearance, the brutal shaman begins reciting a dark rosary through a barrage of barking. The choir's response is a propitiatory, mocking litany aimed at Western society and its symbol-slogans ("Money-Money…", and "Coca-Cola Is Life…"). The relentless litany becomes a confused, terrifying clamour, joined by a dark vocal rumble, once again merging with the wind.

The grand finale, "The Festival Of Death" (ten minutes), starts over from the storm, more deafening than ever. Amid funereal tolling and distant voices, the scene is enriched by diaphanous choirs with sudden tribal surges, background miasmas and hints of fanfare. Everything fades into faint little voices and winds laying out elementary melodies. A multi-voiced choir mumbles new commercial slogans, joined by xylophones and far-off harmonies, almost as if generated by the wind. Just as the atmosphere seems to grow calm, everything dissolves into the wind, fading into nothingness.

Indebted to learned avant-garde and advanced field recordings, Eskimo is yet another point of no return for the Residents. With a single album, they imported programmatic music into the rock cosmos, kickstarted the rediscovery of world music, gave decisive impetus to ambient music, taught one of the greatest lessons in combined art — even if later generations haven't always fully grasped it — and set deconstructionist rock in motion (Mnemonists, Negativland, Slava Ranko, and perhaps even fellow countrymen Matmos will trace their roots back to this).

Diskomo (1980), later revised and expanded as Diskomo 2000, is an EP containing a colorful remix of excerpts from Eskimo for toy instruments: just as the original work's intentions were a kind of parody of Harry Partch's aims, the music on this EP is a kind of (lighter) parody of the Residents' own proposal.

If Eskimo was the obsessive nadir of their socio-philosophical thinking, Commercial Album (1980) is, by contrast, a semi-serious work that strings together clips each exactly one minute long (in the manner of real TV "commercials," but also as an ironic jab at a more "commercial" approach built on short, simple songs), condensing the insights of their intermediate works, from Duck Stab to Third Reich 'N' Roll, into carefully studied non-sense capsules. It ranges, with mechanical programmatic precision, from the pataphysical nursery-rhyme duet of "Amber," to the swampy duple time (with rising-sun pizzicato) of "Die In Terror," from the dark vaudeville of "Simple Song" to the beat-pop ditty of "The Nameless Souls," to the garage stylization with psychedelic invocations of "Dimples And Toes." The best moments come when the band breaks free of the rigid grid of its own conceptual framework to deliver bizarre inventions within these mini-timeframes: the post-punk mottling of "Ups and Downs," the listless expressionism of "My Work Is So Behind" and "Loss Of Innocence," the obsessive jingle of "Give It To Someone Else," the demeaning cabaret of "Act Of Being Polite," the monstrous gait of "Margaret Freeman," the cartoonish tango of "La La," the mechanical synth phasing of "Handful Of Desire," the industrial dance of "Love Leaks Out," the grating, almost melancholy motif of "Tragic Bells," and the near-Pachelbel melody of "When We Were Young," an electrified anthem (which, as usual, clashes rather than harmonizes) that even adds tiny doses of Schubertian romanticism.

Meticulously crafted down to the smallest detail, this is a work built on a contradiction in terms: giving a highly predictable structure (the pantomime of TV schedules) to a musical mass that is otherwise formless. The Residents' icy analysis, though once again sharp, polished and here and there thrilling, this time is also partial.

Having closed out the '70s and stepped into the '80s with a more than superb string of releases, the band now inaugurates the "Live Era." In truth, the decade's major project is the Mole Trilogy, first and foremost another opportunity to define their vision of the theory of obscurity. The "trilogy" of albums is in fact missing its third part (never released, or never made), while the actual closing third album, Big Bubble, bears the absurd subtitle "part four of the Mole Trilogy."

Beyond the self-evident non-sense (an amused take on their own obscurity), the Trilogy properly consists of three works: Mark Of The Mole (1981), Tunes Of Two Cities (1982) and — indeed — Big Bubble (1985). On a second level, the Trilogy takes shape as a shapeless, confused narrative clot (an ancestral struggle between two belief systems, out of which emerges a puppet-messiah speaking an arcane language with magical powers), which is really just a pretext for indulging in improvisations on the vicissitudes of their universe of alien characters.

Mark Of The Mole picks up the complexity and dense fascination of Eskimo, with the difference that, instead of naturalistic scenery, the Residents here install interlocking metaphysical spaces, post-industrial ganglia that multiply their fissures ad libitum, crescendoing electronic spasms that blur into one another; voices become increasingly debased expressionist vehicles, while the percussion — even more stylized now — serves as elementary transfigurations of cosmic junk.

In the first movement (a genuine puzzle of harmonic absurdities, among the sharpest of their career), after a dance-hall-tempo introduction that serves as a foolish declaration of war, a new acidic little tune undergoes cataclysms of noise and distortion until it mutates into a perpetual motion of electronic percussion (which degenerates into horror sounds while still keeping a cybernetic gait) and an android mazurka. In the second, "Migration," an electronic-toy-theater harmony and an insistent tempo rush along, fading into meteorological fury (a storm of radiation) and a lo-fi, out-of-tune chorale (a Beefheart-ian anti-melody); then a mechanical funk kicks in, over which a new chorus is grafted, led by a growling vocalist.

In "Another Land," against a noise backdrop, emerges a melodic invocation of a new "modern dance" set between atmospheric, crackling synths, building tension in a sly crescendo. With the fourth movement, "The New Machine," the work's defining traits take shape almost in full, gradually breaking down into the most inconclusive cerebral abstraction. A diaphanous, pianissimo intro unleashes yet another android tempo, almost floating on harmonic suspensions. Then a metronomic silvery beat reverberates over electronic vapors that turn percussive again, and a confused collective murmur. The new crescendo accentuates the percussion, while the ethereal noises grow ever more demonic; spectral jingles appear alongside a half-spoken, half-sung declamation; a greatly fractured rhythm finally dissolves into a crescendo similar to that of "Another Land."

In the closing "Final Confrontation" all these elements collide, and the chaos reaches transcendental qualities. The agitated rhythm returns, this time more introverted than ever, yet still pervaded by circus-like analog scribbles; a distorted chant (with a punk edge) takes over, but is soon swept aside by Japanese strings over freely found sounds (a ragged musique concrète that here becomes the opposite of Eskimo's careful balance). At this point, a precisely crafted techno mix in the Kraftwerk mold punctuates the chorus with a new propitiatory chant, but cosmic oscillations and chaotic dissonant zones transform it in turn into a coarsened ceremony, over music-box-like arpeggios and electronic little marches.

The first and most layered chapter of the Trilogy, Mark Of The Mole is a genuine high point in the discography of San Francisco's four bug-eyed figures. Driven by fresh inspiration, even by a new narrative-compositional sensibility, it becomes an experience often overflowing with universal catharsis. It isn't hard to detect in it, however tangled up in the intricate folds of non-sense, the influence of Stockhausen's "Mikrophonie."

If with Mark Of The Mole the Residents turn elements of Western muzak into Eastern meditation, Tunes Of Two Cities — by contrast — falls back on percussion, motifs and rhythmic embellishments, focusing mostly on cultured entertainment (vaudeville, melodic cabaret, short song forms). The mood is more traditional, almost orchestral, and the electronic additions sound confused, almost monotonous; the work on timbral textures, however, remains convincing.

Almost entirely instrumental, the album shines above all thanks to a new canon, "Six Things To A Cycle," which unfolds through "Smack Your Lips" (a genuine caricature of that masterpiece, interspersed with a crippled, Kurt Weill-like guitar), "Praise For The Curse" (a variation on the previous theme achieved with hammering percussion over catastrophic chords), "The Secret Seed" (a new study in electro-acoustic percussion and anguished notes), "Smokebeams" (a Broadway-style cabaret with synthesized brass) and "Mourning The Undead" (yet another degeneration of percussion and chords that here edges toward a still life of spectral sounds).

Then the closing "Happy Home" picks up certain fragments of this suite and steers it into a popular-civic march (with angelic choirs at the very edge of audibility) made unsettling by heightened orchestral emphasis. The surrounding tracks are "The Evil Disposer," a macabre tribal dance (with a few fleeting moments of faint voice) detonated by hyper-industrial beats, "God Of Darkness," a swampy tom-tom over which acoustic manipulations of animalistic choirs tower, and "Song Of The Wild," a piece of instrumental film music, perhaps the most modest track of the entire Trilogy.

Though uneven and fragmentary (and almost self-indulgent), Tunes acts as a catalyst for the whole project, midway between the ultra-cosmic mosaic of Mole and the phonetic frescoes of Big Bubble.

Big Bubble, the final chapter of the saga, is thus centred on the voice (human, sub-human, animalistic, humanoid, robotic) and on its expressive verbal and anti-verbal (if not pre-verbal) possibilities. Its sinister tone echoes the cerebral atmosphere (albeit of an end-of-the-cosmos sort) of Mark Of The Mole, but is even more closely related to Tunes (if only for the brevity of the tracks), of which it forms a kind of antithesis: a pseudo-vocal album where its predecessor was a pseudo-symphonic one.

It all begins with a declamation over a run of clipped notes, drum machine and crackling guitar ("Sorry"); the declamation turns into a horror-struck elegy for mumbling voice and grandiloquent synths ("Hop A Little"), and then into confabulating shamanism, bordering on non-sense, with the usual solemn synths now alarmed by a procession that swells in the tolling of the bass drum ("Go Where Ya Wanna Go").

From "Gotta Gotta Get" onward the atmosphere grows heavier still, almost delegating the entire compositional responsibility for its musical constructs to the voices alone. In "Cry For The Fire" a laughter "solo" takes centre stage, recalling the one in "Prelude To The Afternoon" on Frank Zappa's "Weasels Ripped My Flesh", after which a howling voice and a declaiming murmur set off a vast, unease-laden funeral march; all that remains is a single low vibration and a virtuoso performance from a listless crooner; everything resolves into a slow expressionist cabaret song (almost anticipating our own Cccp). The equally theatrical "Gotta Gotta Get" picks up the furious Nick Cave of "From Her To Eternity", with a shaman barking like a free-jazz instrument, and multiplies distant choirs of voices over a suspense of distorted shocks. The shaman then duets with John Barry-esque atmospheric synths in "Vinegar", almost making it the vocal rule of the whole work, while a full-throttle, grindcore-like charge kicks in.

In "Firefly" an infernal poet recites refrains amid distortions, synths and martial drums, and then conjures up an underground presence amid general silence. That presence, on the title track, is a crooner (nasal, in a way Les Claypool would later imitate) looming over a post-punk cabaret (one of their finest stylisations), while on the titanic, almost Beethoven-like electro-symphonic outburst of the closing "Kula Bocca Says So" it becomes a magic formula that modulates the strings down to a whisper and merges piano and synth into one indistinct choral whole.

In Big Bubble, then, we find both the most radical Residents (or at least their most uncompromising interpreters), focused on amplifying the message, and an avant-garde band isolating phonemes, lexemes and graphemes from remote eras (probably invented, or freely drawn from pre-Indo-European languages) to craft them into a gripping poem of desolate, visionary contemporaneity.

Intermission (1983) is a mini-CD gathering outtakes and filler material from the three chapters of the Trilogy (used mainly in live performance) in the form of comic ballets, drawn mostly from Mark Of The Mole and Tunes: from the intro of "Lights Out", a somewhat uninspired electronic tone poem in collage form, to interludes like "Shorty's Lament", an obstinate dance with glitches reminiscent of "Six Things", to farewell flourishes (the barbershop-style cantillation of "The New Hymn").

The "Live Era" label is owed to the band's first live albums (The Mole Show Live At The Roxy, from 1983, and The Mole Show Live In Holland, 1987, not to mention the two celebratory 13th Anniversary Show releases, from 1986 and 1987), which document the huge sonic (as well as scenic) effort behind the intricate scores of the Trilogy.

In parallel, George & James, Stars & Hank Forever (both part of the short-lived American Composers series, made between 1984 and 1986) and The King & Eye (1989) cover — in a far more conventional way than Third Reich'N'Roll — classics by Gershwin, James Brown, Hank Williams, Philipp Sousa and Elvis Presley, establishing themselves as new anti-philologists of American popular music standards (much as Fahey's and Basho's american primitive, in its reactionary phase, had done for folk standards). The fervour of this approach is also sealed by a summarising project, the mammoth live album Cube E (1990).

Title In Limbo (1983) is instead a collaboration with their British disciples Renaldo And The Loaf (standout tracks include "Horizontal Logic", a superb caricature of AOR, "Mahogany Wood" and "The Sailor Song"); clearly rather intimidated, the Residents nonetheless prove they can excel in the most disparate fields, even in music born of compromise. The project itself isn't especially artistic (the same vein produced "For Elsie", released on a 1987 EP, a reworking of the famous "Per Elisa" again done in the style of "Six Things To A Cycle").

Another leitmotif of the decade is film scores: Whatever Happened To Vileness Fats (1984), Census Taker (1985) and above all God In Three Persons (1988).

Whatever Happened To Vileness Fats, as already mentioned, stubbornly revisits the greatest unfinished project of their career, the medium-length film "Vileness Fats", in order to at least complete the assembly of the soundtrack's parts. Taken on its own, this work sounds almost like a meta-concept on the shipwreck of the original project (and, ultimately, on their own artistic regrets), and a new incarnation of the theory of obscurity (the work "Vileness Fats" remains, in fact, still "unavailable").

Thus, in the opening title track, a grim-toned Tchaikovsky-esque perpetual motion coexists with heterogeneous timbral fantasies (electronic vibratos, colourful patterns, cunning rhythms), while in "The Knife Fight" a bold Oriental-flavoured ballet freely mixes with rhyming nursery rhymes. "Adventures Of A Troubled Heart" is an electronic poem built on subdued mutterings and melodic synth phrases, while "Atomic Shopping Carts" unfolds over a sustained note and stretched-out phrasing, animalistic variations and cabaret-like jingling, and "Eloise" reproduces a vocal solo by a shouter (apparently, for what may be the first and only time, Senada herself).

Then comes a fresh grotesque parade ("Broccoli And Saxophone", "Lord It's Lonely", "Disguised As Meat"), proving that the Residents have by now thoroughly mastered the art of variation. Better still, they show that variation has always been one of their great passions (bordering on obsession). Highly cinematic, built perfectly to the standards of a film score (to the point of using the "Vileness Fats" leitmotif as an excuse to dish out their repetitive refrains to the point of exhaustion), the record lines up a string of dazzling, heretical, swaggering insights, even if not perfectly coalesced. Teetering between elementary abstraction and a demonstrative catalogue, slyly related to old-time vaudeville, the sum of its ideas — even if marked by a serious, less focused kind of fun than in the past — still manages to take your breath away, upending the very experience and notion of accompanying music.

Census Taker is another formidable score (for an obscure 1985 film) that pushes the ideas of Vileness Fats to the point of turning them into genuine sonic paradigms. The opening "Creeping Dread", for instance, with its crescendo of thickening pulses rising out of a dark sub-frequency, is a ruthless emblem of this. Even better are the galloping tribal groove of the title track, with its limp keyboard phrasing, the solemn underwater melody of "Emotional Music", bolstered by an almost disco-like (yet strangely cathartic) beat and a shifting atmosphere that keeps fracturing, the once-again Kurt Weill-esque cabaret of "Easter Woman" (but more creative, thanks to a heretical mass of stunning sounds), and above all "Hellno", a number orchestrated like a Broadway music-hall parade, with slapped funk bass and vocal performances in the style of Billie Holiday.

But the Residents also stay true to their initial premise in "Where Is She", a kind of expired commercial jingle turned into wave-industrial obsession over the spasms of an asthmatic singer, and in "End Of Home", a Not Available-style "glacial" piece set over the thuds of cabaret rhythms. "Romanian" picks up their original idea of "modern dance" (further debased by indecipherable timbral soliloquies), and the "Lights Out/Where Is She" medley, a revised and corrected version of the one already released on Intermission, opens with an organ generating distortions and rumbles until it turns into a catastrophic harmony, accompanied by a pointed rhythm and a typical Snakefinger solo. "Innocence Decayed" sets up a medieval florilegium only to catapult it into a mechanical (almost automatic) march, while "Margaret Freeman" imports the same grotesque ostinatos in place of counterpoints for string instruments, and "Passing the Bottle" is a small display of timbral sorcery.

Less ambitious in their sonic blends, the Residents of Census Taker prove capable of reaching a kind of pure asceticism, above all by rediscovering the pleasure of free compositional association (somewhat overshadowed by the rigorous narrative demands of the Trilogy).

God In Three Persons, on the other hand, is the decade's most personal work. More than a soundtrack (though it will properly become one in the 2000 double-CD reissue, with the added bonus disc of Instrumental Excerpts, in the same way as Intermission was for the Trilogy), it's a true opera buffa based on Robert Ashley's "sung monologues" (but equally influenced by Wendy Carlos's baroque-tinged synth). God In Three Persons is also the Residents' first real commercial turning point (likewise sealed by the heresy of highly sophisticated production in place of their typical, liturgical lo-fi), and the template for the two decades to follow, the beginning of the decline.

The scene opens with the bright (yet dissonant) overture of two harmonized female voices, and a prelude with a musical-style orchestral refrain. Then "Hard & Tenderly" offers a tango for piano and twisted effects, and a falsetto vocal duet straight out of a TV commercial, which eases in the narrator's entrance, underscored by an agitated rhythm (and the opening tango grows richer with the most varied arrangements). But it's really from "Devotion" onward that the narrative kicks into gear (in which a certain Mr. X tries to plagiarize the strange healing powers of two mysterious Siamese twins, but ends up plagiarized himself), with an oracle-like declamation over a wind effect worthy of Eskimo, and a gradually building Chinese rhythm, howling brass, and a little march (yet another reprise of "Six Things") that unhinges the scene until it becomes utterly rarefied.

Scene by scene, the operetta grows ever more paradoxical. In "The Thing About Them" an amiable swirl of synth, drum machine and brass is unhinged into a hyperkinetic pulse (which contrasts nicely with the narrator's placidity), and "Their Early Years" is a dark ancient-Egyptian procession thickened with drums, bassoon and piano. Then the complex piece "The Service", which dissolves into the little theater of metallic repeated notes of "Confused", with keyboard shrieks and tuba asides (and the narrator more impassive than ever), the brutal drum machine with 1940s horror-soundtrack piano of "Time", and the cyber-punk with laser beams of "Silver Sharp And Could Not Care" all become genuine sonic proverbs.

The double closer is entrusted to "Kiss Of Flesh", a variation on the leitmotif of "Hard & Tenderly" with atonal suspension, a galloping pace and a final (almost dreamlike) overlapping of the narrating declamations, and to "Pain And Pleasure", a highly atmospheric 1950s doo-wop that - via a conversational narrator and tidal waves of production - serves almost as a concise excursus through their career.

Backed by genuine orchestration, a finally level-headed narrating voice, female vocalists now a fixed presence (no longer the eccentric sopranos making sporadic cameos as in past masterpieces), a rock-solid rhythmic apparatus (drums finally actually played, though the usual electronic devices aren't missing), and a respectable (if measured) symphonic array, the work becomes a plain statement of intent, even as the proverbial hysterical streak persists in the absurdity of the story.

God In Three Persons is also the first Residents album without Snakefinger, who passed away in 1987 during a performance. Under his own name he had released a first album, Chewing Hides The Sound (1979), a carnivalesque romp of lo-fi new wave skits steered by his guitar, from "Kill The Great Raven" (Zappa-esque glam-dub set to a reggae beat) to "Here Comes The Bums" (grand-guignol music-hall), from "Vivian Girls" (Beefheart-style vaudeville) to "Picnic In The Jungle" (a petulant chant over a jabbing rhythm), crowned by the demented skit'n'roll of "Jesus Was A Leprechaun" and "Vultures Of Bombay" (with synth and sax) and a "Magic And Ecstasy" that already shows the influence of Suicide.

His second album, Greener Postures (1980), doesn't offer major shifts in stylistic approach, mostly busying itself with tightening up a debut that was still fairly amateurish. Not only more polished, then, but also closer to the actual Residents style, even surpassing them at times by adding what feel like missing pieces of their second phase ("The Man In The Dark Sedan", a successful power-dub experiment, "Jungle Princess", percussive and dissolving into fractal tapping embroidery), the record rises into a lushly stereophonic production that, absurdly, suits its lopsided rhythm'n'blues perfectly. Proof lies in the warped Hawaiian inlays of "Golden Goat" and "Don't Lie", a little country gem with a hysterical chorus, the guitar overdubbed countless times and then pitched up sky-high to turn it into an expressionist fiddle (the track illustrates well how much the Residents' sound owed to the guitarist), "Trashing All The Loves Of History", a parody of the most parodic Cramps (before the Cramps even existed) with a splendidly scruffy solo, and one of his finest nursery rhymes: "Save Me From Dali" (with a clockwork gothic interlude). This vocabulary for rock guitar yet to come, innovative however hidden and unheard, also holds "Picture Makers Vs Children Of The Sea", the final fresco and his masterpiece, a talking-blues launched at marching speed and overheated by a metal distortion, turned into another surreal mournful pantomime via a very timid harmonium.

For Manual Of Errors (1982) he forms his own band, the Vestal Virgins, with Eric Drew Feldman of the Magic Band on keyboards. What results, however, is something rather more haphazard, which at best achieves a noir little swing like "Beatnik Party" and another frantic pulp-demented gag like "You Sliced Up My Wife". The obligatory long track, "Private Universe/Life On Nebulov", gives a more gothic and rollicking cast (though often more thanks to Feldman's electronics) to the old space mythologies of Bowie and Gong. History Of The Blues (1984) is their live album, and Against The Grain (1983) anthologizes his exploits up to that point.

The last Vestal Virgins album, Night Of Desirable Objects (1987), aside from covers and filler, on paper offers a blasphemy worthy of his bandmates, but the music settles without ambition into the mold of second-era Devo. "Bad Day In Bombay" is his jazz-rock epitaph, and the jig "Sawney Bean/Sawney's Death Dance" is his last metamorphic flourish.

Shortly after his passing, the Residents dedicated a suite to his memory, "Snakey Wake" (1988).

Santa Dog '88 and Santa Dog '92 are fresh commemorations of the legendary debut (but containing new remixes of "Fire"), while Our Finest Flowers (1992) is a collection of short-lived leftovers (the slow rhythm & blues with cacophonous gags of "Fourty-Four No More", the Middle Eastern dance of "I'm Dreaming Of A White Sailor", the ecstatic harp piece "Perfect Goat", the gospel of "Blue Tonges", yet another nod to "Six Things To A Cycle" in "Six Amber Things", the satanic choir over screeches and syncopations of "Kick A Picnic", the gloomy synth-pop of "Gone Again", the harmonic pastiche of "Or Maybe A Marine") that still belong to the '80s decade (and to the God sessions in particular).

The Residents' 1990s, their identity this time obscured by computers, technology and video-game-style (and -aimed) iconography, open rather with Freak Show (1991) and Gingerbread Man (1994), two galleries of characters that matter more for their technological scope than for their actual musical content. Almost forgetting the consumerist catastrophe they themselves had foretold, the Residents dive with the utmost self-satisfaction (while still retaining, here and there, their usual caustic streak) into the bustling universe of modernization, even if reading it obliquely.

Freak Show is a kind of easy appendix to God In Three Persons, and - in its way - a humble fresco of frenzied humanity. In every vignette the Residents indulge freely in effect-laden gags that deploy every tool of the avant-garde, both analog and computer-oriented (Midi, Moog, sequencer, rhythm programming, etc.), up to the point of schizoid delirium.

At the start, a heroic march straight out of a historical epic morphs into a circus carousel tune (with radio commentary, little female voices and a heavy beat), while "Harry The Head" is a cabaret-style skipping dance shaped like a puppet show (decorated with airy synths and a chorus-girl refrain). Next come agitated nursery rhymes over oddball harmonies that bring in sound-montages built around an obstinate rhythm ("Wanda The Worm Woman"), a kind of macabre tarantella with a darkened vocalist ("Herman The Human Mole"), and twilight soundscapes with honeyed voices and clangs of every sort ("Jack The Boneless Boy").

Above all, the album boasts the collages of "Benny The Boucing Bump" (a clownish momentum paired with a narrating voice and tempo changes with unsettling oases), and "Mickey The Mumbling Midget" (a lean rhythm with polyphonic synth counterpoints, organ, percussion à la Tom Waits, and chaotic orchestration).

The work, after the parody of disco queens that closes "Lillie", finally flows into the restless psalmody of "Nobody Laughs When They Leave" (over accelerating hammered piano and baroque-choral flourishes).

Less freakish than God In Three Persons, which was in turn less freakish than the classics of the golden era, it infuses dignified (and somewhat sly) statements of intent into amusing secondhand sketches. The album would be accompanied by a CD-ROM importing music and interludes to experience as navigable hypertext, and by a second CD of instrumental excerpts (later gathered on The Freak Show Special Edition, 2002).

Gingerbread Man, buoyed by the success of Freak Show, comes out directly as an interactive CD-ROM and draws heavily on digital animation. The music, a new surrogate for the timbral delirium of God In Three Persons approximated through a drab computer-generated sound, is a parade of grim, monomaniacal portraits, at times tragicomic. Each character is presented according to a stale formula: a promenade with variations (a macabre waltz in "The Ascetic", a pseudo-symphonic number in "The Old Soldier", Japanese inflections in "The Aging Musician" etc.), followed by a new little motif, followed in turn by a syncopated rhythm (especially the oriental dances of "The Butcher", the best piece of editing on the record, drawing directly on Can's "Peking O", and the subliminal rhythm of "The Old Woman"). Above all, it's a diligent parade of predictable eccentricities.

The modes and forms of Census Taker become mere clichés in Hunters (1995) and Have A Bad Day (1996), the soundtracks of the Residents' new decade.

Hunters is a minor work that collects the music they were commissioned to write for the Discovery Channel's documentary series on the subject, "Hunters: The Worlds Of Predator And Prey". Thoroughly illustrative, the record boasts a sophisticated production and commercial arrangements that aptly capture the naturalistic atmospheres required by the source footage. Saharan pieces ("Tooth And Claw"), dark-ambient ("Rulers Of The Deep"), phantasmagorical ballets ("The Crawling Kingdom"), typically jarring alchemies ("The Dangerous Sea") over driving rhythmic bases ("Eye Of The Serpent", "Track Of The Cat") and quasi-symphonic grandiloquence ("The Deadly Game") are, in the end, nothing more than the (none too adventurous) non-vocal counterpart to the character-pieces of Freak Show. A few tempo changes, a few compositional tricks and a few harmonic complications do not make the collection comparable to their best instrumental works.

Have A Bad Day, the soundtrack to a video game they conceived and released themselves ("Bad Day On The Midway"), picks things up a little thanks to the charged atmospheres of "Daddy's Poems" (a majestic Wendy Carlos-style intro that launches a sleepwalking lullaby growing ever more demonic, over droning three-dimensional backdrops), "Ugly Liberation" (an instrumental fantasy in musical-theatre style) and the collage of "Marvels Of Mayhem" (hysterical voices, sirens and an EBM-style balance of hisses, bursts, nuances and found sounds), as well as the shifting opening number, the floating minimalism of "Dagmar" (with creative samples and hilarious twists), the rarefied piece "Tears Of The Taxman", the joyful "God's Teardrops" (slowed-down rock'n'roll, orchestral adagio, tribal beat), the timbral hallucinations of "The Seven Tattoos" and the synthetic hillbilly skit of "Lottie The Human Log".

This work, once detached from the playful premise (as the pure triggering event behind its conception), reveals how the Residents are still capable – albeit now shakily, even clumsily – of sparking compositional enthusiasm rooted in caricatural imagination that is, at the very least, above average.

In 1998 the band revived a legendary score penned by their guru Senada (his only verified composition), "Pollex Christi", a patchwork of burlesque quotations of classical themes in the manner of Reich'N'Roll, and recorded it as a five-part suite on an EP (which would remain perhaps the smartest thing of the Residents' '90s decade). A new suite (the seven parts of the irreverent "Disfigured Night") appears on Live At The Fillmore (1998), mostly devoted to celebrating twenty-five years of activity.

The Residents return to the proper album (and to the concept album in particular) with Wormwood (1998), a work that also inaugurates the "Band Era". A new offshoot of God In Three Persons, this collection of clumsy melodic songs laden with theatrical flourishes and sonic holograms rediscovers the fullness of pop music at its most basic. Above all, it fills out its theoretical groundwork – curiosities drawn directly from the Bible, as the work's subtitle states – with elements of musical theatre ("How To Get A Head", "Tent Peg In The Temple", "How To Get A Head"), symphonic grafts ("Cain And Abel", "Brigedroom Of Blood") and folk regurgitations ("God's Magic Finger", "Burn Baby Burn").

The core of the Residents' music has by now become a personal challenge, or a matter of honor: their artistic existence traded for an aseptic nonchalance, whatever the content under examination.

Wormwood Live (1999) and Roadworms (2000) are dreadful live records (the first recorded live, the second in the studio) stemming from the Wormwood tour, and they attest to the banality of this Residents "Era".

Icky Flix (2001), on CD and DVD, is another self-commemoration gathering music and clips from past years ("Kick A Picnic", the synthesis of Reich'N'Roll, and above all the few available fragments of "Vileness Fats", which reveal a strong involvement in the original film project, verging on kitsch).

The new millennium brings very little to their pioneering canon of applied technology; on the artistic front, the Residents limit themselves to producing generic music that does no justice to their masterful past. "High Horses" is the decade's suite, recorded on an EP just like "For Elsie" and "Pollex Christi", mimicking the structure of the great pieces of years gone by. More generally, the Residents' best (or most avant-garde) works of the '90s and 2000s are the least trumpeted ones; the underwhelming quality of music from theoretically advanced works (CD-ROMs, concept albums, video games, soundtracks), set against the more than respectable quality of genuinely accomplished works (the fantastical suite form of "Six Things"), shows that the whole question of applied technology is, in the end, merely a palliative.

Demons Dance Alone (2002) is a bland concept album that, for the first time, turns to face the surrounding reality. Whether due to the gravity of the event (the September 11 terrorist attacks) or the artistic fatigue of their recent output, the band partly sets aside the fantastical element to become a direct observer of the consequences of a terrible real-world event, reinterpreting or isolating a new historical period (the age of terrorism).

From an intellectual standpoint, the album is a failure; like the Twin Towers, the Residents monolith no longer exists, brought down by speculation about the theory of obscurity and hidden identity (by now tiresome). Structurally, the work shows signs of candor in the complex twists of the tracklist (which still favors the short format: "Mickey Macaroni", "My Brother Paul", and the irreverent fable of "Wolverines").

WB: RMX (2003) is a commemoration that this time takes the form of remixes of antiquated tapes ("Maggie's Farm", "Christmas Morning Foto", "Peace & Love", the controversial "Love Theme From A Major Motion Picture", the sacrilegious melody of "Sweat Meat", "Oh Mommy Oh Daddy", "Sell American", "Pie In The Sky"), but which often turns into pathetic self-pity worthy of an easy-listening band.

12 Days Of Brumalia (2004) is an album available via the web that exploits digital download possibilities to the fullest (while also mocking them): one downloadable song a day, starting from Christmas 2003, posted by the band itself (or what's left of it) until closing on Epiphany, for a total of thirteen tracks. "Day 6", "Day 8", "Day 5" and "Day 11", aside from the project's original oddness, its professional presentation, the sound quality now close to hi-fi, and the care put into the mixing (now practically the whole point), are worn-out copies of Babyfingers.

I Murdered Mommy (2004) is once again a soundtrack for an interactive CD-ROM that adds nothing to their canon of physiognomic desecration. The CD-ROM will never be made, but the fortuitous event is far removed from the cosmic satire of the "not available" stunt thirty years earlier: the CD containing the project's music matches chart pop, but the fact of belonging to an "obscure" band places it in an ambiguous limbo of pure and simple aurea mediocritas.

Animal Lover (2005) clocks in once again as a concept album (the world seen through animals' eyes, no longer through freaks'), where the musical content is a stale mix of melodic entertainment and monotonous song forms disguised as impertinent pranks (of dubious taste): "My Window", "Elmer's Song", "Two Lips". The Residents have finally taken the plunge and created the (artistic) monster they themselves feared at the outset.

With this work, the Residents close out the "Band Era" (a revival of the enthusiasm for live shows from the old "Live Era", as attested by the 2005 DVD 33rd Anniversary Show, though in no way original) to devote themselves to a "Storyteller Era" of pompous, macabre narratives in various forms (radio drama, strings of memorials, absurdist scripts), which at least has the merit of bringing them fully up to speed with new modes of audiovisual consumption (digital and online).

Within months there thus appear Timmy (2006), a cycle of microclips available via YouTube built around an animated character already seen on Have A Bad Day, River Of Crime (2006), a pseudo-radio series in five parts available via iTunes, Tweedles (2006), the only real album of the period, a mediocre collection of readings and their subsequent reworkings, centered on the childish visions of a single character (the opposite of the "Multimedia Era" of the 90s, and a very distant relative of the 80s' Trilogy, where a multitude of visions merged with a multitude of characters or paradoxical situations), Night Of The Hunters (2007), a sci-fi-psychology lecture on the emotional effects of darkness (a watered-down version of the theory of obscurity), and The Voice Of Midnight/The Sandman Waits (2007), a melodrama in one act and twelve scenes made in collaboration with Carla Fabrizio and Nolan Cook (also performers). This is certainly not where the Residents' flair for high art lies (and with it they also close out this latest "Era").

Cube E Box Set (2006) gathers onto a double CD the live project revisiting the American pop roots of twenty years earlier. The three volumes of the Best Left Unspoken series (between 2006 and 2007) collect all sorts of unreleased material (skippable) and rarities (precious).

In the end, even the reckless degenerations of the new millennium are part of the Residents' own brand of "not available"; their alien ragtag army from the early days simply turned in on itself, after having plundered the trappings of the Western civilization surrounding it, leaving scorched earth behind.

The same collaborators from the "Storyteller Era" thus put together Bunny Boy (Santa Dog, 2008), abandoning noir pretensions to try to deliver the definitive Commercial Album of the 2000s, but actually ending up sinking into a new pile of trivial banalities in the vein of Wormwood (the otherwise fine mini-operetta "The Bunny Boy" and the chaotic-minimalist scenarios of "I Killed Him", the bizarre "The Dark Man", but also "Pictures From a Little Girl", "Butcher Shop", and the pale imitation of Al Yankovic in "It Was Me"). While trying to balance hip-hop, spazz-punk, film music and cartoonish electronics, the album is a dismal assemblage of their own degenerations.

Their tendency to release any kind of pseudo-musical assemblage on the most puerile of pretexts shows no sign of stopping — if anything, it grows. Properly cataloguing their discography becomes, at this point, a tough job: Smell My Picture (2008) and Dollar General (2010), reserved for the fan club, The Ughs (2009), an instrumental-only revisiting of Night Of The Hunters, the new tour called Talking Light (2010) and also captured on Lonely Teenager (2011), the autobiographical fable Coochie Brake (2012), Mush-Room (2013), Ten Two Times (2013), Wonder of Weird (2014), the live album Shadowland (2015) from the related tour. In more recent times, the Residents have shamelessly exploited the Bandcamp digital platform for yet another flood of recordings, new or archival, remixes, remakes, live sets, etc.

Their self-celebratory obsession with Vileness Fats resurfaces incognito in the making of the film Double Trouble (2016), inspired by Fellini's Dolce Vita, Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, and Betty Boop cartoons. Another audiovisual piece from the period, Theory Of Obscurity (2016), directed by Don Hardy, retraces their history.

Presented as a rebirth after a period of chaos, The Ghost Of Hope (2017) — in fact their first proper album in nearly a decade of insignificant releases — comfortably falls back on their absurdist vaudeville and their old-fashioned concept (America's early railroads). The ingredients are roughly still those of the "Storyteller Era": from collages of sound effects to narration and sardonic rhyming recitations. While light years away from Eskimo, scenarios like "Horrors Of The Night" and "The Great Train Wreck Circus" recapture some of that universal tragicomedy. The mazurka of "Crash At Crush" is already more formulaic, and something about "Death Harvest" is rather crude, but you can still hear their legendary, unhealthy synth fanfares in "Shroud Of Flames". A record for anyone going through withdrawal from the more entertaining side of the Residents.

80 Aching Orphans (2017) is a quadruple anthology that also includes assorted rarities. I Am A Resident! (2018) is a collection of the best fan-made remixes, selected by the band from a worldwide open call. The W***** B*** Album (2018) collects tapes dating back to 1971, when they called themselves Sponateous Combustion.

Hardy Fox, one of the group's leading designers, perhaps their very mind, perhaps the group itself, passed away in 2018.

In the very year of his death he had finally begun releasing records under his own name, but none are worthy of the genius he showed with The Residents. Hardy Fox (2018), a collection of modest, amateurish electronic ditties, actually falls well below that standard. To return to his specialty - noxious vaudeville operettas - Fox turns to longtime collaborator Fred Frith for help, but A Day Hanging Dead Between Heaven And Earth (2018) sounds every bit as tasteless as The Residents' last few efforts. His knack for disjointed collage, primitive rhythms and a sickly, suspended narrative resurfaces instead in the brief concept piece Nachtzug (2018), and comes through even better across the 42 minutes of Rilla Contemplates Love (2018), though in an almost symphonic, marathon-length format: weighed down as it is by spoken-word passages, it stands as his definitive artistic testament. The two posthumous releases are complete opposites of one another. The 25-minute mini-album 25 Minus Minutes (2019) is a successful appendix to Rilla in the form of a pseudo radio drama, while Killing Time (2020) is a collection of mediocre library music.

The posthumous Intruders (2018), The Residents' last album with Fox, contains the tired, macabre horror nursery rhyme of "Bobbie's Burning Blues" and little else worth noting, further marred by an arrangement built around a horrible guitar and overly silly synthesizers ("Still Needy", "The Scarecrow"), on top of the usual vocalists from this late period.

B.S. (2019) contains a 14-minute "Very Long Suite", Eskimo Deconstructed (2019) collects the sound sources behind their masterpiece forty years after its release, while Music To Eat Bricks By (2019) offers up "crime jazz" leftovers from the River Of Crime period. The 15 minutes of The Healer And The Archer (2020) make up the soundtrack to a multimedia project with longtime collaborator Leigh Barbier.

The live album In Between Dreams (2019) and the singles collection Present Alvin Snow aka Dyin' Dog (2019) pave the way for the double album Metal Meat & Bone (2020), the first true Residents album without Fox, dedicated to the mysterious bluesman - a collection of crude absurdities ("Bury My Bone", "Pass For White", "Blood Stains"). Without its creator, the group, if anything, only deepens the vulgarization of its already overused clichés, losing even more of its reason for being.

Warning Uninc Live And Experimental Recordings 1971-1972 (2022) documents live and studio recordings from their early days.

The Residents scrape together more footage from "Vileness Fats" to flesh out yet another audiovisual project, Triple Trouble (2022). More archival releases follow: LS1 Sketches For A Live Show (2023) collects sketches for the never-realized tenth-anniversary tour (1982), Shadow Stories (2023) contains a mini-album of reworkings accompanying the "Shadowland" tour, and Eat Exuding Oinks (2024) reissues a radio special dating back to 1977.

Are Faceless (2025) documents a retrospective show held in Hamburg in 2023.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google