Residents

Residents. Eyeballs. The icon of the underground; of the unconscious. The encounter with oneself. The abandonment: farewell to the Sixties. The "flower-power" dream gone to hell. America and the nightmare of Vietnam. Shreds of a collapse, and a cover, that of "Meet The Beatles", defaced, violated, "decoded": the symbol of a nothingness that gets definitively set in stone, but which…my God…still moves, within these cracks of sound coming from a locked room, far from everything and everyone.

Names chasing each other. Critics compete over them (it's their job, after all…): Captain Beefheart, Steve Reich, Frank Zappa, John Cage, Edgar Varése. And a certain phantom figure, Nicolas Senada: a theory of darkness, phonetic organization of sound, the brain as an electric circuit (which, therefore, would work better at low temperatures). Look around, there's plenty to sink your teeth into.

1972 – a bizarre double 7-inch hits the shops: "Santa Dog" (an anagram of…uh!…"Satan Dog"). A monster limited to 400 copies. Four tracks, each credited to a different composer and a different band. 1) "Fire": call it "swing", if you like; 2) "Lightning": the "Jingle Bells" theme on the verge of a nervous breakdown, with crooked, oblique horns; 3) "Expolosion": hysteria, adrenaline: a badly cut dose; 4) "Aircraft Damage": anarchy – vocal, musical, percussive. A completely deserted "arable land". No mirage in sight.

The myth grows, but to this day nobody knows the faces behind these madmen.

Shortly after, "Ralph Records" is born (their own independent label), while English guitarist Philip Lithnam (code name: Snakefinger) joins the entourage. We're only at the beginning, after all. About a year and a half spent gathering sound material of every kind. One eye on the world, one on the underground. One eye on the mainstream, one on the sewers. The editing: sonic, but also "mental", auditory. Everything the ears can take without being able to say enough. Tragic and grotesque. Where does noise end and melody begin?!? What is noise? What is melody? A tangle of questions (useless, and precisely for that reason, human…all too human…) and of genres that meet and clash; that sleep together and get dressed again without even saying goodbye. This isn't delirium. It's the music of the Residents. Take it up with them.

1974. The cover, first of all. Don't give it just a furtive glance. That's "Meet The Residents". Nothing else. The annihilation of one's own image passes through the (improper, distorted) appropriation of someone else's. And so, for that reason alone, it's a manifesto of otherness, a proclamation of "total" freedom, one that defines itself through the destruction of false myths and/or models.

Then there's the music. Dramatic, tragic, demented: a "total", cubist crossover of genres, blended, swallowed and regurgitated onto magnetic tape: carcasses tossed haphazardly into a corner. Like the first six tracks: a genuine suite, an "alien" agitprop synthesis, somewhere between pop(-ular) dysfunctions and terrifying industrial/iconoclastic anticipations of a certain new wave (though not only that…), antidepressants tucked in its pocket (it's up to you to track down the names…the ones with an actual face, that is…).

The opening "Boots" deconstructs (not by chance) the hit (another world is possible!) "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'" by Lee Hazlewood (considered one of the pioneers of studio sound manipulation…): a few fleeting moments, built on the contrast between out-of-focus horns, battered bass drums and deformed voices (the cyclical stupidity of the vocal duel between 'pa-bam pa-bam' and the refrain "walk all over you" is already a symptom of a "tabula rasa" that presses on, undeterred, even if eternally "in progress"…); deformed voices, I was saying, that flow – a river in flood dragging down sonic debris of every kind – into the sickly music-hall melody of "Numb Erone", slowing down mid-stride – amid the rubble of world music – which accentuates its mutant timbres, before the mechanical dance – complete with mongoloid declamation (yeah…the Devo!) and an Arabesque clarinet solo – of "Guylum Bardot", ready to hand the baton to female vocalizing, to the supersonic bursts of distorted/compressed/howling guitar and to the anemic trills of "Breath And Lenght". What the Residents are – consciously! – doing is manipulating the (fake) image of popular music…

"Consuelo's Departure" stitches together a micro-symphony for pills propelled amid piano stammering, synthetic modulations of aphasic automatons repeating their detachment from themselves and their truth (poor deluded things) about the concept of reality: declamation as the first symptom of a "devolution" that, in Devo, will bear juicy fruit…"pop-corn" ones (forgive the term…), but here is still a blazing warning sign of an often aseptic "dissonance"; of an uncertain wandering, among myriad sonic stars in a universe as private as it is, deep down, a mirror of an entire nation (of an entire civilization!) that in the age of decadence finds itself (my God!) on the edge of the abyss. Stupid humans… If only there were a God to remind us of it, every now and then!

At this point, one might risk being thrown off by the almost academic classicism of "Rest Aria", were it not for those wild interweavings of vibraphone and exotic fanfares that reshape the track's pseudo-"romanticism" à la Chopin around a thoroughly degenerate notion of the piano sonata. "Skratz", for its part, once again handles with care the tools of "lo-fi" synthesis drawn from multiple sound sources. In "Spotted Pinto Bean" — opened by a harpsichord and an "elusive", almost operatic choir (a balloon lost in the sky) — the Residents let the aforementioned meta-sonata slowly coagulate, with cascades of thread-thin chords, gratuitous cacophonies and counterpoints worthy of a ramshackle, out-of-tune little orchestra, permanently stationed on Broadway: against all odds.

A liquid guitar with a very Latin feel kicks off the cannibalistic growl of the vocalist (a Beefheart with less phlegm in his throat) on "Infant Tango", whose coordinates soon shift toward a paranoid funk, amid twang, wah-wah and an excess of unleashed, dissociated horns. This epic of desecration leads into the boundless nostalgia that introduces "Seasoned Greetings". Then comes an android flow (with "hammered" piano) that is slowed down to the point of collapse, amid metallophone, sudden pianistic surges, hermetic wisecracks, and fragments charged with an "abstract", "mathematical" and schizoid sax orbiting Anthony Braxton. The finale gives itself over to chaos, organized through imperfect overlaps of rattles, fainting horns and yet another declamatory parody. All of this, in short, serves as a prelude to the pianistic stomping (Dave Burrell would approve) and the shameless raspberries that push "Meet The Residents" toward the total, absolute disintegration of "N-ER-GEE (Crisis Blues)", launched into a boogie-woogie jagged with vocal loops, chemical offal, intermittent cymbal hiss: a lobotomized creature imploding on itself: a magnetic tape stabbed with knives, shriveled, forcibly torn from its path. You'll then be assailed by an idiotic little march, blasts of reeds resonating with the background silence, drumsticks played who knows where, standing in for percussion. And so it goes: a bass drum pounded more or less rhythmically — as if it were the primal root of some ritual — and a mad, puppet-like voice emerging from the chaos, devoid of pathos, shrill, obsessive: determined (against everyone and everything) to unmask the American dream, already shattered yet still paraded as the emblem of progress. And then comes the final invitation — almost ironic these days — "Go home America". Repeated into the void, after the wreckage and at the end of the ordeal, amid the darkness and cold of a San Francisco already projected into the existentialist cobwebs and self-destructive anxieties of the new wave.

Ride the wave of great music

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08/11/2006