Residents

The Residents could well be remembered as the “Lords of Darkness” of the early-70s rock landscape. It's there in their compositions (just listen to “Santa Dog”, the 1972 EP that was their unofficial debut, pressed in only a few hundred copies), in their image (four little men in tailcoats, horrifyingly masked with bloody human eyeballs), in their obsessive concealment of their real identities, and in their self-exclusion from the mainstream music circuits and its spotlights. On top of that, add the extension of this will to secrecy into a total, radical dimension: even the release of their third record, this “Not Available” — written and effectively completed in 1974, and sold precisely as ‘not available’, yet inexplicably not put on the market until 1978 — finds our heroes pulling off the stroke of genius that permanently projects them into the wondrous limbo of alternative rock bands steeped in fascinating enigma.

The opening cymbal crash hits the listener's ears as thunderous as it is unexpected, and seems to solemnly mark the beginning of some macabre ritual. The percussive carpet that follows announces itself as a complex, cubist pattern, with sound sources firing off along different perspective lines, immediately causing a first effect of acoustic-perceptual estrangement, while asphyxiated fanfares bluntly proclaim their own unhappy condition. The entrance of ghastly, sickly choirs increases the dissonance against the fanfares of death and against the orchestral whole, in a climate of dense, swampy unease. A sudden interruption then catapults us into a new scenario: a new, almost horror-film theme (and a new, mournful choir), again underscored by insistent, sickly percussion and by sobbing synth washes, leads into the first episode.

Strange as it may sound, all the material just described, already extraordinarily complex, was nothing more than an introduction — or, if you prefer, an exposition (in the most classic symphonic tradition) of the main themes. Now it's a nervous song from a desperate soul that takes hold of the reins of the game, making its way through omens of death and anguished melancholy, reworking the earlier catastrophic mood. It's almost a shift to a different physicality, achieved through a subtle game of acoustic manipulation. Almost like the symphonic development of a sonata's first movement, only pervaded by a perverse, anguished, inconsolable and perpetually unhappy taste. There is then an extraordinary break toward a Wagnerian echo, leading to yet another skeletal, livid fanfare, which preludes an imitative polyphony for the next choir. We have arrived at the moment of the Recapitulation, following sonata form, but the main themes are, needless to say, varied, deformed and redrawn. There are graceless soliloquies, counterpoints that attempt to bring touches of warm humanity, psalmodies of the cosmos's unhappy souls, right up to the slight accelerando that closes the piece. The two thematic cores, in this new outing, reappear in evident dichotomy, almost like a demoralizing, wearing struggle between two parallel yet opposing (existential) situations.

“The Making of a Soul” opens with an intro entrusted to the sax (over a backdrop of repeated piano notes and percussion — polyphonic, as usual). The sounds seem to come from different dimensions, mixed together, laid out on different planes, arranged in a surrealist manner, using a technique of spatial collage. It's an anti-heroic intro, one that could prelude a triumphant little march, but instead first introduces a wicked little choir, and then a dreamlike interlude entrusted to the piano. It's a phrase as soothing as the Lady in the Radiator from Lynch's “Eraserhead” could ever be; perhaps it is in fact a female character (and the Satie-esque slowdowns seem to underline this), but in this sort of musical of the damned, this is nothing more than a relatively lyrical little episode, which, rather than easing the tension, only causes further loss — as if that were even needed — of one's auditory bearings.

The march of the abyss resumes, while — announced peremptorily by piano and tubular bells in unison but in blatantly sinister dissonance, together with effects that seem to come from the center of the Earth — a new sardonic motif is introduced, a sort of Luciferian waltz, complete with a halting, garbled vocal. Everything then tends to dissolve into its own vacuity, into its own indefinite wandering, into its own errant floating within the acoustic spectrum: the voice grows muffled, as if suffocated by some unspecified supernatural entity, while the piano heightens the paranormal reverb effect, until the degeneration is complete. We find ourselves amid a sonic chaos that precludes any conventionally understood rationality, becoming a symphony for chaos and instruments, mumblings of disjointed litanies, recited with the last breath before total sleep. And the close rests on a chilling sustained chord and on a new, amorphous groaning.

“Ships A'going Down” is the adagio of this ideal symphony. The 'glacial' runs of horns at the opening are almost a pantheistic apology, taken up again by the brief spoken passage that kicks off a new fanfare of the darkest depravity and a tribal theme. In fact, one could say that every episode of this new, extraordinary piece is announced by the phonetic utterance of some damned soul, while the timbral blends whirl elemental (almost proto-minimal) rhythmic structures together with sinister repeated piano notes, which seem to hint at some melodic element, only to swallow it all back up again and continue compiling this anthology of disjointed fragments.

A new, sinister (anti)theme appears, laden with despair, over which a polyphonic choir is grafted — perhaps the Beach Boys of Dante's Malebolge — which seems to be sung by the chosen few gripped by a premonition of cosmic destruction. This is perhaps the most devastating and moving moment of the record, its peak, the masterpiece within the masterpiece. The whole thing is surrounded by a thick sonic fog that seems to strip the quality of the sound down to the bone, seeming to project images of innocence invisibly corrupted, unaware of the now irrevocable sentence of absolute ending.

The opening of “Never Known Questions” is shocking: clots of notes and sax laments (the most benevolent character, perhaps, the prophet, the wise man of the situation); a hymn of the absurd that takes on notably dark tones, steeped in dramatic sorrow, delivered with a skillful use of harmonic-tonal play. And at a certain point it almost seems to hint at the “Promenade” from Mussorgsky's “Pictures”, in a poor, timid attempt to recall beauty and a sense of charity, so definitively lost to the corruption of the modern age. A new tribal theme introduces a piano motif and background effects with a sharp cut. This is a record possessed of an internal tension bordering on collapse into devastation, precisely because it is perfect in every part: the lengths of the tracks say neither more nor less than what needs to be said, at times even forgoing developments normally considered customary. It is also in this play with the medium — rather than with expression — that the work becomes determined and purposeful, dry and precise. In terms of content, it's also interesting to note its almost neo-Bachian tonal instances, a will to propose a counter-summa on the harmonic ambitions of the original tempered tuning system. Every stylistic element carries a deep consistency, every instrumental or vocal entrance widens its scope until it upends the piece down to its most intimate essence. The dialogue unfolds between haphazardly scattered instruments and 'entities' of obscure origin (more than songs, they are the inner voices of a depraved humanity, perhaps the representation of evil itself). There are no protagonists, only characters more important than others; there are no conventionally understood artistic peaks, only extreme attempts at salvation.

A new piano interlude (a recurring actor throughout the record) makes it clear that the 'internal' division of these mini-suites takes on a meaning almost more important than the external division between one track and the next. An abrupt interruption gives way to a declaimed lament, soon joined by the rest of the funeral march of lost souls, in which the sax serves as an unmoved mover, an entity endowed with supernatural powers, a lord of the cosmos's fate. It seems that all malevolent forces dissolve and yield to compassion for the damned (through the establishment of some kind of melodicism, the only one in the whole work): it is the rare moment of consolation and pietas, though still shot through with the bitter, deep disillusionment of devastated minds.

“Epilogue” is the brief track that closes the record, and is in fact essentially a reprise of the first track. It's the implacable cyclical structure that offers no escape, reminding the universe of its decline toward the dark abyss of perdition. The main theme is less dialogic in this return, and is in fact far drier and sharper than in its initial exposition at the start of the record. Every means at the band's disposal is deployed to shift inert masses of sonic magma according to a precise, implacable whole. The quiet, feminine piano theme from the beginning returns once more, itself wishing to offer its own personal farewell before the catastrophe, its sweet goodnight in its almost childlike terribleness. But it offers nothing more than one last illusion: it is the end, the end of everything, as is underlined shortly after by the closing section, complete with a chilling harp glissando, the counterpart to the happy ending, sealing an absolute absence of hope.

An album of universal dissolution, of cosmic mourning. A long testament from initiates, from the chosen few who possess knowledge of the terrifying mystery of existence. A desolate prayer, a wasteland with no way out, disturbed by sardonic, almost sadistic sallies. We've stepped out of the flower-power era and into an age of second thoughts, and the Residents couldn't have found a better way to officially announce it. Seize this message while you can, because before long it really will be "no longer available."

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08/11/2006