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DVD video |
| 5.169 Ft
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| 1. | Betty's Body
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| 2. | Mickey Macaroni
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| 3. | Wolverines
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| 4. | Mr. Wonderful
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| 5. | Caring
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| 6. | My Brother Paul
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| 7. | The Car Thief
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| 8. | Ms. Wonderful
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| 9. | Baha
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| 10. | From the Plans to Mexico
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| 11. | Golden Goat
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| 12. | The Shoe Salesman
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| 13. | Honey Bear
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| 14. | Life Would Be Wonderful
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| 15. | Neediness
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| 16. | Demons Dance Alone
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| 17. | Thundering Skies
Audio
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| 18. | The Weatherman
Audio
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| 19. | Beekeeper's Daughter
Audio
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| 20. | Ghost Child
Audio
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| 21. | Vampire
Audio
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| 22. | L'Oeil du Cyclone
Easter Egg
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| 23. | The Impossible Dream
Easter Egg
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The Residents
with guests:
N. Cook, C. Fabrizio, T. Dammit, M. Harvey, P. Benney
Sound: Julian Lauzzana, assisted by Isaac Peachin
Produced by The Cryptic Corporation - Directed by The Residents
The lighting design for the Demons Dance Alone tour was extreme. The stage was kept very dark.This made shooting video almost impossible. A solution was to flood the stage with IR (infared) light and shoot using night mode. The problem with IR light was that it made everything green. Also, it was grainy and lacked contrast. Perhaps worst of all, it revealed the set in a way that did not reflect the lighting design of the show. The IR lights saw into darkness and shadow, places where the audience was not intended to see.
All of these problems became the basis for the design of the DVD since it was inpossible to show the stage as it appeared in normal stage light. All of the footage, approximately 10 shows worth, was reprocessed by the computer to create color and contrast. Also, effects are used to bring definition to the images and to stylize the individual songs.
The multitrack recording for the surround mix was captured on three consecutive nights. However, only the last night’s recording was used as it was considered the best. Unfortunately, there was no video shot when the audio was recorded, and no audio when any of the video was recorded. The result was an illusion of picture and sound together that never existed. The "style" of the DVD allowed for black outs. These were necessary to bring the ever shifting sound and picture closer for the illusion of sync.
The Demon lights were powered by rechargable batteries. Each produced a light of 1,000,000 candlepower. The batteries drained rather quickly so about a dozen identical lights were used in one show.
Many things in the show were not part of the original script. For example the script did not call for the Demon to play trumpet, but when dancer, Paul Benney, was hired for the show, he confessed to having played trumpet in his high school band. When The Residents heard this they responded by saying that he must play trumpet in the show. Paul said, "I don't play very well". The Residents said, "terrific!"
The Demons Dance Alone DVD documents the Residents' 2002 tour of the same name, but as with all things Residential, they bring their own special warped aesthetic to the table and push creative boundaries as they have done for 30 years now. As Residents tours go, this one was pretty stripped-down, and there were problems with documenting it from a technical perspective. If they shot with standard video techniques, the lighting required for a decent picture was something less than flattering to the sets and costumes. The decision was then made to shoot with night-vision technology, which yields an image colored with various shades of green. Their solution was to utilize the night-vision footage, but using computers, they enhance the contrast and add colors, while also editing still shots and other footage into the mix. The visual effect of the video ties in nicely with the Demons Dance Alone concept, as the songs were written in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the costumes of the lead singers were camouflage tuxedos, so elements of this video are highly reminiscent of night-vision news footage that accompanied George W. Bush's wars, almost like some weird war telethon. It's this type of constant innovation and high concept that kept the Residents at the forefront of experimental and avant-garde rock for three decades now. But there was also something very different about this tour. It began with longtime face of the Cryptic Corporation, Hardy Fox, personally greeting attendees as they entered the venues. The music was still obviously that of the Residents, but they were getting more and more accessible musically as the millennium turned over. Perhaps the most startling element of the show was the genuine rapport the musicians seemed to enjoy with the audience. In the past, their complete anonymity acted almost as a wall between audience and performer, but on the Demons Dance Alone tour this wall all but disappeared. Oh, they're still completely anonymous, but they treat their audience to actual personal details about the lead singer's life in Louisiana, and a thought-provoking encounter with James Brown. Just prior to that, there are a couple verses that refer specifically to their bizarre career and lack of commercial success, as well as describing themselves as "aging hippies." This type of self-referencing/acknowledgment was completely unheard of up to this point in their long career, and almost seemed to be a genuine gesture of affection to an audience they must be grateful to. And the curtain call somehow reinforced this connection to the audience; it was a strange, wonderful, and somehow touching close to the show.
Without a doubt, the Residents are not for everyone. There is no escaping the fact, though, that this group is comprised of creative geniuses who have proved it over and over again in a 30-plus-year career. They may have softened their impact over time, but not their creativity. Long live the Residents. ~ Sean Westergaard, All Music Guide
Residents
Active Decades: '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s
Born: 1966 in Shreveport, LA
Genre: Rock
Styles: Avant-Garde, Experimental, Post-Punk, No Wave, Mixed Media
Over the course of a recording career spanning several decades, the Residents remained a riddle of Sphinx-like proportions; cloaking their lives and music in a haze of willful obscurity, the band's members never identified themselves by name, always appearing in public in disguise -- usually tuxedos, top hats and giant eyeball masks -- and refusing to grant media interviews. Drawing inspiration from the likes of fellow innovators including Harry Partch, Sun Ra, and Captain Beefheart, the Residents channeled the breadth of American music into their idiosyncratic, satiric vision, their mercurial blend of electronics, distortion, avant-jazz, classical symphonies and gratingly nasal vocals reinterpreting everyone from John Philip Sousa to James Brown while simultaneously expanding the boundaries of theatrical performance and multimedia interaction.
It was commonly accepted that the four-member group emigrated to San Francisco, CA, from Shreveport, LA, at some point in the early '70s. According to longtime group spokesman Jay Clem -- one member of the so-called Cryptic Corporation, the band's representative body -- they received their name when Warner Bros. mailed back their anonymous demo tape, addressed simply "for the attention of residents." Finding no takers for their oddball sounds, the Residents founded their own label, Ralph Records, for the purposes of issuing their 1972 debut "Santa Dog," released in a pressing of 300 copies which were mailed out to luminaries from Frank Zappa to President Richard Nixon. Their debut full-length, 1974's Meet the Residents, reportedly sold fewer than 50 copies before the group was threatened with a lawsuit from Capitol Records over its cover, a twisted Dadaesque parody of the art to Meet the Beatles.
The follow-up, 1974's neo-classical excursion Not Available, was recorded with the intention of its music remaining unissued; locked in cold storage upon its completion, only a 1978 contractual obligation resulted in its eventual release. Released in 1976, Third Reich 'n' Roll was the next official offering, a collection of pop oldies covers presented in a controversial jacket portraying Adolf Hitler clutching an enormous carrot. After a 1976 concert in Berkeley, CA which cloaked the Residents behind an opaque screen, wrapped up like mummies -- the most famous of only three live performances mounted during their first decade of existence -- they issued an abrasive 1977 cover of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," which became an underground hit on both sides of the Atlantic at the peak of the punk movement. As the decade drew to a close, the group released a flurry of recordings, further building upon their growing cult following -- among them were 1977's Duck Stab/Buster & Glen; 1979's Eskimo (purportedly a collection of native Arctic chants); and 1980's Commercial Album, a compilation of 40 one-minute "pop songs" that aired on San Francisco radio only because the Residents played them during the advertising time they bought.
In 1981 the Residents embarked upon their Mole Trilogy, a prog rock collection of albums -- 1981's The Mark of the Mole, 1982's The Tunes of Two Cities, and 1985's The Big Bubble -- recounting an epic battle between a pair of tribes named the Moles and the Chubs; a lavish, multimedia tour, The Mole Show, followed. In the interim, the group also mounted another ambitious project, the American Composer series, although only two of the projected titles -- 1984's George and James (a reinterpretation of songs by George Gershwin and James Brown) and 1986's Stars and Hank Forever (celebrating John Philip Sousa and Hank Williams) -- ever appeared. Instead, in the wake of financial and corporate difficulties which resulted in the creation of a New Ralph label, the Residents issued the one-off God in Three Persons (a talking blues outing), and 1989's The King and Eye (a reinterpretation of Elvis Presley standards).
After losing control of the Ralph label as well as their back catalog, the Residents regained the rights to their music in 1990 and began reissuing long out of print material as well as the new Freak Show, a meditation on circus sideshows and carnival dementia. Four years later, Freak Show was reissued as a CD-ROM, marking the group's first leap into the new digital interactive technology; Have a Bad Day followed in 1996, and included the soundtrack to the CD-ROM game Bad Day on the Midway.
In 1997, the band celebrated their silver anniversary with the release of the career-spanning overview Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Huddled Masses. Wormwood: Curious Stories from the Bible followed the next year, with Roadworms (songs from Wormwood as performed in the stage show) being issued in mid-2000. They followed that up with the Icky Flix DVD, an incredibly detailed collection of their videos that featured both old and new soundtracks, 5.1 digital stereo Surround Sound, countless hidden videos, and in-depth histories of each individual track. A subsequent tour incorporated the DVD, while guest singer Molly Harvey joined the band on-stage for some truly creative duets. Several high concept projects followed the 2002 compilation Petting Zoo. The first was Demons Dance Alone, a complicated pop album that recalled the catchier material from Duck Stab and The Commercial Album. The live retrospective Kettles of Fish on the Outskirts of Town contained three CDs and a DVD. Despite the release of so much old content, new material wasn't in short supply. Their releases throughout the latter end of the 2000s' first decade included Animal Lover (2005), Tweedles! (2006), The River of Crime (2006), The Voice of Midnight (2007), The Bunny Boy (2008), The Ughs! (2009), and Ten Little Piggies (a sneak peak at projects in the pipeline, released in 2009). Much of it, of course, was highly conceptual.
---Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide |
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