Story by Klam Meraffe
23-2-2005
   
   
  Toolbox:

Print this article
   
   
  More on: The Residents

Third Reich‘n’Roll
  Album Review - 28-9-2005
Gimme, gimme, gimme
  News - 20-9-2005
'Third Reich'n'Roll', encore
  News - 30-6-2005
Animal Lover
  Album Review - 29-3-2005
Brixton Academy, London
  Live Review - 12-3-2005
A flare for sinking artworld
  Interview - 17-11-2004
Commercial Album DVD
  Album Review - 26-10-2004
Taste of time
  Interview - 7-10-2004
Sonic tonic
  Interview - 26-8-2004
I, Resident
  News - 16-7-2004
   
The Residents: 'Animal Lover' in Feb.
Animal loving
‘Animal Lover’: beyond Darwin & Freud 'concept'

“Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object-relations." - Sigmund Freud

The Residents have announced details of a brand new album, their first for Mute, to be released on 28 March 2005. ‘Animal Lover’ follows the 25th Anniversary re-release of the ‘Commercial Album’ in the Autumn of 2004.

When Charles Darwin first proposed in the late 1800's that homo sapiens had evolved from and were in fact a species of animal, many humans were horrified. Humans had an unusual need to feel superior, something their fellow animal associates had never quite understood. When Sigmund Freud, a few years later, destroyed the accepted opposition between sanity and madness by locating "normality" on a sliding scale, the poor humans were even more shocked. Taking a step beyond Darwin, Freud believed that the human was an animal in conflict, and informing the human of that very simple concept seemed to only increase the conflict.

In The Residents' ‘Animal Lover’, the creatures who don't really mind if they are animals take an existential look at the upright animal whose normality is sliding toward the wrong end of the spectrum. The human beasts live in a world of primal darkness, their heads forever stuck in the ground like frightened ostriches living in a constant murky dream state.

In creating this picture book of animal tales, The Residents wanted to include a soundtrack that related directly to "animal love." The result is an imaginative CD whose rhythm tracks are based entirely on animal noise mating patterns generated primarily by cicadas and frogs. Also the actual sounds of mating whales and humans were used for longer tonal passages. They weren't mating with each other, by the way.

So the world is filled with tubular entities. Food goes in one end and shit comes out the other. Sperm goes in and babies come out. It's all we've got. That and love.


Klam Meraffe
23-2-2005


  Other News:

Hall of Fame and Broadway
  17-10-2005
'Idlewild' album gets a release date
  17-10-2005
More heavy dates
  17-10-2005
johnpeelsmusic.com
  14-10-2005
Cat Power's new album
  14-10-2005