The stuff you listen to when you are not listening to unz, unz, unz thread

I cant listen to this unless its blaring. Otherwise you're defeating the purpose.

Always reminds me of fun times.

I've annoyed people on facebook about this album so I'll annoy you guys here as well.



These guys were true pioneers.

From Wikipedia:

Eskimo is an album by The Residents that was originally supposed to follow 1977's Fingerprince. However, due to many delays and arguments with management, it was not released until 1979. Upon release it was hailed as the group's best record to date.
The pieces on Eskimo are generally made up of sound effects, occasional playing on home-made instruments and gibberish standing in for actual Inuit. The stories were all created by the group and, despite their claims otherwise, is not meant to be a true historical document of life in the Arctic. Rather, it is a symbolic criticism of how Western culture dealt a deathblow to the religions and tribal customs of Native Americans.


From Head Heritage:


The Residents make concept albums, or as John Oswald puts it: ‘unified and inter-referential aggregates’. Don’t let this put you off, though. The Residents have been saving the concept album from its worst excesses of bombast and self-indulgence for over two decades now. Each Residents album is a ‘unified aggregate’ in that each starts from an idea which holds the 45 minute journey together. What is so significantly different about The Residents is that they use the initial idea as the springboard for some of the most perplexingly fascinating music you are ever likely to hear. The Residents’ world is a mischievous place where even their own heroes and influences are frequently unceremoniously slaughtered in cover versions of uncompromising oddness. The Residents also manage to avoid accusations of kookiness and weirdness-for-the-sake-of-it, by virtue of their apparent conviction that this music is not difficult. It’s actually normal, as long as you have Residential ears on. Resident ears don’t make the listener feel like a kook at all. They reveal instead a David Lynch-ian world inhabited by grotesques and simultaneously silly and frightening characters, events and emotions. Welcome to the sound of pop and rock music as heard through the filter of a severe ‘flu fever in a darkened room.

So, to ‘Eskimo’. The Residents are arch myth-makers, and of all their albums this one seems to have the greatest amount of myths and legendary stories attached to it. I won’t go into the foggy rumours here, as you can find out far more about this elsewhere. Suffice to say though, that one story has it that The Residents, in dispute with their record company, ran away to England with the master tapes of this recording, that they thought it was possibly pushing too far into pretentious territory and that it almost never saw the light of day. Thank goodness it did, as it’s my favourite Residents album, or at least the one I play most. Every winter it comes out to chill me to the bone with its ice-cold invocations.

Unlike most Residents albums this tells its story not song by song, but as one long tone poem. Although divided into six tracks, the album plays as a whole, and in the liner notes the listener is told that ‘Eskimo should be played in its entirety. A relaxed state of mind is essential’. Instead of relying on the music to tell the story, liner notes are provided, which the listener is encouraged to read along with the music.*

The whole album is an ethno-forgery of enormous proportions. Eno has said that this album was instrumental in the formulation of the general idea for ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’ in that he wanted to create a psychedelic vision of Africa in a way that, with this album, The Residents had evoked a psychedelic vision of the North Pole. The Residents are alleged to have constructed many of their own instruments for this recording which were supposedly tuned to Eskimo tunings (a definite nod to Harry Partch), and one of this album’s strengths is the difficulty of identifying the instruments being used.


From Android 666:


Seriously lads check this out, the album cover tells you to listen to this with headphones and a warm blanket and by the time you've finished listening to it you definitely need that blanket.