UNCLE WILLIE'S HIGHLY OPINIONATED GUIDE TO THE RESIDENTS
The Residents, intent on not merely continuing to create a series of obscure musical albums, decided to undertake projects of greater scale and magnitude. The first such venture was The Mole Trilogy. This was designed to be a collection of six albums, three of the story and three of music. The story line followed two cultures through their ideological clash. The music albums were to document the two cultures’ music and then illustrate how it changed through the conflict of the two cultures together. Perhaps this was a bit ambitious. As of the publishing of this book, only parts 1, 2, and 4 have appeared. There has also been one spin-off album and a world tour based on this premise.
The Story So Far: The Mohelmot people live underground in the desert in gigantic ant-like colonies. They are primitive and superstitious. Music has a ritualistic purpose that supports their love of darkness and their belief in work. A quirky storm causes water to fill their holes and forces them to cross the desert to seek another land. On the coast they meet the jolly Chubs who seem eager to welcome the exotic “Moles.” Soon it is apparent that the welcome has more to do with cheap labor than true acceptance. The Chub culture as reflected through their music is superficial and pleasure oriented. Tension eventually mounts and a form of war breaks out between the two groups. As usual, war solves nothing. Time passes. The Mohelmot are forbidden to use their language due to deeply paranoid Chub fears. Racial intermarriage has created a new lifeform referred to as a “Cross.” A pop group of Cross youth named “The Big Bubble” creates a sensation by singing in the forbidden Mohelmot tongue. The singer is jailed and begins to see himself as the new Messiah of traditional “Zinkenites.” The Zinkenite wished to form a new Mohelmot nation. Truth be known, the singer is merely a naïve puppet of an aggressive Cross named Kula Bocca. In fact, Bocca arranged the arrest just to stir up trouble. The story abruptly ends, but there is plenty of basis for a dynamic conclusion, if The Residents ever get around to it.
Mark Of The Mole (RSD)
The Residents’ final work of their synthesizer era is Mark of the Mole, a terrifying electronic epic of a unique culture, the Mohelmot, who have been driven from their underground home by a massive storm. The unpublished novelization of Mark of the Mole by T.D. Wade brings much of the story into clear vision. In this extraction, Dydres, a young priestess of the Mohelmot race, tells the story of the Disposer and feels the first water drops of the impending disaster.
"Their way to the Melanatory took them near the idol of Disposer, tall and two-horned. The creature had somehow blundered into Havehome not long after Innisfree’s death. It was blind, probably ill, and panicked. For two or three nights it prowled the walkway and the tunnels, and whenever it smelled or heard a person, it would charge. Thirteen Mohelmot died on its terrible horns.
Eventually it worked its way to the floor of Echodrome. Many falls had left it bellowing with pain and rage. It was weak, but still dangerous. Dydres, although only a young woman, was then the highest acolyte, and had the confidence of the Melanatrix, Xecca. Though Darkness was silent to Xecca, he told Dydres that Disposer’s eyes, useless to it in the dark, were unsettling its mind. The Melanatrix asked for two volunteers with sharpened sticks to put out those eyes. One of them died, but so did Disposer, with crossed sticks hanging from its eyeholes like the protruberant meln-organs of Darkness himself. Alfray had suggested the sticks, though Dydres told the Melanatrix that Darkness had ordered their use.
Now Disposer’s bones were interred in its statue, which functioned to appease its soul. The statue also served to warn away the young or incautious from entering the Funeral Tunnel, a natural cavern whose treacherous paths lead to the Doomhole, a bottomless burial pit.
Before Dydres and Allasu reached the walls of the Melanatory, lightning had struck three more times. None of the flashes were any brighter than daylight Urxkanat, but the thunderclaps rung the mountain like a bell. People were retreating into their tunnels, as if they had lost all thought of work. The daily regimen was never interrupted except for the yearly Gathering to chant the Litanies.
Most of the twenty-seven acolytes were brave enough to come to the Melanatory. Within, it was quiet and dark. Dydres gathered them in a circle beneath the image of Darkness. They prayed with bare knees to rock, waiting for the words of Darkness to fill their empty minds. After a time the god told Dydres that the people were overly troubled by this test of faith. They should have a Gathering, right away, with chanting and with music.
Dydres raised her face to shen the image of Darkness. A drop of water suddenly hit her senozel, and she gave a cry, for she was as surprised as if lighting had struck her instead. The Melanatory was roofed, so Urxkanat could not intrude on the god or his worship. Furthermore, all the water in Havehome came, ultimately, from Kebol, a river running beneath the floor of Echodrome.
She gave quiet orders to the nearest acolyte, who was spattered by the next drop. The boy ran out the door and soon was back in.
“Melanatrix, water falls from above and runs down the outside of our temple!”
For a moment Dydres wished she had somehow told her people about thunderstorms and rain."
-T.D.Wade
Tunes Of Two Cities(RSD)
is essentially a prequel to Mark of the Mole. It consists of a dozen cuts: cultural samples, six from the Moles and six from the Chubs. The Residents alternate the pieces, cinematically intercutting the societies to pin down their characters and aspirations. And they do their work with an originality, a painstaking sense of detail, and an emotional wallop which makes Tunes, for me, their finest album.
The Mole cuts on Tunes are comparable to Eskimo, in that The Residents are again inventing the ritual music of a “primitive” society. Mole music embodies all the Residents’ reverence for tribal cultures, and to keep the soul from being eclipsed by the hardware, they use voices on all the Mole cuts. The voices are wordless and highly stylized. Sometimes the weirdness is melodic, but more often it is timbral: “Maze of Jigsaws” has a howling, animalistic chorus, and a low, rippling solo voice; at the end, that voice returns in a distant, ghostly reinvention that’s genuinely chilling.
Not surprisingly, Chub music is every bit a apocalyptic as Mole music. Chub music is pop, but by intercutting the two idioms, The Residents describe a commonality beyond musical structures. Mole music and Chub music are about the same thing, they serve the same purpose: the ritual exorcism of suffering. Almost all of the Chub cuts are covers of Big Band standards. So just as Mole music is an outgrowth of Eskimo, Chub music harkens back to The Third Reich ‘N’ Roll: Again, The Residents are trying to discern what’s hateful, dangerous, and fascistic in pop culture; what values it betrays about ourselves. But if Reich ‘N’ Roll seemed self-consciously methodical and pyrotechnic, Chub music has an almost documentary coherence, a found-object integrity, because of its detail and relative uniformity.
Tunes is quintessential Residents, opening new mine shafts into their humor, experimentation, allusiveness, elusiveness.... yet it’s also without a doubt their most accessible work. The expressive freedom of Mark of the Mole takes a quantum leap with Tunes, where the music wordlessly articulates the convictions that generated it. Role-playing and pyrotechnics, ordinarily The Residents’ defenses against emotion, here serve to realize emotion, and this music can speak to people as no other work of theirs has.
Tunes reminds me of Citizen Kane: an original, technically sophisticated achievement that’s more than accessible - it’s downright entertaining. No easy trick, for both works are obsessed with wealth, privilege, and power; nostalgia and loss; decadence and dissolution. And as long as I’ve gone this far, I’ll confess that I find them comparable in quality; Tunes is one of the triumphs of American Music, regardless of genre or era.
- Cole Gagne
Intermission(RSD)
The Big Bubble(RSD)
The most controversial band in Chubville has got to be The Big Bubble. But The Big Bubble has also proven to be a bit controversial right here on the planet Earth, even with Residents fans.
The package alone is worth discussing. It is the most conceptual cover The Residents have ever produced. The idea of having a “record jacket cover” on one’s record jacket cover is certainly unique. The Residents have done just that and taken it further by not only having the cover of The Big Bubble’s cover on their cover but also having The Big Bubble album back on their album back, The Big Bubble gatefold in their gatefold, and even The Big Bubble record label on their record label. The Residents even hired models to be on the cover of The Big Bubble album (which is therefore on The Residents cover by default).
The Residents have always been strange but this album is strange in a totally new way. It adopts the typically pop musical stance—guitars, keyboards, drums, and vocal—but twists the music into off-key anthems sung in a garbled non-language (though they call it Mohelmot). Assuming that one knows the story line behind the album (check “The Story So Far” elsewhere in the book) I guess it makes sense to record an album like this. However, it does seem that we should look at the album on its own basis—that is, to ignore any story.
One of the obvious first impressions is that the music is very nearly recorded live. Sure there may be overdubs and stuff, but the timing is so relentlessly unpredictable that it is certainly following the lead of the singer. My first impression was that it is not particularly memorable in its music; what stands out is the general force of maintaining such a dedicated emotional stance for the whole album. There is no doubt that they believe in what they are doing.
But it does grow on you, and pieces like “Cry for the Fire” and “Kula Bocca Says So” are as fine as anything they have written. The album carries such an emotional weight that it is difficult to analyze. It certainly makes one feel uncomfortable. Cole Gagne in his book, Sonic Transports, says, “The stuff you’re told to think of as unintelligible, amateurish, or even imbecilic can contain some profound surprises—but you have to stop living on borrowed ideas, and actually listen, if you’re ever going to spot them. And The Big Bubble contains some of the most amazing nuggets of beauty and humor and intelligence and feeling in the Residents’ music.”
But perhaps The Residents say it best.
“Sugar melts and goes away, Sugar melts and goes away, Sugar melts and goes away, but Vinegar lasts forever.”
- Uncle Willie
Out-Takes (Flac)ConcentratedBig Bubble Vocal ImprovisationsThe Try Out:
The Mark of The Mole recorded live in Santa Monica, California April 10, 1982.
From Assorted Secrets cassette A-side only and later released on CD.(2000)
10-Apr-82 Santa Monica USA The HouseMole Show DVD Bag Set (2009)
Edition of 400 numbered copies.
Comes packaged inside a burlap bag, with a miniature shovel & twelve 5.5" x 8.5" postcards, with backdrop drawings from the Mole Show.
Cd was recorded on 10-30-82 at the
JJJ 105.7 radio station in Sydney, Australia.
Dvd was recorded live at the
Kabuki Theater in San Francisco, California
Live at The Roxy(RSD)
This album is an "unofficial" condensation of two Mole Show concerts given by The Residents at the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles in October of 1983. The record has no label or catalog number - it was bootleged by an "inside source" at the shows, whose efforts were later discovered, but were not discouraged.
Ralph Records was later financially compensated, after discovering that the resulting album was being manufactured and sold.
The sound quality of the record is quite good, considering that the recording was made from a cassette tape of the two concerts. The front cover was taken from the European MOLE SHOW program; the back cover is a picture of a piece of the burlap screen which was used in all of the concerts.
COLLECTOR INFO:
1800 copies of THE LIVE MOLE SHOW were produced in total secrecy, and were sold by mail and through word of mouth. Later that year, Ralph Records came into possession of the master tapes, and manufactured the same recording as a picture disc, in a limited edition of 1500 copies.
(from the book "The Cryptic Guide To THE RESIDENTS", 1986)
The Mole Show VHS:
Just join again with
HJ Split/Other:
Part 1Part 2Euro Moles:
25-May-83 Vienna Austria Secession(Flac)
Recorded live at the european part of The Mole Show in Vienna, Austria on March 25, 1983.This is complete concert not the crappy LP vinyl version.
Live In Vienna 7"A1 The Residents - Smack Your Lips (Clap Your Teeth) 1:40
A2 TheResidents - Smack Your Lips (Clap Your Teeth) (backwards) 1:40
B1 The Residents & Penn Jillette - Another Land - Rumors 4:46
Live recording from March 25, 1983 in Vienna, Austria. Track A2 is track A1 played backwards.
28-May-83 Frankfurt Germany Volksbildungsheim (Flac)
29-May-83 Dusseldorf Germany Schumannsaal (Flac)
30-May-83 Berlin Germany Metropol (Flac)
2-Jun-83 Hamburg Germany Markthalle (Flac)
4-Jun-83 Utrecht Holland Muziekcentrum This Mole Show was presented by The Music Center, Utrecht, The Netherlands. Recorded by NOS for VPRO Radio.
7-Jun-83 Paris France Olympia 9-Jun-83 Zurich Switzerland Volkhaus (Flac)
The Third Secret Of Fatima LP
13-Jun-83 Milan Italy The Rolling Stone (Flac)
17-Jun-83 Barcelona Spain Salon Cibeles (Flac)
21-Jun-83 Madrid Spain Le Edad de Oro
First Broadcast, 1984 - TVE2
Rebroadcast July 8, 2006 - TVE 50 Years
Proshot - 82 minutes
Complete program, not edited. No setlist, no cover.
Some parts of this program are in spanish, with people talking about The Residents.
La Edad de Oro was a legendary TV program on the 2nd channel of the spanish public TV dedicated to the new tendencies of music, art, etc... These programs are now in the Public Library of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid (The same Museum of the Picasso´s Guernica masterpiece.)Thanx to kigonjiro over at Dimeadozen.org for the DVD Torrent.
Part1Part 2Part 3Part 4Part 5Just join again with HJ Split/Other.
Snippets From KoFotOoT:
The Secret Seed &
The Observer28-Jun-83 London England Hammersmith Odeon (Flac)
30-Jun-83 Edinburgh Scotland Queens Hall (Flac)
The Comix of Two Cities by Matt Howarth
In the early 1980s, Matt Howarth did a minicomic series entitled "The Comix of Two Cities", based on lifeforms created by the Residents in the band's "Mark of the Mole" trilogy of albums. In the late 1990s, these stories were reprinted as a comic book series.
Issue 1Issue 2Issue 3Issue 4Issue 5Issue 6
Mole Pix
