Talk:Eskimo
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Notes From Ralph
"Our long-time associate, The Mysterious N. Senada, has been residing for some time at the North Pole and living with the Eskimos. Recently, in the mail, N sent to the Residents a cassette tape comprised of various audibles connected with various cultural festivities, which are a very integral part of the Eskimo culture. It is upon this very concept that The Residents have set about to do their next album."
- Jay Clem, The Residents Radio Special, 1977
"The long promised Eskimo LP from the Residents has once again been delayed to an early fall release. Two and 1/2 years in production, this LP is promising to be a conceptual masterpiece, if they can just finish it."
- Buy Or Die! #3, February 1978
"The Mysterious N. Senada disappeared some time roundabout 1971, presumably to go to Greenland, where he believed some musical 'missing link' could be found among the Eskimos. The next The Residents heard from him was a postcard he sent from somewhere in North Greenland, followed by some tapes of Eskimo rites and Eskimo culture, which The Residents have been studying. In fact, their forthcoming album, which has been two years in the making and has no title yet, is referred to by The Residents as 'the Eskimo album'."
- Jay Clem, New Music Express, February 18th 1978
"Work on Eskimo had gotten so abstract that they could no longer find the key elements they were trying to capture in the recordings. Discovering that their protective isolation had turned into a prison which prevented the necessary balance between fantasy and reality that fuses creative direction, they had taken the Eskimo tapes to England and entrusted them to their friend Chris Cutler with instructions to hold them until they could "wash their ears out". Following a large number of adventures, The Residents returned to San Francisco and went straight to the studio and spent the entire night recording this new version of Santa Dog, which was their first record (it is included on this disk for those unfamiliar with this 1972 classic)."
- "Santa Dog '78" liner notes, December 1978
"Eskimo is definitely for '79. The Residents are eagerly at work on a new LP project."
[...] When Eskimo had run into one of its many problems back in late 1977, The Residents saw that the planned release date was impossible. They agreed to release two new EP discs - one for Spring and one for fall - in order to work more on Eskimo. So Duck Stab was introduced in February of '78."
"Eskimo, The Residents’ sixth LP represents their most challenging musical concepts to date. The album evokes an ageless Eskimo culture primitively struggling to exist in a cold and unforgiving reality. The various tracks on the disc are in the form of stories since spoken legends and adventures are a basic element of Eskimo life. The tales are told by the sounds of the Eskimo, their music, and their environment. There is no narration. Although the narratives are printed on the jacket to encourage the listen to project himself into this cold barren world of whiteness.
Ignoring the stories, the album is a moody piece of highly abstract music punctuated by primitive rhythms and vocals. Without doubt, Eskimo is one of the strangest, most original concepts available on record today.
At the time of this writing, Eskimo has not been released. Please check your enclosed order form to see if it is currently available."
- Buy Or Die! #4, February 1979
"If you've listened to Eskimo, it's practically not music at all, as far as I'm concerned it's an absolute masterpiece and maybe one of the most important records of the decade, I would say without a doubt it is."
"We make our instruments if we want a particular sound that isn't available. We'll make the instrument that makes the sound that we want. That's how come Eskimo took such a long time to record. Three years. The instruments and the technology we needed to record it just weren't available. We had to make up our instruments and lots of stuff to play what we visualized mentally."
- Snakefinger, Radio interview, 1979
"'Tapping your foot to wind' as stated by Penn Jillette really sums up this wildly innovative and potentially disastrous album. To even have this album described to you could only make you think that it is both highly pretentious and tediously boring. Certainly, many people found that to be true, but lots of people did see this as a work of great intelligence and imagination. It actually was a sizable hit when it was released and even charted in Greece."
- Big Brother, "Scars", The Last Word, 2008
"At some point in 1977, The Residents happened to stumble onto a review of their album, The Third Reich 'N' Roll, and the reviewer was joyously proclaiming, 'Kids today don't want to listen to music like The Residents make. There is no fun in it. You certainly can't dance to it.' That kind of pissed The Residents off, not so much because he said their music was no fun, but more because it implied that kids were complete idiots.
So The Residents set out to make an album of shorter, more fun tunes to prove to the world that it would be just as unpopular as their other recordings. So The Residents recorded Duck Stab.
However, when it came out in February of 1978, it was an instant smash. The kids ate it up, proving that The Residents were wrong yet again, and the pesky reviewer knew what he was talking about. The kids were idiots after all.
Duck Stab produced several instant classics. Hello Skinny, Constantinople, Bach is Dead, and Blue Rosebuds became anthems of Residents mania. The very reviewer who didn't take to earlier Residents works proclaimed, "Duck Stab lifts the country out of the slumber of the Seventies."
Even now, 30 long years later, Duck Stab is, to many people, the ultimate Residents album. The kids obviously grew into adult idiots. The Residents gave up trying to prove that catchy music would be unpopular and announced that next they would record an album of wind noises and grunting. Which is exactly what they did. But that is another story."
- Big Brother, BOG, 2008
"In 1979 "punk" music was all the rage. The Residents had gone though the punk stage three years earlier with the release of "Satisfaction" and were ready for anything that was not punk.
They decided it was a good time to make the jump into world music, since by their own calculations it would not become popular for several more years. They scanned the map for a proper culture to exploit and, not finding one, became discouraged until seeing a large Coke sign featuring Santa Claus. Immediately they realized they had overlooked the North Pole because it is made of ice and therefore didn't exist on their world map.
Immediately rushing out to a library, they gathered all the information they could find on Eskimos. What they found was a government-issued book on Eskimo sanitation, a book of Eskimo legends, and one scratchy record of someone hitting a drum and chanting. Not exactly the rich cultural vein they had hoped to mine.
But it was enough, for it set the Eyeballs spinning off into their own imaginary world of six-month nights, marimbas made of frozen fish, and Eskimo sex lives. For almost four years the ideas tumbled around. Sometimes they would feel elated at some new breakthrough, but usually they moaned that the album would not only make dreary listening, but be pretentious beyond belief.
But when it was finally released ESKIMO was a hit, both in sales and in reviews. Andy Gill of New Music Express said, "I'm not sure quite how to convey the magnitude of The Residents' achievement with Eskimo. What I am sure of is that it's without doubt one of the most important albums ever made, if not the most important, and that its implications are of such an unprecedentedly revolutionary nature that the weak-minded polemical posturing of purportedly 'political' bands are positively bourgeois by comparison.
He says this because the album tells the story, without relying upon words, of the assimilation of a ritualistic society into consumer culture. This story unfolds as Eskimo fables, a lived experience, set to the grinding of sound effects and music. It is a mind movie rich with detail. ESKIMO is, quite literally, a unique experience."
- Big Brother, BOG, 2008
"In the late '70s, I was in San Francisco working with Carla Bley, and that's where I met The Residents. They came to see one of our shows. After talking with them, I knew I had to get to know them better. Homer Flynn of The Cryptic Corporation invited me to come to The Residents' studio the next time I was in town. A few months later, I called to tell them I was in San Francisco, and asked if I could visit them. "Yes!" they all said. The place was amazing. Up above was a large walkway that wrapped around the room where they created and displayed the artwork. Recent album covers were there are well as several covers in the making. The art was incredible. So unique. Below and to the back was their studio which included an eight-track board, an eight-track tape recorder, and two Mellotrons - a keyboard with each key operating its own tape loop inside.
A few months later, I came back to San Francisco to work on the music for the film Apocalypse Now. I had my six cases of modular Moog with me. The Residents told me they were working on an album called Eskimo, and they asked if I could lay down some tracks. I did that, and they said it was perfect."
- Don Preston, A Sight For Sore Eyes, Vol. 1, 2022
Cosmichobo1 (Moderator) (talk) 15:30, February 18 2023
"Probably my favorite story, you know, the Eskimo album offered a whole lot of room for, shall we say, creative or imaginative sound effects. And you know, the first song on Eskimo is called "The Walrus Hunt", and so, you know, they're out there, the Eskimos supposedly, you know, are out in the water, and they're paddling, and The Residents got a big tub of water and filled it up and they started splashing their hands to create the sound of the paddles, but they finally get to the walrus, and you know, I think they came up with some kind of mythological harpoon that they would spin over their head, so they got something that they spun, you know, to create that sound effect. But when it came time for - bam! - something to hit the walrus and kill it, and they kept trying different things and nothing sounded right, and ultimately what it ended up being was a cardboard box... You know, he hit a cardboard box with his first or something like that, and he was like 'That's it! That's it!'"
"I have to say that the Eskimo album took place over four years, and the majority of that took place over the last six months. And you know, there's an expression, what is it... "a man's reach should always exceed his grasp", something like that, "you should always be reaching for something that you can't quite get". And ultimately, they had the concept for Eskimo early on, but you know, having the concept and the reality of actually doing stuff and taping it and bringing it to life was pretty challenging. And they were able to do a lot of little short pieces here and there, but it was only really during the last six months that they saw the process by which they could take those pieces and then add wind and add more sound effects or whatever, to then get the effect that they wanted for the story."
"The number of conversations that I've had about The Residents with my family I can almost count on one hand. I mean, I may say something about 'oh yeah, they're about to go on tour again', or whatever, but my brother who is five years younger than me, at one point, totally out of the blue, he said something about, 'you know, you know that Eskimo, I really like that!' And, like, I'm completely blindsided. He was talking about the t-shirt."
"During part of that time they were working on Vileness Fats, the Vileness Fats film, you know, they recorded Duck Stab! during a break in the Eskimo sessions..."
"There wasn't a deadline so much, you know, sometimes as you sense the finish line is coming, you know, you get this burst of energy... becomes a force of its own pulling you forward."
- Homer Flynn, Industry Tactics with Friendly Rich, "Ep. 145 - Homer Flynn", February 13th 2022
ImaginaryJacques (Admin) 💀 (talk) 10:01, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
"As far as The Residents go, it would be Eskimo that sold the most, and probably still, historically, I would say had sold the most. And at the time, it was... you know, it sold its first pressing, it sold its second pressing out, and its third, so... I mean, there was probably, in the course of three years, they probably sold between 80 and 105,000 copies of just Eskimo. Which is a hell of a lot, for an independent band. That would be the top."
- Tom Timony, "Ep 137: Ralph Records with Tom Timony", The Vinyl Guide, September 10th 2018
ImaginaryJacques (Admin) 💀 (talk) 17:01, 23 June 2023 (UTC)