cryptic corporation
In the mid-1990s, many musical groups, artists and others experimented with sound and image connections. None got farther than the Residents, whose work is often classified with video gaming, but which often is described by users as interactive novel or interactive fiction. Recent experiments called Machinima (that is, machine-cinema) mix videogame engines with the artistic processes (particularly staging, camera work, dialogue and stage sets), and owe their parentage to the Residents' groundbreaking mix of music, ambient sound, and narration. Their live shows, with their two-feet-high identity-obscuring eyeball costumes, seem in some ways to presage Machinima. The Residents' experimentation is presented on two disks, their first less successful disk titled Freakshow and the second, with more plot and purpose, titled Bad Day on the Midway. As, at least nominally, a band first and multimedia collective second, The Residents are acutely attuned to the way sound creates the landscape of their virtual world, attentive to how and when objects should emit sound, and how and when characters should speak. In creating their world, The Residents are reformulating how our senses interpolate reality.
According to Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, the Residents actually began by making films. They converted their San Francisco row house into a studio where they shot video, made music, and later programmed their video game worlds. And it seemed at the time that the Residents lived in worlds of their own creation. According to Reynolds, the Residents created an effective media event out of specious claims to be at odds with their record company, Cryptic Corporation. The band claimed that the company was destroying their ability to work, while Cryptic Corporation claimed the Residents had run off with master tapes and refused to return them to the company for release. Reynolds explains:
This whole falling-out between Cryptic Corporation and the Residents was, of course, totally staged, a minature masterpiece of misinformation and hype. Although to this day the pretense is studiously maintained that Cryptic Corporation and the Residents are separate entities, at some point, the truth seeped out. The Residents and their "representatives" were in fact one and the same.
Bands in the Residents' wake have attempted to assert their anonymity: Kiss, Gwar, Gorillaz, The Dead Presidents all, to greater and lesser degrees, have asserted a certain facelessness to their audience.
The Residents started as filmakers. Visual world-building defined the group as multimedia artists, as worlding auteurs, who made money with music. Records were commodities purchased by fans before films. Music culd be purchased as pressed vinyl albums, cassette tapes, CDs, and now digital files before films became commercially available in the form of, first, VHS tapes, then DVD, and now digital files.
Here, again, the limits of the printed page restrict the ability to meaningfully describe the experience of both Freak Show or Bad Day on the Midway. Some have tried, with greater or lesser results, but more interesting than what they say about the immersive media system is what remains unsaid, and ineffable, in text.
