With two discs released and a third on the way, The Residents is both the most prolific band experimenting with interactive music on CD-ROM and among the most interesting. The band's latest release, The Gingerbread Man, is an "expanded audio" disc featuring 11 new songs; it's playable both in CD-ROM drives and on ordinary CD players. The interactive elements are amusing but fairly limited.
Like The Residents's first interactive effort, Freak Show, this new one is structured around profiles of strange, alienated characters. Nine tormented souls, such as The Confused Transsexual and The Sold-Out Artist, are found lurking behind an abstract screen of twitching eyes. The Aging Musician, a former star who now spends his days watching TV alone, wonders, "Maybe if I put a bullet through my brain/They'll remember me like Kurt Cobain."
The disc's unifying thread is a running gingerbread man who appears in recurring animated montages. The famous uncatchable children's book character symbolizes the elusiveness of human happiness.
Each video song begins and ends with non-interactive sequences of QuickTime movies and graphics. For a few minutes in the middle, you can manipulate the graphics and audio, using the keyboard to create surreal collages. Certain keys swap complex tiled backgrounds on the screen, send pithy strings of text and weird graphics wandering about, and add audio snippets of characters bitterly mumbling about their wasted lives. If you choose not to interact, these amusing effects alternate randomly.
It's not always clear when you're in an interactive mode. A flashing cursor on screen is usually a sign, but sometimes it's busy morphing into The Residents's trademark eyeball and top hat.
Some key information can be found in the manual, but only after plowing through several pages of pretentious nonsense coyly belaboring the band members' anonymity.
After a while, the graphics become mostly a distraction, and interacting with them a chore. Fortunately, once you get tired of playing collage artist, you can put the disc in your audio player. Gingerbread Man is the most approachable and haunting music from The Residents in years.
The Residents's The Gingerbread Man: US$49.95. ION: +1 (415) 455 1466, e-mail ion@eworld.com.
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