The Residents, Eskimo, Tokyo Blue Note, Sept. 8, 2026
A revered ensemble of the alternative scene, the collective The Residents, formed in San Francisco in the early ’70s, incorporated various visual media into every album release from the outset. Homer Flynn, founding member of the group and spokesperson for their company Cryptic Corporation, pointed to how each decade resonated through conceptually distinct means. The Residents never performed live during the ’70s; each album was only ever played by them once, in the studio (1). Beyond the extraordinary graphic design for each cover and poster, videos made with the tools of the era accompanied releases such as Third Reich n’ Roll. Their theory of obscurity underscored this project of anonymity; the group’s members always appeared in masks and costumes, refusing to reveal their identities, urging the audience to focus on the performance. Flynn, responsible for the group’s graphic design across five decades, remains to this day the official face of the group.
The first samplers of the ’80s, the Emulators, allowed them to reproduce their sound textures and undertake a series of international tours, and whose use of theatricality made them a foundational influence that continues to this day, as seen in the Québécois duo Angine de Poitrine. They stopped performing live during the ’90s to focus on computer graphics and CD-ROMs — they released three, well received by critics — before resuming performances in the 2000s.
Eskimo, released in 1979, gathered genuine elements of Inuit folklore and approximate anthropological research, in the manner of ethnographic forgers (2). It already announced a postmodern dimension, a self-referentiality expanding the parameters of a strategy since refuted — cultural appropriation, parodied by the group. In 2025, the group, lucid and aware of possible misunderstandings, performed the album in its entirety onstage, adding two new pieces and a staging featuring the group’s frontman and three musicians in yeti-like costumes, this time favoring the narrative dimension and letting AI reveal the excesses of the ethnographic decoy.
In 2003, a DVD had already been released in which the chapters of the story were illustrated using images and archetypes — the igloo and the kayak, the walrus and the hunter. These had a bluish black-and-white texture. For this tour, nine clips were created by AI from the DVD’s images. One of them was made by John Sanborn, who went on to become an important collaborator of Homer Flynn’s, releasing a portrait of The Residents, The Eyes Scream, as early as 1991.
The animation also indulges in this homogeneity of an image owing something to both morphing and the slickness of 3D, producing immediately identifiable images that don’t hesitate to draw an almost perverse pleasure from this process.
The Residents demonstrate, right at the end, how this culture does not escape this tool — and how the polar bear, that other hunter once prowling the ice floes, feared by those in kayaks, became an emblem of Coca-Cola. A performance barely an hour long, without a single false note.
1 — An interview with Homer Flynn on the history of the relationship between The Residents and image technologies will appear later this fall.
2- And not unlike the compression of hurried inaccuracies in this short text.
Eskimo live setlist:
The Walrus Hunt (Abridged) —
Birth (Abridged) —
Arctic Hysteria (Abridged) —
The Tale of Two Tupilaqs (New song) —
The Angry Angakok (Abridged) —
A Spirit Steals a Child (Abridged) —
The Skeleton at the Bottom of the Sea (New song) —
The Festival of Death (Abridged) —
Diskomo (Abridged) —
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