ANIMAL LOVER
PRESS RELEASE
The Residents' Animal Lover
"Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite
unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always
have to mix love and hate in their object-relations."
--
Sigmund Freud
When Charles Darwin first proposed in the late 1800's that
homo sapiens had evolved from and were in fact a species of
animal, many humans were horrified. Humans had an unusual
need to feel superior, something their fellow animal
associates had never quite understood. When Sigmund Freud a
few years later destroyed the accepted opposition between
sanity and madness by locating "normality" on a sliding
scale, the poor humans were even more shocked. Taking a
step beyond Darwin, Freud believed that the human was an
animal in conflict, and informing the human of that very
simple concept seemed to only increase the conflict.
In The Residents' Animal Lover, the creatures who don't
really mind if they are animals take an existential look at
the upright animal whose normality is sliding toward the
wrong end of the spectrum. The human beasts live in a world
of primal darkness, their heads forever stuck in the ground
like frightened ostriches living in a constant murky dream
state.
In creating this picture book of animal tales, The
Residents wanted to include a soundtrack that related
directly to "animal love." The result is an imaginative CD
whose rhythm tracks are based entirely on animal noise
mating patterns generated primarily by cicadas and frogs.
Also the actual sounds of mating whales and humans were
used for longer tonal passages. They weren't mating with
each other, by the way.
So the world is filled with tubular entities. Food goes in
one end and shit comes out the other. Sperm goes in one
hole, babies come out another. It's all we've got. That and
love.