The Making of a Soul

Eskimo is The Residents' most ambitious project — a suite of pieces intended to evoke the music and culture of Arctic peoples, though the band's approach was more conceptual than ethnographic. Released in 1979, it remains one of the more extraordinary things ever released on a record label.

The Making of a Soul demonstrates the Residents at their most ceremonial: slow percussion, voice processed into something between chant and incantation, textural sound that seems to come from a ritual context even though it was created by anonymous weirdos in masks in San Francisco.

Eskimo was recorded over several years and represents the band's most sustained concept. Its relationship to actual Inuit music is tangential; its relationship to music as cultural construction is central.