Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats?

The Residents have spent fifty years refusing to be known. Emerging from Shreveport, Louisiana and relocating to San Francisco in the early 1970s, the anonymous collective built one of the most bizarre and extensive catalogs in American music: avant-garde, comedy, horror, and genuine unsettlement, often in the same track.

Vileness Fats was an unfinished film project from the early 1970s, released in edited form in 1984 with this soundtrack. The music is characteristically disorienting — atonal, rhythmically unstable, punctuated by sounds from what seems like a damaged dream. The sound of people who took the avant-garde completely seriously and also found it very funny.

The Residents remain active, touring with elaborate theatrical productions, maintaining their anonymity across a career spanning half a century. There is no one like them.