The Residents have a long history of story-based music projects, starting with 1974's Not Available, continuing with God in 3 Persons in 1988, and more recently The River of Crime in 2006. With The Voice of Midnight, The Residents have now taken a bold step, crossing a line into the world of music theater.

For The Voice of Midnight, The Residents have adapted a short story, Der Sandmann, by Prussian writer E.T.A. Hoffman. The story was first published 190 years ago.

On the surface, Der Sandmann is a simple story of madness. However, it has been recognized as addressing the conflict between the age of reason and the romantic era by scholars who have studied the tale. It has been adapted, in parts, by Jacques Offenbach for his opera The Tales of Hoffman, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky for The Nutcracker Suite, and for the ballet Coppelia. Freud extensively interpreted Der Sandmann in his famous essay Das Unheimliche in 1919. Freud was fascinated by Hoffman's obsession with eyeballs.

The protagonist of the story is Nathaniel (Nate) who carries a deeply-seated fear that the childhood fable character, the sandman, is stalking him. The character of Nate is superbly performed by Corey Rosen who first worked with The Residents on River of Crime in 2006. Nate's fiance, Clair, a steadfast realist, is performed by Gerri Lawler who also worked on River of Crime as well as Tweedles. Long time Residents collaborator Carla Fabrizio performs the role of the other "woman," Olympia (who in the original story is a robot).

The Residents embody the other characters, and perform the music, assisted by soloist Nolan Cook, whose guitar work for the Residents over the last eight years is legendary.

Scene 1 - The Sandman
Scene 2 - Mental Decay
Scene 3 - Claire's Response
Scene 4 - In The Dark
Scene 5 - Professor Caligari
Scene 6 - The Telescope
Scene 7 - True Love
Scene 8 - Seven Cats
Scene 9 - Catatonia
Scene 10 - The Proposal
Scene 11 - The Tower
Scene 12 - Epilogue

E.T.A Hoffman & The Voice of Midnight
By R. Peterson Kane

Writing an intro is a thankless job. Especially when the recording artist is The Residents (no help from them), the subject matter is an obscure 19th century short story (written by an even more obscure Prussian writer), and the album has been described as "music theater" (no singles, lots of talking).

In addition, I've never been a huge fan of "concept" albums (or The Residents for that matter), but, if only because they seem so committed to the arcane and obscure, I've grudgingly come to admire the anonymous band's output. After all, their last album was about a sex addict who wishes he'd become a clown; I mean, come on, it's closer to The Sopranos than Sergeant Pepper. So I said okay, what's the story? And I was told, "Check out the Sandman... as in E.T.A. Hoffman's Sandman."

Dubious, I did a little research on the internet and looked him up. It turns out that Hoffman's pedigree, in terms of who he influenced and inspired, is pretty impressive. And I'll get to that later. But the really fascinating thing about this guy is that he was exactly what he wrote about. Now maybe that's true of any writer to some extent, but every writer doesn't dwell in the ugly gulf spanning the points between reality and OUT THERE.

Hoffman was an artist, both by talent and by temperament, but life seldom supported his artistic ambitions. Between the breakup of his parents' marriage when he was two, and a childhood spent with his grandmother, a religious fanatic, and his oddball Uncle Otto, Hoffman's early years were chaotic. He eventually succumbed to family pressure by entering law school at age 16. But the amazing thing is that, instead of dropping out like any normal artist, Hoffman actually succeeded, passing his final law exam at the age of 24. He then spent the rest of his life bouncing back and forth between the law and the arts, eventually succeeding at both, while ultimately enabling his own insanity in the process.

Hoffman's characters are noted for their vain attempts to tiptoe tightropes between the concrete and the vague; pulled in one direction by their peers and in another by their imaginations, Hoffman's protagonists inevitably lose their balance and fall, screaming and flailing, into the open maw of madness. Now this is obviously not unique territory for a writer, but what Hoffman brought to it was AUTHENTICITY; and not only the authenticity of his character's emotions, but also the essence, their damaged, unbalanced and sadly soiled souls - because they were him. The beauty of Hoffman's work is his uncanny ability to tap into the dark, fluid cesspool of a torn and twisted psyche and make it feel real.

In the early nineteenth century, Hoffman's literary landscape was virgin territory. Even though he died a paralyzed alcoholic, unappreciated in his own time, no one ultimately recognized his breakthrough more than other artists - except, of course, for the psychologists. One of Freud's best known essays, Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny - 1919), was based in part on Hoffman's Sandman, and Jung's theory of the archetypes was influenced by Hoffman's novel, Die Elixiere Des Teufels (The Devil's Elixir - 1815).

From a public perspective, Hoffman is perhaps even more obscure now than he was when he died. However, his writing, which didn't begin until he was almost 30, inspired Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens, Charles Baudelaire, and Franz Kafka, among others. Jacques Offenbach's masterpiece, the opera Les Contes d'Hoffman (The Tales of Hoffmann - 1880), was based on several of Hoffman's stories including Der Sandmann (1817); Hoffman, portrayed as a dreamy artist, is the central character of the piece. In addition, his story Nussknacker und Mausekonig (Nutcracker and Mouse King - 1816) was the basis for Tchaikovsky's beloved ballet, The Nutcracker (1892).

When The Residents decided to do an album based on the idea of dreams, they too were quickly drawn to E.T.A. Hoffmann. Sensing a certain kinship in the 19th century Prussian writer, the group unexpectedly discovered a fellow bearer of the eyeball, as it were. (Two notes: 1. Eyeballs play an important role in the story of the Sandman. 2. Freud says that eyeballs are symbols for male testicles.) But they felt the original story, taking place in the early 1800s, was too distant, so they set it in contemporary times and modernized many of the elements. The resulting CD, The Voice of Midnight (2007), remains amazingly true to Hoffman's nightmarish vision of a young man haunted by macabre memories from his youth, who tries but ultimately fails to escape the siren song of the Sandman.

When The Residents begin work on their 2007 opus to insanity, The Voice of Midnight, the group felt the need to shake things up. Internal forces were pulling them in different directions, with some feeling compelled to follow the purity of an intellectual approach, while others favored the immediacy and rawness of their emotions. Unable to reconcile these different needs within their traditional structure, the group came up with a novel solution, creating an alter ego through which they could act out new roles, consequently freeing themselves from previous perspectives.

The Residents then promptly christened this conceptual alter ego as THE UGHS!

Realizing that their new direction was not unlike the methodology of psychodrama, they immediately saw THE UGHS as the perfect vehicle for exploring the conflicted emotions of Nate, the Voice of MIdnight's tormented protagonist, and threw themselves into a feverish schedule, recording loose and spontaneous music night and day. Working backwards from this improvised beginning, The Residents then fashioned "written music" from the raw, impulsive ideas they had created. The entire musical structure of The Voice of Midnight was built on these pieces.

For the next two years these original Ughs recordings languished in a box containing various demos, rough ideas and backup files, until someone, in a moment of idle curiosity, put one in a CD player. One-by-one, everyone in the room began to listen. Hearing it with fresh ears, the music of THE UGHS, freed from its previous role supporting The Voice of Midnight's narrative, sounded as fresh and dynamic as it did when it was first recorded. The time had come to resurrect THE UGHS.

Falling in the direction of a ritualized, primitive free jazz, some will find THE UGHS startling and unpleasant, while others will appreciate the humanity and beauty underlying its rough surface. Regardless, no longer cloaked in the darkness of midnight, THE UGHS is unlike anything ever recorded by The Residents.

The Ughs
The Dancing Duck
Floating Down the Nile, Part 2
Squeaky Wheels
The Lonely Lotus
Rendering the Bacon
The Horns of Hanynesville
The Wondering Jew
Charlie Chan
In The Dark

An RSD download-only release, Voice-less Midnight is a companion to both The Voice of Midnight and The Ughs!

The original liner notes state:

A collection of the more-nearly-orchestral music from The Voice of Midnight. It is only about 34 minutes... much of the music from that album was covered by THE UGHS! already. Good opportunity to hear some of the compositions on the album since many complained about the talking on top of it.