HUNTERS
THE WORLD OF PREDATORS AND PREY
Album
| Hunters Prelude |
 |
In 1993, a Discovery Channel production team commissioned a score from the Residents for the channel's forthcoming documentary series, Hunters: The World of Predators and Prey. The Residents composed ten hours of music for ten one-hour episodes, and recorded and produced it throughout much of 1993-94. The show premiered on Discovery in late 1994 with the CD coming close on its heels in January 1995.
Interestingly, Hunters was the first CD since Fingerprince in 1977 that listed the Residents, not the Cryptic Corporation, as producer.
Only this hour of the ten recorded has seen the light of day on CD, with one exception: an extended version of "Hunters Prelude" was released as part of RalphAmerica's MP3 promotion in 1999 and 2000, and was included on the subsequent dot.com collection.
RATING: 7
Folks, you'll never believe this, but what we got here is an ambient Residents album. You can't review ambient albums. They're insubstantial, unmelodic, lacking in hooks or resolution—and that's their whole POINT. What the Hell am I supposed to do with that? Ah, well...I'll give it a go.
To tell the truth, I like Hunters better and better every time I hear it. There are strange bits and pieces that grow on you out of nowhere after 22 listens. This started out as a 6, at this writing is a 7, and may well be an 8 by the time you read it. I don't know how those Residents do it.
Oh. Maybe I do. Part of it is their brilliance at putting sound textures together, even on synthesizer. "Gamelan gongs go here, over the hand drums but under the weird fake horns, and there we'll put the mock-orchestral accents and the freak-out noises." It's an art and a science that these guys have long since mastered.
But the other part is something they've also mastered, but most fans don't notice through all the weirdness: subtlety. It's a question of knowing what to understate; just try that drum fill in "Tooth and Claw," the one that sounds like drumstick-and-trashcan-lid, and see how great it sounds turned so far down! But they also know how to minimize the whole thing and work only on atmosphere: that's how we get grand tracks like "Rulers of the Deep" and "The Crawling Kingdom."
What'll really catch you off-guard is the percussion. The rest of this music, though a departure has THE RESIDENTS written all over it anyway. The drums on Hunters are news to me: synthed hand-drums are everywhere, for one thing, sometimes sounding very eerie. And what's with that subdued cling-clang, like on "Track of the Cat?" I had no idea the group could do this kind of creeping quiet, really. I like it.
So I'm taken aback by Hunters, but the emphasis is on "taken." Vote "YES" on more spooky Residential ambient music.