Includes 32 unreleased tracks, Instrumental version of Buckaroo Blues, and complete demos of the King and Eye album, alongside TV recordings, studio jams, throwaway instrumentals and, of course, the re-contextualising live recordings that remain so key to the band’s work. In the late 1980s The Residents embarked on what many fans still consider their greatest live project. Cube-E – The History Of American Music In 3 E-Z Pieces spanned almost four years and proposed to do nothing less than its title suggested, telling the story of American popular music, from its birth around the campfires of a non-existent Old West to its death at the hands of Elvis and the British Invasion, all in three easy pieces.
Performed on TV and on stage around the world between 1987 and 1990, the show saw The Residents fully embrace their loves of elaborate and imaginative staging, the latest in music technology and, of course, The King – Elvis Aaron Presley. It goes without saying that there was barely a dry seat in the house, and alongside live recordings and contemporaneous studio material this pREServed set includes the previously unreleased demos for the entire King and Eye album, which saw the group tackle twenty-something (you can count ’em!) of Mr. Swivel Hips’ hottest hits.
Spread across an inescapably unwieldy 7CDs at the group’s insistence, Cube-E pREServed is the final word in Americana cool. Or so it says here!
Remastered, expanded, and preserved for future generations, this is the latest in a series of archival Residents reissues that will continue throughout 2020 and beyond.