Talk:Assorted Secrets

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Notes From Ralph

The Residents have been in San Francisco making records for about 12 years, but they've never performed until now. A couple of reasons behind that. There was a synthesizer invented called the Emulator, which was invented a couple of years ago and allowed The Residents to perform all of their music live. Until now, they had not been able to do that because the music is very difficult to do live. They had been very used to the studio.

- Nessie Lessons, Mole Show interview, 1983

Assorted Secrets is almost unique. That’s actually The Residents being a garage band. And they don’t like that album at all. They would like that album to disappear.

it’s very not in their studio perfectionist vein, and I never could figure out why they allowed it to be released. Because those are rehearsals for a show that never happened. Frankly, what happened is that this group of people [who was or was not a “Resident” at any given moment back then was a highly fluid concept] tried to recreate their records, and in my opinion failed miserably, and then around the time that we realized — or I realized, anyway — that we weren’t doing a very good job on this music, and that their fans were not going to like this, because it didn’t have any of the sophistication of the album versions, then they decided that they wanted to tour The Mole Show instead. Which was even harder. But, exactly at the right moment, those first digital audio samplers came along, and suddenly sounds that they had made in the studio could be taken on the road. This was pre-MIDI, so we had the usual stack of keyboards. You had to play everything live. But with the sampler, Hardy was able to figure out how to do a lot of the things that he had done on the albums. That was the only time I ever saw them excited about a piece of equipment.

- Philip Perkins, an anonymous musician on the album, 2021

Cosmichobo1 _(Admin) (talk) 17:04, February 18 2023