The Residents have been creating delightfully wacky music, performance and multimedia art in the Bay Area since 1969, making them as much of an institution as, say, the San Francisco Symphony or the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Throughout their boundless career, they’ve written spoken-word rock operas, created fictional universes, scored documentaries and helped popularize the art of the music video. And all the while, the members of the collective have remained mostly anonymous.
During the last several years, their album release schedule has remained as prolific as ever, and in 2020 they performed at the Museum of Modern Art. The subject matter? “A ruined evangelist and his twisted obsession with a pair of gender-fluid conjoined twins he claims are miracle workers,” according to the museum.
Their Sept. 17 performance at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco should be no less imaginative.