My relationship with The Residents has always been a little difficult to explain.
 

I first saw The Residents perform when I was thirteen years old, and I can say without exaggeration that the experience reset the trajectory of my life.
 

So the idea that, decades later, I would somehow find myself inside their peculiar universe still feels completely improbable.
 

My first connection with The Residents was unknown to me but apparently not to them. Back in the ’90s, I self-produced two album-length collections of songs and, based on nothing but gut instinct and a need for validation, sent them unsolicited to Ralph Records. I received absolutely nothing in response.
 

Years later, I unexpectedly received an invitation to perform with The Residents at their 50th Anniversary Secret Show. When I questioned the motivation behind such a sudden and surprising offer, Homer Flynn, The Residents’ spokesperson, told me they had listened to my unsolicited tapes many times over the years and thought the Secret Show would be a perfect place to finally connect.
 

Apparently, I could be trusted. I was subsequently asked to remix their track “Duck Sauce” for a special limited-edition release.
 

Then, in April 2025, a thumb drive arrived in the mail from The Residents. The contents seemed less like an album and more like an archaeological site: fragments of music, voices, rhythms, noises, unfinished ideas, and pieces of recordings ranging from brand new to possibly more than forty years old.
 

There was no obvious roadmap. I was given an enormous collection of musical artifacts and, essentially, the freedom to make sense of them.
 

I began excavating.
 

I sampled original musical passages and vocal fragments, pulled phrases out of recordings made decades apart, reorganized ideas, built structures around things that had never quite become songs, and gradually began molding these pieces into something resembling an album.

Eventually, I sent everything back.
 

There was no grand post-production meeting. No series of notes. No lengthy conversation about what we had created. IEventually, I sent everything back to The Residents. What happened on their end remained, appropriately, their business.
 

Eskimo Folk Tales contains pieces of The Residents’ past, but make no mistake: this is new music. Is it a sequel to Eskimo? A prequel? I HAVEN'T A CLUE. What exactly are these songs about? I can’t answer that either. My role was to bring some cohesion and structure to the madness of assembled memories, scraps, ghosts, folk tales, new technology and forty-plus years of accumulated Residents mythology. I also made sure Hardy Fox’s ARP Odyssey made one more appearance on a Residents recording, just as it had on the original Eskimo.
 

For someone whose life was redirected by seeing The Residents at thirteen, there is something beautifully circular about being handed pieces of their history all these years later and being asked to help determine what happened to those pieces next.
 

My job was simply to listen carefully to what was buried there, organize the evidence, and try not to disturb the bodies.

Ego Plum
Co-Producer, Eskimo Folk Tales