Ever the innovators, the music world'''s favorite recluses, the Residents, will try a little musical theatre on for size. For the album The Voice of Midnight, due in stores on November 20, they of the giant eyeballs have adapted Der Sandmann, a 190 year-old short story by Prussian writer E.T.A. Hoffman. This ''"simple story of madness''" has been interpreted several times by Jacques Offenbach (who was obsessed with eyeballs) for his opera The Tales of Hoffman, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky for The Nutcracker Suite, the ballet Coppelia and by good old Sigmund Freud. Scholars have found the story to be a study of the conflict between the age of reason and the Romantic era. Not sure what age we have entered into lately, but clearly it is at odds with reason.
Artist: http://www.residents.com/