For her new dance performance, Grace Ellen Barkey (Needcompany) of course needed some music, and so she called up the ever-mysterious group The Residents. And what was even better, this avant-garde San Francisco collective answered! Perhaps not entirely surprisingly, the result is an intriguing and occasionally bonkers soundtrack that declares war on everything melancholy. You can expect dark percussion, peculiar string instruments (once in a while we thought for a moment that Ryuichi Sakamoto had a new dealer), meticulously dosed electronics, well-planned hysteria and – as is often the case with The Residents – tracks that are anything but pop, yet sound strikingly pop-like. In a word, MUSH-ROOM is an exceptional disc that stands up well even without the accompanying dance performance.