ORBITAL SURVEILLANCE The search for a missing brother is at the center of The Bunny Boy.

Photograph: courtesy of the Cryptic Corporation

Throughout a career spanning nearly 40 years, the Residents, a mysterious collective of anonymous avant-garde pranksters, have relied upon happy accidents as a creative tool. Across a lengthy string of albums and videos filled with eerily distorted pop melodies, singsong rhymes and unsettling images, the group has erected grand mythologies, launched ambitious projects only to abandon them, and at times allowed a zeal for new technologies to dilute the quality of their work. But even wayward paths have led to breakthroughs—and besides, what better way to keep fans guessing than to genuinely not know what you’re doing?

The Bunny Boy, the Residents’ current project, taps into its rabid fan base in an entirely new way. This latest fable is built around a nameless, hermitlike shut-in who searches via the Internet for his brother, Harvey (wink, nudge), who disappeared on the Greek island of Patmos. Part of the story is told through the songs on a new CD, issued on the group’s Santa Dog imprint. More of the saga is unfolding in a Web-video series, updated three times a week. An elaborate stage show, which comes to the Blender Theater at Gramercy this week during one of the Residents’ extremely rare tours, combines elements of both.

But there is still another component to The Bunny Boy: interactive participation. In the ninth episode of the video series, the rambling narrator flashed an e-mail address (wearedoomed666@gmail.com) and asked viewers to send clues regarding Harvey’s whereabouts. Fans immediately started posting their queries, along with the responses they received from the Bunny Boy himself, in a forum on the Residents’ website.

Those fans, according to the band’s longtime spokesman, Hardy Fox, were unwittingly playing a role in creating an open-ended work. This kind of real-time interaction, he explains, is actually serving to drive the story. “That was one of the reasons that it had to have such a long flow, because the series had to build momentum before you’d see the impact of what people start adding in the way of ideas,” he says. “They’re suggesting things without realizing that it might alter the course of the story.”

Judging by comments in the online forum, one subtext wasn’t lost on anyone: Patmos is the site of the Cave of the Apocalypse, where the apostle John received his biblical Revelation. Combined with the e-mail address, you have to wonder whether the Residents believe the end is near.

“I really don’t think so,” Fox says, gently chuckling. The core concept of The Bunny Boy, he reveals, is based on someone the Residents actually knew: “They’re being guided by someone who got very fixated on the Apocalypse,” he says. “This is sort of a fictionalized, stylized version of that.” At its heart, though, the sad, funny songs and curiously touching narratives of The Bunny Boy pursue a theme the Residents have been exploring since their fabled Mole Trilogy of the early ’80s: the loneliness of being different, and the vulnerability of reaching out to others.

“It relates in some ways to the Mole series, where the workers are coming out of the ground and going to the city,” Fox says. “That worked on the fact that the Residents were going out on tour for the first time, moving from the studio to being visible. And that’s happening again now. Where it’s going, I’m not sure.”

The Residents play the Blender Theater at Gramercy Thu 9–Sat 11.

Eye never! Where to begin with the Residents

The Third Reich ’n’ Roll (1976) The Residents’ third album recast chart-topping pop hits as fascist mind-control tools.
Eskimo (1979) This windswept conceptual masterpiece laments the destructive effect of consumerist exploitation.
Commercial Album (1980) These 40 pop songs, each 60 seconds in duration, find the Residents at their most approachable.
Wormwood: Curious Stories from the Bible (1998) Lurid tales of violence, mayhem and lust, freely but faithfully adapted.
Demons Dance Alone (2002) In coping with the shock of September 11, the Residents made their most humane disc.—SS