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Am I A Resident? The subject of this article contributed to the 2018 album I Am A Resident!. |
Frenesi Gates is the pseudonym of a Residents fan who is a creator and administrator of The Residents unofficial Facebook group. His name is based on a character from the novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon.
Gates has made a number of notable (and sometimes controversial) contributions to Residents fandom culture, having likely been the person chiefly responsible for the leak of a sequence of snippets of the group's unreleased early demos on the Internet around 2009.[1]
Gates contributed to I Am A Resident! in 2018, sending the group a cover of "Fire" and "Hitler Was A Vegetarian" which was ultimately mixed into the resulting album. He has since largely retired from the Residents fan community around 2019 although he does occasionally contribute.
Contributions to Residents fan culture[]
Gates' earliest notable contribution to The Residents' fan culture was in 2009, when he leaked a sequence of snippets from the group's previously unheard early demo tapes Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor and The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger via the file sharing program Soulseek. Gates claimed to have been sent the snippets (which are in notably higher quality than the low-quality mono versions of the demo tapes which leaked a few years later) by a "highly mysterious woman in Barcelona".[1]
The Cryptic Corporation's discovery of these leaks resulted in the closure of the Residents Lovers fan forum in 2010, and prompted then-President of The Cryptic Corporation Hardy Fox to issue a statement discouraging fans from hearing the material.[1] Gates met Fox in person some years later, and admitted responsibility for the leak. Gates has said that Fox hugged him and said he wasn't angry, just that he thought that the old material "wasn't very good", and sarcastically called Gates a "naughty boy".[2]
Gates created the unofficial Residents Facebook fan group in February 2018. The group has since become the most active discussion point for The Residents on Facebook, and arguably, the Internet as a whole, with frequent contributions from Residents associates and collaborators such as William Reinhardt, Margaret Swaton, Graeme Whifler, Nolan Cook and Richard Anderson, among several others. In the same year, Gates contributed a mash-up cover version of "Fire" and "Hitler Is A Vegetarian" to the group's collaborative project I Am A Resident!, which was featured on the completed album.
Gates met Homer Flynn, "Captain Doc" of The Cryptic Corporation in August 2018 at a reading and book signing of The Brick-Eaters. By the end of the year, Gates had largely retired from The Residents fan community, however continues to make occasional appearances in the group.
See also[]
External links and references[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "...I may have been the person responsible for leaking those snippets to Soulseek in like 2009... They came to me from a highly mysterious woman in Barcelona... The leak caused H.Fox to issue a statement... and a Residents forum was closed down as a result" - Frenesi Gates, The Residents Facebook group, April 26th 2018
- ↑ "When I met him he hugged me.. he said he was not 'mad' over the leak. He just thought that old stuff "wasn't very good"... Hardy also called me a 'naughty boy'. Very sarcastically lol" - Frenesi Gates, The Residents Facebook group, 26th April 2018