Articoli e interviste, solo su TBIG

"THE ODD SQUAD
welcome to the weird world of The Mars Volta

It's a grey, rainy January day in New Haven, Connecticut, but aboard The Mars Volta's tour bus, the black-clad, big-haired, double-barrel named creative core duo of studio wizard Omar Rodriquez-Lopez and vocal acrobat Cedric Bixler-Zavala, are all well coloured and animation.
"We're all so happy to be on the road and around each other again," grins Omar. "It's been eight months, the longest in our history of touring musicians we've ever been off the road."
But before they get swept away by the travel itineraries and sound checks in support of their fourthcoming fourth album The Bedlam In Goliath, we spent some time delving into the weird, wonderful and, at times, dark and disturbing world of The Mars Volta....

GIBBERISH
Omar: "That's at the top of our list. A lot of Cedric's takes that I like are his very first impressions, when he doesn't even know what he's trying to get at, then he goes back and writes lyrics to the gibberish, he just lets his subconcious speak completely. When I write songs I don't sit down and go, "How can I write a song? How can it be in a strange time signature?". I sit down and I feel something and write it. When I teach it to the musicians later they go, "you know this is in 7/10?" and I go, "oh, that's interesting. Cool. Let's play it"."

THE AFTERLIFE
Ced: There's part two. Deffinately. This is probably part one. We were in contact with the equivalent of three people rolled into one and it was a male voice that would constantly speak over the female voices. The female voices were hoping we would have the guts to tell people about it. The main core of the [albums] story is an honour killing- something happened to the point where when they all died, their spirits went into the solitary confinement of this board, and that's who we made contact with."
Omar: "We know what we went through and through and it was very real to us. We can accept other theories that it was subconcious and we made our own connections, but we know what we experienced and nothing can take that away from us."

BODDIES
Ced: "The guitar player from the white stripes [Jack White] said, "they're always singnig about body parts. What's up with these guys?". I didn't realise, but we kind of do! I'm not happy with the way I look and my body. I think everyone can identify with that. Everyone has their parts that they hide or try and change. Even with us having curley hair, once you're around people with straight hair, sometimes you want what you don't have."

HISPANIC CULTURE
Omar: "It influenced everything. It's our background, it's our roots so everything it filtered through it, in a negative and positive way. Whether it be the positive side- our music, our attatchment to our culture, our language- or it be us trying to escape our language and face our Americanism and the fact we've been Americanised. We hear our own people making fun of us because of the way we look, saying, "Look at these fucking faggots, look at these faries", I go, "Dude, I speak Spanish, I know what you are saying"."

RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS
Ced: "They're the older brothers we grew up watching on TV and listening to sometimes. Then we got to meet them and understood that they were like our older brothers, but the coolest kind of older brothers that were in on shit that you know you were in on as well. In 1989 there was no other band mentioning Funkadelic and The Germs in one breath. People have to remember those cats had their picture taken by Andy Warhol, it's how deep in history they are. You can't just write them off because they make pop music now!"

RELIGION
Ced: "Religion can bring about a complete state of solitary confinement for everybody, in which we lose all touch and interaction with each other. I'd hate for the world to live the way people live in Afghanistan, or have something like the Taliban exist. It's our Gestapo with different clothing. When ther are societies that outlaw playing marbles, or listening to cassettes, or fucking walking outside with a miniskirt on, it's as though that one place that is the birthplace of humanity still thinks the world is flat and didn't have the oppertunity to get modern.
"We have people in the United States trying to implement the concept of 'intelligent design' into our daily curricula. What the fuck are they thinking? And what's with planned parenthood being an extension of eugenics? They're trying to control the ugly people from reproducing because they want a pure master race."

INSECURITY
Ced: "I'm defintely insecure. I'm definitely not the confident musician. I have my bad nights. It's embarrassing sometimes to hear myself sing- I just don't like the sound of my own voice. Onstage we are two different people from the people you are talking to now. Onstage we can act the way that would probably get you thrown in jail in regular life. So it's like being able to take on this alter ego, to be somebody else. I could probably talk to girls easier if I was the kind of person I am onstage!"

Q&A With Cedric Bixler-Zavala of The Mars Volta
Wed Jan 23, 2008 at 06:41:23 AM


At one point during the following interview, conducted for a profile of the Mars Volta that appears in the January 24 Westword, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, the band’s vocalist, lyricist and frontman, casually mentions his “old habits” with “drug use.” After perusing the entire Q&A, readers will understand precisely what he means, since the conversation is every bit as hallucinatory as primo peyote.

The main topic is The Bedlam in Goliath, the act’s latest disc. Bixler-Zavala talks about what inspired it in a rush of imagery emblematic of the group’s over-the-top post-prog jams, touching on a visit to the Holy Land by guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, a Ouija-type board that was allegedly possessed by multiple spirits, terrified translators, messages from beyond the grave, a murder that echoes across time, the 2004 assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the uses of bear mace, hereditary foot problems, and an insane engineer who tried to take the album hostage. Once that trip ends, Bixler-Zavala launches more, hashing over the positive aspects of paranoia, record-company battles and the relative dearth of creativity in today’s rock scene prior to a guest appearance by Powdered Toast Man.

What kind of powder is it? No one knows for certain – but I’ve got a guess.

Westword (Michael Roberts): Tell me the story behind the new album.

Cedric Bixler-Zavala: Right after Amputechture, Omar took a trip to Jerusalem. I don’t know why he went there. Out of the two of us, he has that spontaneous traveling bug. I think there was a spiritual calling for him to see things like that: see the birthplace of Jesus and all of that kind of stuff. Film a lot of stuff and record a lot of stuff – a lot of field recordings that we can use in our albums. So he went over there and he stumbled upon the Jewish quarters, the Muslim quarters and whatnot. And then he found this flea market, and he was singled out by this street vendor there. The street vendor took him aside to a shop that was situated away from the flea market, and the shop sold lots of I guess you could call curio objects: taxidermy kind of candle holders, different amulets, different kind of jewelry. Stuff that would be considered blasphemous in that area. He singled Omar and saw that there might be some kind of spark of interest, so he showed him the shop, and in the shop, Omar stumbled across this antique talking board. In American terms, it’s called a Ouija board, even that “Ouija” is not an American word. I think it’s either French or German. Omar just knew I would love something like that.

Having the old habits that I do with drug use, it became my new drug. It became a private sort of drug that only Omar and I would play. And pretty much playing that thing was when we had all our drummer problems and everything kind of went to shit for our last album. We didn’t get to tour that much on it because of all the problems, all the bad luck from it. That’s when it started, and the more and more I played it, the more and more I wrote everything down that it was saying, and the more and more I was excited by it, because I was having such a dry spell for inspiration. And, of course, a lot of people can comment and say it probably just is me writing this stuff down. But it’s an exercise in opening up portals in the back of the head – not so immediately in front. And so I wrote all this stuff down and I think as an example, all the bad luck was happening to my friends around me.

The more I played it, the more I realized it wasn’t the average kind of children’s game, really. I discovered poetry attached to it underneath the decal of the design of the top of it, and I had it translated. The first person quit – didn’t want to have anything to do with it. The second person, this woman, she stayed on and translated it for us. Some of it was Hebrew, some of it was in Aramaic, some of it was in Latin. She stayed on because I think she realized the content of the story was a lot stronger than what we realized – and she never really explained it to us. She just kind of looked at us like, “I think you’ll figure it out in time.” And now that we’ve had the bio written, the bio is sort of like the worm on the hook to get people come and dig into what the story is. But once you actually bite on the worm, you realize that there’s this stronger story. And the story, in my opinion, the way I read it, is about this honor killing – the kind of honor killing that happened quite frequently in the Middle East among Muslims. And it’s the spirit that contacted us that’s called Goliath, and it’s a combination of a male voice and two female voices, and the male voice doing what it does best in organized religion, which is talk over and suppress the voice of the female, what she’s trying to say. Essentially, it’s the sprit that realized we are antennas, and apart from being antennas, we have a somewhat large audience that’s going to listen to what we have to say, and that’s why I’m here talking to you about it now, and that’s why we have microphones and other media to explain about this stuff.

The last time something like this was talked about was when Van Gogh’s distant cousin was making this cinema – this Dutch guy. He was making this movie essentially about honor killings, and within months of making this movie, he was found murdered with a knife through his heart, literally stabbed in the chest with a note that pretty much said, “Don’t fuck with Muslims.” For us, it’s somewhat telling us, “No, don’t talk about this,” and we’ve dressed it up in some very unbelievable clothing. So it’s your job to be private investigators and explain to people that this happened. Things like The Exorcist are based on true stories, even though it’s not a woman, it’s not a girl. It’s a young boy, and he was outside the Georgetown area. They’re all based on true things that happened. It’s just culturally how you’re brought up. That has a big impact on whether you’d believe a story like that. I talk to most white people: They laugh at me and say, “Great. That’s a great cover story. It’s a great way of getting people interested.” I talk to anyone of Latin persuasion and the first thing they say is, “What the fuck were you thinking of? Here are some remedies. Here you go.”

WW: Were you at all trepidatious to go into this territory. After all, the Van Gogh story you mentioned had a tragic conclusion.

CBZ: Right. If anything, it’s like in Apocalypse Now where he says, “Don’t get off the boat,” you know? I’ll stay in van. If anybody wants to fuck with me there, I’ll have a nice big can of bear mace for them (laughs).

WW: Did you play with Ouija boards when you were a kid?

CBZ: I had a cousin who did, and he got deathly ill from it. That has had a lasting impression. Some of the urban myths are, don’t allow young teenage girls to play it, because they are easily susceptible to the power of suggestion, which to me is a big load of crap. It just adds to the myth of it, you know?

WW: You mentioned bad things that had happened to you guys during this period, and I’ve heard that included foot problems for you. What kind?

CBZ: I have this problem that’s hereditary, but it was really aggravated by the touring, the live show, which is directly linked to playing the board. Some people can say it’s me using heightened paranoia as a story, but I’m still having problems with it today, and I’m still trying to figure out how I can perform like I used to, which has changed a little. But the biggest problem was losing our engineer to a nervous breakdown. We had to hire people to physically take our tapes from him. It was like Dog Day Afternoon. He took over his house, didn’t allow anybody in there. He was freaking out, arguing with us, and we were like the cops trying to convince him to come out and let the hostages go.

WW: Were the hostages in this case the recordings?

CBZ: The recordings, the tapes, the original demos, a lot of which didn’t make it – that were damaged in the whole struggle. A lot of it, I had to convince Omar to keep going on and don’t start over, because that would have pushed us back two years or so.

WW: How long did this incident with the engineer go on?

CBZ: It was a couple weeks. When I came to New York to start doing my regular vocals, not just demoing, he didn’t get on the plane. And I remember getting out of my hotel and seeing Omar fuming up and down the parking lot, screaming at him: “You can’t fucking do this to me, John!” He came back to me and said, “He’s lost his fucking mind! He’s not making any sense.” And I just kind of giggled because I thought, okay, this is someone trying to put another obstacle in front of our band. And every time they put an obstacle in front of us, we’re like, I’m going to eat this obstacle alive, and once I eat it, the outcome will be even greater than what you feared.

WW: You mentioned paranoia earlier, and obviously paranoia can have negative effects. But can it also fuel creativity? Can it cause you to go to places you might not have gone to otherwise?

CBZ: Yeah, I believe that. Paranoia can be such a powerful hallucinogen if you’re not careful – but it’s great to kind of recognize it as that. Sometimes it’s great to not recognize it as that, because I think you kill the actual signal, and then you’re left with having to come up with stuff on your own (laughs) – with it being obviously from you. In this case, I don’t believe it was from me, but I do believe it used me as an antenna. I believe it used me as a bullhorn.

WW: Was the bullhorn used primarily for the lyrical content? Or did it translate to the music and the melodies?

CBZ: The music was there first. It was lyrically speaking. It’s the fact that I wrote down everything that came from there and used it. It’s like transcribing a conversation between a hit man and the person paying the hit man. Not everyone wants it to be documented, and that’s the way it felt.

WW: When you first put the lyrics together, was there a frightening aspect to it as well as an exciting aspect?

CBZ: Oh yeah. That’s the fun part – the taboo of it. The more you’re not supposed to do something, the more you do it. And then you start wearing it out and do it all the time. That’s what it was.

WW: Is there a corollary to that for the band as a whole? Do you see the Mars Volta as doing things that other performers don’t think should be done?

CBZ: Completely. We’ve lost a whole big bunch of people who were fans of our band because this album doesn’t do thirty minute songs and this album doesn’t sound like Francis [the Mute] and this album doesn’t sound like the first record. But that’s what we learned from punk rock: compulsive gambling. It’s going to a hardcore show and seeing Flipper and not understanding why Flipper sounds like they’re on Quaaludes and all the other bands sound like they’re on speed. That’s inspiring. It’s inspiring to see Black Flag looking like Vietnamese farmers with big beards and those kind of Vietnamese farming hats showing up at a Mohawk-mania club in England and being spat at because they don’t sound or look like Exploited; they sound more like Black Sabbath than Black Flag. I love that. I think it’s great. Andy Kaufman is a prime example of people who twenty years later realizing that was the joke in and of itself – that they were so pissed off at him.

WW: It surprises me that your fans are having problems with the new material. I would think anyone who’d like your band would also like adventure – and adventure is all about change. Does the backlash surprise you, too?

CBZ: No, because I think it’s one thing to say you’re adventurous and it’s another thing to actually do it. That’s why there’s all these bands that are recreating OK Computer. Radiohead doesn’t want to recreate OK Computer, so you have all these mediocre either soccer-mom versions of it or metal versions of it, so it can appeal to young people. Because young people didn’t gravitate toward or understand things like Amnesiac or Kid A, which I think are phenomenal – and one of the reasons I do is because they don’t sound like OK Computer. It sounds like music of the future. It’s the sound of a band shedding its skin every time there’s a new record to be made. I wish more bands would do that. Then we’d have less bands like Coldplay and Travis trying to rip off the most digestible parts of Radiohead – selling it back to people who are dumb enough to think it’s something new or interesting. A lot of people who’ve said they’d follow us with blind faith, they really don’t. They’re hoping we’d recreate our first two albums again, which is just boring. That’s suicide more than it is murder. I’m not going to give a fan the benefit of a suicide. I’m paying too much attention to them. We’ve never been a jukebox and we’ve never been the kind of DJ who takes requests.

WW: With the state of the record industry right now, I’d think there might be people at your label who’d like you to recreate your first two albums as well. Has there been any pressure along those lines? Or have they given you complete creative rein to do what you want to do?

CBZ: They’ve given us complete creative rein, but at the same time, that’s the kind of rein that doesn’t allow certain songs to be on the radio that I think would be great on the radio, because I think you need a kind of song that makes you have a double-take or make you scratch your head in the middle of traffic because it’s the sign of the future coming. But that’s not where the label is at (laughs). It’s actually just paying us so that we can make music that is this creatively unrestricted. That’s the hardest thing, because we’ve had such bad luck in the past, and sometimes we’ve just walked away from interviews – and they see it as us being troublemakers. But if you work in the rock industry, you should realize that the most important bands are the troublemakers.

WW: Is there an example of a song on the new album that you wanted out there on the radio and they objected?

CBZ: Yeah, there’s a song called “Ilyena” that I just thought was catchy to me, and it showcased a new sound for us. It didn’t have this obvious Led Zeppelin sound, and there’s certain bands that can just completely ape that nowadays. I wanted to show the fact that we could grow and we weren’t just some Floyd thing, some retro act. The song “Ilyena” really showcased to me what was a giant leap into future music for us. I wanted that to be on there, but it’s like six minutes, and to edit it would be to butcher the real intent of it. I thought that was the catchiest one, but what do I know.

WW: Six minutes doesn’t sound very excessive to me…

CBZ: I know! Some of our conversations in life are fifteen minutes long, you know. I’d hate to think that the stereotypical American is someone who just says “Hi – bye” in conversation. That’s how Europeans see us. And I’d like to think that not all of us are like that. If I do meet someone and I ask them how it’s going, and they are having a shitty day and their dog has died, I do want to know about it. I want to know humanity. I don’t want fast-food culture in my interactions with people.

WW: Speaking of interactions, I know that you guys did a New Year’s show were the audience was encouraged to come in costume. What were some of the most notable costumes – and were there any soothsayers among them?

CBZ: No, no – none of that. We wanted to do that to show that we have a lighter side now (laughs) – because we’ve been through all that darkness. My favorite costume was Powdered Toast Man, which is from Ren & Stimpy. I don’t know how they pulled that off, but they did. That was pretty phenomenal. It was just nice to open my eyes and see an audience that was reminiscent of the spirit of Zappa’s audience, which didn’t need a flyer to tell them it was costume only. Those fans were just nuts, and I love that element. I love walking down the street and someone telling me, “It’s not Halloween,” and I can say back to them, “Yes it is – because every day’s Halloween for me, my friend.”

OOR (February 2008)

...Omar Rodriguez-Lopez on The Bedlam In Goliath

On this record it's chaos starting at the very first second. Intentional change or a normal way to work?
I'm getting a little tired of myself. Yes, we used to work with intro's gave the album a easy build up. I wanted to stop that way of working rigorously. I wanted to escape from the things we normaly did, wich felt comfortable. So we hit it from the immediate start.

Maybe it sounds like a cliché, but this record really needs a few listens before you understand it all. Your most difficult record till today.
You call it a cliché, but it ís true. This kind of music asks for attention and effort. And that's exactly what I want it to be. The most records and movies wich I find awesome are like that too. And just like my most dear friendships en most important relations wich I've had. Those all have grown little by little and with that I never knew what to expect from the start. Such a friendship forms after multiple talks. Most of the time even the musicians on the record didn't knew what was happening. I chose to record it all very fragmentary. I've composed hundreds of pieces, wich I let the musicians record each seperatly, without them knowing in what songcontext they would be. Even Cedric [Bixler-Zavala, singer] didn't knew wich direction it all was going. When everything was recorded, everybody heard the whole thing. Wich was for many kind of a surprise.

Central theme on The Bedlam In Goliath is a fortune-telling-board wich you've bought in Jeruzalem and wich you believe brought many disaster. What happened?
After I've bought it we messed around with it. You can ask questions to that thing through some kind of game and you get answers too. But those answers soon got instructions and the board got a hold on us. From that moment many things happened. My studio flooded a few times, I've lost three laptops and four technicians, the electricity dropped off on the strangest places, Cedric got some serious trouble with his foot and I could get on with this. Let me tell you we are all spiritual people, with a background of metaphysical faith. We really believe in this kind of disaster, while some would tell us: ah, it's all coincidence. Knowing we are religious people it's maybe even more stupid to play with that device. We deserve it to burn our fingers. Now that board is burried somewhere deep under ground, but to get rid of all the bad spirits around us, it seemed to be the best to make a complete record about it. That's why everything sometimes sound over the top and agressive.

You've lived in Amsterdam for a year. Did you inspire
(note by Spookrijden: This question got lost by printing the magazine.)

In the meanwhile you're working on the next Mars Volta album and there are multiple soloreleases on schedule. There is still enough music in Omar Rodriguez?
For sure! For the next year I've planned eight new solorecords. The only other one musician I know that worked like this, is John Frusciante. Wich you, by the way, can hear on the new album. Anyway, I get enough to tell. Although my present mood is kinda mellow. My next writings won't be as crazy as Bedlam.

by NIELS GUNS

The Mars Volta Embrace the Absurd

The Mars Volta's new record was inspired by a Ouija board of sorts, according to founding members and shot-callers, guitarist/songsmith/producer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and vocalist/lyricist Cedric Bixler-Zavala. And while the story may sound like a bit of a stretch to those grounded in the pragmatism of Western culture, the two insist that the concept behind their latest effort, The Bedlam in Goliath, is in earnest — one might even say reverent fear. Zero was afforded the opportunity to chat with Bixler-Zavala in late January and probe his psyche to find out just what the Volta and the new album are all about.

A Portrait of the Artists…

Born in Redwood City, Calif., a suburb located on the peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose, Bixler-Zavala moved to El Paso, Texas, where his father, a Stanford graduate, had been offered a bilingual education teaching job with the University of Texas. It was in the late '80s in El Paso that Bixler-Zavala met Puerto Rican-born Rodriguez-Lopez, and the seeds were sown for what would become At the Drive-In and later The Mars Volta. Rodriguez-Lopez's father, a psychiatrist, had relocated the family from their native island to the West Texas town, where Bixler-Zavala explained there was a community of Puerto Ricans already in residence. The two met while in separate punk bands playing shows in the area.

"Everybody else in El Paso wanted to be in The Stone Roses, Jane's Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and we were really into The Germs and stuff, and we had really obnoxious rowdy punk bands," Bixler-Zavala said of his and Rodriguez-Lopez's early musical careers. He added that before the formation of At the Drive-In he and Rodriguez-Lopez hung out a lot because "we liked the fact that we weren't trying to be … all that kind of stuff that was really popular."
It would seem that this sentiment, above all other strange, metaphysical musings of the Volta, which is the core driving force of the group. They wish to push the envelope. Rodriguez-Lopez was quoted Jan. 15 in an online post to Volta forum, www.thecomatorium.com, as saying, "If there's a philosophy to The Mars Volta, it's that you have to gamble everything all the time." Bixler-Zavala seconded this assertion.

"In my opinion," he said, "I constantly want to reinvent the pop format — not like happy pop — but, like, pop music, which is the verse, the chorus, the bridge, the out, all that kind of stuff. If we can challenge people and make it so that in the future it won't be so weird for a Venetian Snares kind of approach for a chorus, which would be, like, information overload. If we could do that, we can move forward, I think. The more you move forward, people in the future will be able to make music and fuck with it and not have to worry about whether or not someone can identify what a chorus is. To me, it's identifying whether a song moves you or not. If it doesn't move you, then it doesn't move you."
It was in this vein that Bixler-Zavala said the band chose San Francisco for their New Year's Eve blowout — a show where the band played for well over three hours — as a tribute to one of their favorite groups, The Grateful Dead — which notoriously eschewed convention throughout its stellar, yet radiopathic career.

"For us to have grown up with punk rock and to like The Dead is a big taboo and an oxymoron, you know?" he said. "I used to love to tell that to a lot of the kids in El Paso and they ask what we were doing. But before we were ever known, and we were just in small bands and they would ask to describe our sound I always wanted to boldly claim that we wanted a punk-rock Grateful Dead and utilize all the things that punk people hated about hippy music and utilize all the things that hippy people hated about punk music and make a mutation of it. That's why we chose it."

The singer said that The Volta have always had a fondness for the Bay Area. "We wanted to move back there from Texas, but the cost of living was so high we just ended up in Long Beach and now I'm in Los Angeles," he said with a breathy chuckle, as if in recognition of the juxtaposition of that smoggy valley and that great foggy city where Mark Twain once spent the coldest mid-summer winter of his life.

Because of The Volta's quest to reinvent what popular music is all about, Bixler-Zavala said it is of the utmost importance that the group has full control of their music from start to finish.
"It's kind of essential to have Omar be the leader of the band and then also be the producer of the band," he said, "because anyone else who would come in would really just dilute it and take us back to At the Drive-In, which was making compromised art."

Even working with Rick Rubin, one of rock 'n' roll's most prestigious producers, did not do The Volta justice according to the frizzy-haired singer.

"We tried something with him and we learned a lot from him," Bixler-Zavala said of Rubin who produced 2003's De-Loused in the Comatorium in conjunction with Rodriguez-Lopez. "We learned a lot about the pop song structure, and now that we learned that we kind of — I guess in our school we like to learn stuff and then forget about it that way it's just inside of you and it's not, like, overcalculated and manipulated so much. But Rick did a really good job on that record, but the reason why the record is the way is the way it is is because Omar produced it as well. For me, I can't listen to that record because, to me, the demo versions, and even before the demo versions — like, the practice versions — we have, especially the opening song on the first record, the choruses are so much more interesting. And Rick always tends to cater to the everyman's ear. And that tends to make choruses, you know, the kind of chorus you blast on a radio. … It's stripped down and you can sing along, you understand what's going on, and that's fun but … in a weird way I think it diluted it, because we're already in 2008, and the pop song structure and the way bands do things right now, we're still copying what has happened 40 years ago."

THE BEDLAM IN GOLIATH

Mars Volta enthusiasts are all abuzz in the blogosphere and in print about the concept underlying The Bedlam in Goliath. According to Bixler-Zavala, the latest record is heavily influenced by an antique "talking board," which Rodriguez-Lopez picked up while visiting Jerusalem shortly after the completion of the group's last album, Amputechture. The board was meant as a gift for Bixler-Zavala, but according to the band, they got far more than Rodriguez-Lopez had initially bargained for. The board featured multilingual writings — Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew, Bixler-Zavala told Zero. It had poetry attached to it, as well. Since the relic had no planchette (the heart-shaped piece generally associated with guiding the hands of Ouija players), the band used wine glasses to channel the voices speaking through the board. Bixler-Zavala said that as he and other band members let the object guide their hands, messages and a cohesive narrative of violence and subversion slowly began to emerge.

"The way I see it now," Bixler-Zavala said, "it's this sort of prison, a sort of solitary confinement prison attached with all these traditional kinds of poetry that serve as sort of, like, padlocks to keep … everything that is in there that's mischievous inside of it — to keep it locked down. The mistake that I made was unlocking it."

He said that by hiring people to help translate the poems and through the act of playing the board the prison was unlocked. It was presumably by unlocking this holding cell of malevolent spirits that the band suffered many tribulations in recording the album, including — as revealed by Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez in many previous interviews appearing in other publications — tracks mysteriously disappearing from the mix, physical afflictions and a sound engineer, who after suffering a nervous breakdown stole some of the band's tapes, which had to be taken back somewhat forcibly.

"The gist of the story is," Bixler-Zavala told Zero, "like most ghosts and spirits there is unfinished business when it comes to people that died. The board is sort of like this in-between space, like a telephone, for making contact with people who want to explore why these people are trapped in this board."

Bixler-Zavala said that The Bedlam in Goliath is the band's way of combating the evil spirit who was released from the board's confinement by "fighting fire with fire and creating another version of (the board) in the vinyl so when you open up the gatefold, you'll have the option to play the game as well, but our version of it. So, it's kind of like we sprung traps around the world, and when you want to play it, it will confuse the mischievous spirit and hopefully it will be able to contact the female spirits rather than the male spirit of the board."
He said that the album takes a Middle-Eastern tone in an effort to describe and flesh out the stories gleaned from the talking board and illuminate aspects of the culture from whence the mystical object came.

THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN T.M.V.

This desire to uncover the bizarre idiosyncrasies and diverse modes of thinking the world over is perhaps illustrative of the Mars Volta's frame of mind — Bixler-Zavala's specifically. Any fan of the group cannot fail to notice that a multitude of languages are used in the band's song titles and lyrical content. Even their name has a Latin feel — Mars being the name of the Roman god of war and agriculture — while one finds various definitions for Volta in the dictionary from a river in Africa to an Italian term used to describe a specific set of lines in Petrarchan and Shakespearian sonnets.

Post-modern art and philosophy places a great deal of emphasis on language and the role it plays in shaping humans' understanding of the world around them. In many ways, our perception of the entire universe is inseparably tied to the words we use to describe it. Bixler-Zavala uses more than one language, in order to produce a more genuine article — a greater truth.
"Sometimes the sentiment of a song can't be sung in English and have the same impact," he explained. "I think with the English language there is so much variety for adjectives and nouns. In Spanish, it's limited, so you really depend more … on metaphor, which is a great challenge and it's a lot more fun to paint with it."

Not only does Bixler-Zavala place an importance on using a variety of languages in his lyrics to describe the physical world. He also emphasizes the need to understand the various ways of interpreting the metaphysical world, as well.

"We all have this same concept of this creator," he told Zero "It's just some people's versions of it have multiple arms and blue skin, and some people's versions of it ride on a broomstick, and some people's versions of it are contacted through roots or trees and things like that, which I would tend to believe in a little bit more, you know? Especially cultures that use (the hallucinogenic plant) ayahuasca and stuff like that, because I think they understand that instead of to cut rainforests down you should embrace it and utilize a lot of these plants who are probably trying to use these supposed psychedelic drugs to actually speak to humans — to say, 'Hey, here's a cure for this, here's a cure for that, here's a cure for this.' … Sometimes the preposterous, absurd notion of psychedelic drug use might get you more in contact with conquering the ailments of humanity."

This is likely the most crucial concept one must grasp when attempting to synthesize The Mars Volta's frantic and often obscure ideology — the absurd. It is the absurd that drives their music, it is the absurd that justifies 17-minute orgasmic cacophonies of swirling, electro-acousto-noise pop. When Rodriguez-Lopez described the Volta's music as "a donkey choking a waffle" on the Fuse music talk show, The Sauce, it was not in an effort to be cheeky. He said that because in our post-modern age of uncertainty — in which the promise of technology and globalization offers humanity hope of transcending all cultural and spiritual boundaries, whilst the specter of unsustainability, nuclear holocaust and biological warfare haunts our dreams — the only way anything can be accurately described is in the most absurd of syntactical constructions.

compliments of vick neronin

The Curse of The Mars Volta

By Andy Tennille


It began as it always does, with an innocuous mid-morning knock at the front door. The FedEx man handed me my package and had me sign on the line. Wandering into my office I tore open the envelope, removed a single white CD sleeve, and placed the disc in the player. The piercing, banshee screams of Cedric Bixler-Zavala burst forth—the opening to “Aberinkula,” the lead track on the Mars Volta’s new album, The Bedlam in Goliath—and I settled in for my initial listening session.

The next day, I fell violently ill—gut-wrenching, toilet-hugging, sweat-inducing sick. After three bedridden days with little to eat, doctors put me on Cipro, the antibiotic prescribed to government employees during the 2003 anthrax scare. No one could tell me exactly what was wrong.

As I recalled these eerie events to Omar Rodriguez-Lopez in Los Angeles a few weeks later, the quiet, diminutive musical mastermind behind the Mars Volta became noticeably uncomfortable. Tense even.

“Here we go again,” he says, an exasperated look creasing his face. “I thought we’d ended it but I guess we were wrong.”

“Maybe the curse is still alive.”

*****

“At the time, it just seemed like a nice gift for Cedric.”

Rodriguez-Lopez slowly shakes his head in bemused disbelief. In May 2006, as he was wrapping up the final mix of the Mars Volta’s third studio album, Amputechture, the 31-year-old guitarist got a sudden urge to travel to Israel, a country he’d never visited.

“It felt like something was calling me to Israel, and that I had to go there to discover it,” he explains in a hushed voice. “I don’t know how else to explain it. In my head, I was thinking it was something about music, something I needed to hear. So I booked a plane ticket and left the next day.”

For ten days, Rodriguez-Lopez toured Israel, traveling to the purported birthplace of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem and visiting various religious sites and historical landmarks. On an afternoon walk around Jerusalem he found the local bazaar, a flea market of sorts on the city’s edge. A self-proclaimed pack rat who collects antique typewriters, old televisions, vinyl records and random keys, Rodriguez-Lopez wandered through the maze of tents and makeshift stands before ending up in a curio shop.

“It was like something out of fucking Indiana Jones,” he recalls. “There were all sorts of strange things in there—I remember there was a candlestick with talons at the bottom. But it all seemed harmless to me, like an antique store. I bought a bunch of religious icons and ended up with two suitcases full of stuff. The board was just one of the things I found. I bought it for Cedric because I thought he would really appreciate it. But I never thought we would actually use it.”

The board: Rodriguez-Lopez’s gift for Bixler-Zavala, his band mate and long-time musical collaborator dating back to their days in At the Drive-In, was in fact a talking board, an archaic version of today’s Ouija board. Used by occultists for thousands of years to summon and communicate with spirits, talking boards are said to date back to 500 B.C. when Greek philosopher, mathematician and mystic Pythagoras allegedly used them in seances.

Still wondering if he’d fulfilled his calling in Israel, Rodriguez-Lopez returned to his Brooklyn studio to finish mastering Amputechture before hitting the road for a three-month North American tour opening for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. As the tour snaked through the United States, the band often retreated to its bus after the shows to play with the talking board.

“It’s what consumed our nights on that tour, really,” Bixler-Zavala says. “You’re out on tour in the middle of America in these big arenas opening for a big band, and sometimes there’s not a lot to do in Idaho. So you retreat back to your safety zone—the bus. The satellite wasn’t working on the bus and we were smoking a little pot after the shows, so why not? We were curious, and I think our natural inquisitiveness led us to it.”

According to Bixler-Zavala, the first sessions with the Soothsayer—the name the band gave the board—unearthed seemingly nonsensical words and phrases.

“The first ones were funny, and we just laughed,” he says. “They didn’t make any sense. Or maybe that’s how it’s supposed to work; the words aren’t as obvious to you at first. Just because it’s a strange word doesn’t mean you should overlook it, but that’s just what happened, session after session of us doing it.”

As the sessions continued, words and phrases became clearer—Tourniquet Man, Patience Worth, Appetite. Ultimately, a name emerged: Goliath.

“The more we would use it, the more you could tell it had multiple personalities,” Bixler-Zavala says. “It was usually a guy or a woman, and the woman always broke off into two personalities—a motherly voice, and what seemed to be a child’s voice. Then we found some poetry underneath the board’s label that appeared to be Aramaic or ancient Hebrew. What we got from the messages the board was sending and the poem that was attached to it was that there was some kind of love triangle between the man, the woman and her mother that ultimately ended in a murder.”

With an album on the horizon, Bixler-Zavala did what anyone with a new fascination might do—he drew inspiration from it.

“It gave us the best one-liners, the best names, better than I could ever think of. It was automatic writing in a strange way and just seemed obvious that it should be subject matter for the new album,” he explains. “I liked the idea of putting old, traditional words with modern music. That’s when I made the mistake of copying the poem down along with my favorite words and sayings from the board.”

For whatever reason, Bixler-Zavala’s decision to transcribe the board’s words and use them for lyrical ideas was the tipping point. Suddenly, equipment on tour that had never given them problems before was on the fritz. Only months after replacing former drummer Jon Theodore, Blake Fleming left the band mid-tour. Bixler-Zavala inexplicably injured his foot severely, and the band’s bassist was diagnosed with polycythemia vera, a rare blood disorder. Not only had the band hit a streak of terrible luck, but the board’s messages had become more urgent and ominous.

“It started sending messages about wanting a new body,” Bixler-Zavala remembers. “It seemed to want another chance to live. Every time we played with it, it was a little more threatening with the way it was saying it. It got more demanding each time, asking us for offerings and wanting to trade places.”

Tragedies have plagued the Mars Volta since the band’s birth in 2001. De-Loused in the Comatorium, their 2003 long-playing debut, was an elegy for Julio Venegas, an artist and close friend who committed suicide in 1996; 2005’s Frances the Mute was inspired in part by former bandmate Jeremy Ward, whose fatal overdose in May 2003 served as the impetus for Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez to stop using heroin. One might begin to wonder if the spirits summoned through the talking board were, in fact, the voices of their deceased friends. But Rodriguez-Lopez believes it’s even more complex and sinister than that.

“When we got deeper into it, the board started saying that it had brought me all the way across the world and had been trying to bring me there for a long time,” Rodriguez-Lopez whispers, clearly uncomfortable about talking in too much detail about the events that transpired. “My interpretation, and I think Cedric had the same interpretation, was that it was saying that it had taken people from us because it has been trying to get to us. So, Julio, Jeremy and other people around us that have died, and all these bad things that happened to our band when we had the board, this thing, Goliath or whatever you want to call it, was taking credit for.”

After the Chili Peppers tour and two brief trips to Japan and Australia, the band began work on the new record. But the problems from the road resurfaced in the studio. Tracks that had been recorded were suddenly missing. Reliable studio gear abruptly broke. Random power outages occurred, and Rodriguez-Lopez’s Brooklyn studio flooded. Matters worsened when Jon DeBaun, the band’s engineer since 2004, suffered a nervous breakdown and abandoned the project. With everything and everyone crumbling around him, Rodriguez-Lopez considered scrapping the album entirely and starting from scratch. For a musician whose boundless energy resulted in four solo albums and a film soundtrack, plus Amputechture, in a single year while living in Amsterdam, the metamorphosis was terrifying.

“There was literally a point where I was telling myself that I didn’t know if I ever wanted to make another record again,” he says. “It was complete chaos, and that’s what I had to dive into in order to pull the record out, like something on the other side not wanting it to be made. It was a very, very fucked up and dark period. It was no longer a matter of superstition or believing in the curse or not—this was our reality. I felt like, if we stopped doing the record, I’d be trapped. I was a prisoner. The only way to not be trapped or to not go crazy was to finish it. Finishing the album was the elixir.”

With renewed determination, Rodriguez-Lopez called in Amputechture engineers Robert Carranza and Rich Costey to untangle the mess left by DeBaun’s departure. But problems persisted.

“There was one night that Rich and I were in the studio playing back a mix that we’d been working on for a day and a half when a guitar solo all the sudden stopped,” Rodriguez-Lopez says, inching forward in his seat. “It’s a section of a song that we’d heard over and over, and this guitar solo comes in at the beginning of the verse and plays all the way through. All of a sudden, the guitar solo stops. The music is going, but the guitar solo goes away as if someone pressed the mute button on the board. So we rewind the tape and the solo is missing completely. Just gone.”

“It got to a point after his studio flooded and Jon left that Omar didn’t want anybody to speak of the board, its name or anything having to do with it,” Bixler-Zavala says. “Things were going so wrong with everything that it didn’t seem like finishing the record was going to be possible. We realized that the only thing we could do aside from bringing in a priest was to bury it.”

Without revealing his destination, Rodriguez-Lopez booked a plane ticket, took the board and left.

“It was sort of like sleepwalking,” he says. “It was like something bigger than me was telling me to do it. I just felt drawn there somehow, just like when I went to Israel. I’d never heard of this place, but that’s where I was going. I got there, went out and buried it and didn’t make any conscious effort of figuring out how to get back there ever again. When it was done, I felt like there was nothing inside of me. I cried for days and days and didn’t understand why. For days afterwards, I wasn’t sure I wanted to play music. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do anything or have anyone around me. It was complete emptiness.”

*****

“I imagine it’s like it was on Ghostbusters. They threw out that box on the floor and it opened up and sucked the ghost in. For us, the box is every copy of the album that will be reproduced and anyone who buys it will get to be Egon. Hopefully, we can all trap this thing.”

Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez share a laugh about seeing the 1984 sci-fi-comedy classic in their native El Paso. If we are all ghost-busting parapsychologists for The Bedlam in Goliath, Bixler-Zavala is the charming Peter Venkman to the introverted genius of Rodriguez-Lopez’s Egon Spengler. With piercing blueish-grey eyes shrouded by a thick mane of jet-black hair, Bixler-Zavala is the quintessential frontman, captivating audiences with his melismatic, androgynous voice while seducing them with his reckless machismo.

Rodriguez-Lopez is almost his polar opposite. A self-confessed control freak with an obsessive streak, the guitarist eats the same things every day and wears the exact same clothes—black suit, black shirt and black shoes. A crack and heroin addict since he was a teenager, Rodriguez-Lopez quit using drugs in 2003 following Ward’s fatal overdose. Music has been his addiction ever since.

“I don’t have a life,” he says matter-of-factly. “People that I’ve been in relationships with have either seen it as a sickness or as something healthy for me because I’m not smoking rocks all day. I have to channel that energy somewhere and music seems like the safest place to me.”

Rodriguez-Lopez’s energy and creativity are the fuels that power the Mars Volta’s music. While both he and Bixler-Zavala are quick to establish that the band has always been an equal partnership, the genesis of the music is clear.

“Generally, I have a cataloge of somewhere around 200 songs—demos I’ve recorded in my studio over the years,” Rodriguez-Lopez explains. “When we’re ready to start work on a new album, I pick a few out and Cedric listens to them and says which ones are of particular interest to him. We take those songs, and then I just work on them for a month or so and put them into a shape where Cedric can start writing to them.”

“A lot of the time—and we started to do this with Frances—I’ll come in, listen to the songs and then do some gibberish takes, which gives Omar an idea of what he likes,” Bixler-Zavala adds. “Maybe he likes some of the gibberish stuff that comes off the top of my head or maybe he likes the mistakes in what I was doing. From there, he’ll ask me to keep certain parts or ask me to just keep it sounding a certain way. Then I’ll start writing lyrics.”

Once Rodriguez-Lopez feels comfortable with a song’s framework, he brings in the rest of the band to record. In most traditional recording scenarios, musicians are given their parts ahead of time and know the basic song structure, but Rodriguez-Lopez gives his band mates absolutely nothing.

“What I really like doing is not letting them learn anything until they’re in the studio, because it gives this spontaneity and nervous energy to the music,” he says. “We have all these masterful musicians in this band. Masterful musicians are usually very confident - you give them anything and they can do it. But when their mikes are up and you give them something they’ve never played before and tell them to play it, there’s this crazy energy that comes out of it that I am just totally fascinated with. It causes this chaos that goes into the music that is very much to me a part of the sound.”

The approach is similar to filmmakers like Woody Allen’s process, filming out of sequence and asking actors to shoot a scene without prior knowledge of its premise. A filmmaker himself, Rodriguez-Lopez’s love of cinema—particularly the work of Werner Herzog, Alejandro Jodorowsky and David Lynch—is a huge influence on the way in which he creates music, but the real impetus behind his approach dates back five years to the recording of De-Loused in the Comatorium, produced by Rick Rubin.

“After spending three months in a house recording De-Loused, I knew we needed a change,” he says. “We made records for 10 years where you’d rehearse, everybody knew what they were doing and you go in and do it. With Rick, he was great, I learned a lot from him, but everything was under control. We had all the equipment we could ever want. If something even remotely started to seem like it was breaking, a new one came in. Everything was laid out there and everything was safe. Rick’s philosophy was very much, ‘The studio was not a place to experiment.’ You get what you do in the rehearsal room, you experiment there, and then you articulate it in the studio.

“But after doing that, I wanted to throw a wrench in the system. We were comfortable making records like that, so I wanted to create chaos. I wanted to record completely backward and out of order, do anything differently than the way we did it before.”

The result was Frances the Mute, the first album in which Rodriguez-Lopez directed all aspects of production.

“When we did Frances, it was a complete rebellion against De-Loused,” he says. “The idea was to go into a place where nobody would want to make a record: ‘Let’s go into a complete fucking shithole and let’s limit the gear.’ We went from having four engineers, runners with SUVs to get anything you need, Starbucks, whatever, to being in fucking East LA, it’s hot as shit, the air conditioner is broken and there are gangsters right outside our door. It was back to the basics, but it was great. There was nothing to distract us from the album and absolutely no glamour whatsoever.”

It’s that vitality, coupled with the thrill of putting himself and the band in uncomfortable situations, that’s compelling to Rodriguez-Lopez as an artist. In his mind, every studio experience should be different to insure that nothing becomes formulaic.

“We just never want to lose that freshness and that energy that a lot of people lose once they have bigger budgets to make a record,” he offers. “Once you have more money, you need to have more time; once you have more time, then you think about things more; and the more you think about things, the more you take energy away from your subconscious and block it from doing the talking. We want to achieve a balance of both what our subconscious is thinking, which is usually smarter than us, and what our conscious mind wants to express.”

With the talking board serving as its dark muse, The Bedlam in Goliath sounds like the music of a band in the crux of the crucible with its back against the wall, playing with a dire urgency to save the remaining shreds of its collective sanity. Lyrically, Bixler-Zavala may be at his best on Goliath, interlacing the dark imagery of the Soothsayer with positive elements including Santeria prayers, Biblical allusions and fables. There are also cinematic references, including the 1973 prison movie Papillon starring Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen.

“There’s a point in the movie where Steve McQueen does solitary confinement for a very long time and I started thinking about what it might be like in solitary confinement, what things you might see,” the singer says. “That played a big part in some of the themes I used for the lyrics because it wasn’t that far off from what the album ended up being about.”

Sonically, the record is an aural maelstrom, building on the explosiveness of the band’s past work while incorporating processed vocals, swirling loops, cacophonous horns, street recordings from Jerusalem and the guitar work of John Frusciante. As he has on every record since the Tremulant EP in 2002, the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist lent his talents to Goliath, enabling Rodriguez-Lopez to remain behind the board and concentrate more closely as a producer.

“John’s our secret weapon,” Rodriguez-Lopez says. “He’s always willing to allow me to utilize him in whatever way we want. On this record, he learned and memorized, down to the nuances and the odd way of picking, certain solos that I did, and turned them into parts. He would learn an entire solo in like 40 minutes and then double it, perfectly. That’s a sound you can’t get by just stereo-imaging a solo; it’s a different hand playing the guitar. So on the record, generally when you hear a guitar solo on the left, it’s me. On the right, the same exact solo is being played, but it’s John.”

If there is one noticeable difference between past albums and Goliath, it’s the primal ferocity brought by new drummer Thomas Pridgen. As a child prodigy, Pridgen won the Guitar Center Drum Off at nine before receiving a four-year scholarship to the Berklee College of Music at the age of 15. In October 2006, shortly after drummer Blake Fleming left the group, Rodriguez-Lopez called Pridgen on the recommendation of Volta bassist Juan Alderete.

“I called Thomas and told him to come down to our show on Halloween and just hang out and watch us,” Rodriguez-Lopez says, a mischievous grin creeping across his face. “He showed up, we had an hour until we played and I said, ‘Come over here.’ We had a drum set in the room and I beatboxed a beat to him and said, ‘Remember that. That’s the main rhythm we’re going to play onstage in a few minutes.’ He was totally up for it and learned it right away. Thomas is the youngest person in the band, but musically, he’s definitely the most talented. He has a young, vital energy like every day could be the last day of his life. ‘Play in front of 10,000 people opening for the Chili Peppers in 20 minutes? Sure, let’s do it.’”

“He’s our new fountain of youth,” Bixler-Zavala chimes in. “The great thing about his fountain of youth is there’s no hint of hipsterism at all. He’s a black drummer, and he doesn’t even know one single album by Bad Brains. He doesn’t know who [Dead Kennedy] D.H. Peligro is and we consider him our D.H. Peligro. But what he does know is that he’s on this planet to do one thing, and that’s to play drums. And he wants to be the best drummer he can be. Thomas brought a real change in spirit that’s energized us all.”

The new energy that Pridgen has inspired in the Mars Volta is palpable in Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala. Less than a year ago, the duo was questioning their desire to create music ever again, apparently entangled in a demented curse that threatened to destroy their sanity.

“Looking back on it, we were prime candidates to be channeled by this thing,” Rodriguez-Lopez says. “We believe in other dimensions, in things beyond what we are seeing in front of us. I’ve said this before, but I feel like we are the human embodiment of this music. It already existed before us and would have already been made, but it took us to recognize it. We pulled it out of the ether and became a transistor radio for it. We feel like we’re just a channel for this music. And this time we tapped into something much darker than we ever have before.”

Cynics and critics will no doubt lob accusations of hucksterism and claim the entire tale is nothing more than a marketing ploy, but Rodriguez-Lopez dismisses that.

“During the making of this album, we went through the darkest depths of hell and made it back out. This album was a rebirth for us,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if people believe the story or not. They’re still giving us what we need—that energy to trap Goliath and put a lid on this thing. Good or bad, the reviews are a collective energy being generated from the Earth about the Mars Volta.

“Every time someone says the name of the band, the Mars Volta grows.”