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The Mars Volta’s Omar Rodriguez-Lopez:
Chronic Nostalgia
By Randy Harward

Right out of the gate, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez’s Se Dice Bisonte, No Búfalo (“They say bison, not buffalo”) begins to tear at the red fabric of reality, fucking with your head like a good Zappa, or Can, composition. Since the Mars Volta guitarist is so ready to mess with our heads, it’s only fair to return the favor.

HARP: Is there any truth to the rumor you were gonna call this album El Queso Es Potrido y Viejo; Donde Esta el Sanitario: “The cheese is old and moldy; where is the bathroom"?

“Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!”

Mission accomplished. Omar’s laugh betrays a playfulness that makes it easy to comprehend the mind behind Se Dice’s free-range space-jams. This is a guy that finds something to appreciate in anything—even a joke from a Pauly Shore movie.

That may be why, while in Amsterdam in 2005, Omar came up with four different albums while also tracking the Mars Volta’s Amputechture and a film soundtrack (Jorge Hernandez’s El Búfalo de la Noche): He can just pluck ideas out of the ether. “Things just come out in groups and you can pretty much say, ‘Fuck, I just laid down the foundation for a record. Okay, I’ll put that aside—and here’s another little record over here.’”

Yeah, easy as that. Only Se Dice (Gold Standard Laboratories), the first of the four discs to be released, sounds like it was conceived by geneticists on chronic. The mostly instrumental songs—Omar plays almost everything—somehow splice the DNA of Zappa, Can’s Holger Czukay, Captain Beefheart, Henry Mancini and Sun Ra. And maybe a little Pauly Shore. It’s freaky and a whole lot of fun, like hearing a new language, one as fascinating and incomprehensible as tone-oriented Cantonese.

Naturally to Omar it’s much simpler, more like a photo album. The songs’ parts are snapshots, and the finished tracks are a series of photos depicting various stages of his life. “It creates nostalgia for me, really,” he says. “It’s like pulling a digital camera fresh from the box. You kinda fuck around with it, get a sense of the camera, and once you get that really nice picture, you kinda start going off. And you can’t turn back; it’s become an addiction.”