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| | CITAZIONE da mxdwn.comA Dexterity of 16Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (A Manual Dexterity Vol. 1 Soundtrack)
Monday, September 06, 2004 by Raymond Flotat Consider this a shining example of the new wave of progressive rock. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, guitar player and principal song-writer for The Mars Volta, has an audacious new solo album that drives for diversity more than excessive fret work. A Manual Dexterity Vol. 1 also doubles as the soundtrack for Omar's as yet unreleased film project of the same name. The movie is something Rodriguez-Lopez has been filming on and off for a couple of years using his personal collection of cameras. If this album is any indication of what to expect the piece will be highly visual and abstract without a heavy focus on characters and dialogue. A Manual Dexterity plays less like a traditional guitar player solo-album and more like a fully realized prog-rock opus, much akin to The Mars Volta's De-Loused in the Cometorium. Actually, many of the tracks here might have easily been ideas integrated into that record. Imagine the ethereal spacey parts of those songs in a long-form patient delivery. The spastic time changes famous from Omar's old band At the Drive In are not present here. Songs such as the opener "Around Knuckle White Tie" and "Dramatic Theme" use a set melody and then slowly swell into a melee of textured subtle sound effects. Some are amazingly grabbing like "Sensory Decay Pt. II" which through fuzzy flanged distortion literally is evocative of what one might think it sounds like on the moon. Only two songs on the record feature vocals, the latin dance track "Deus Ex Machina" and the other is the closer "The Palpitations From a Limit" which features a short and sweet performance from Cedric Bixler-Zavala. e l'immancabile (???!!) pitchforkmediaCITAZIONE Omar Rodriguez-Lopez
A Manual Dexterity: Soundtrack, Vol. 1
[GSL; 2004]
Rating: 7.5
A Manual Dexterity - Soundtrack Volume 1 is half of a pet project that Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (At the Drive-In, De Facto, The Mars Volta) has been recording since 2001. In its entirety, it will comprise the soundtrack for Rodriguez-Lopez's film of the same name. That this project steps back from the structured post-prog of The Mars Volta and bends more toward the esoteric experimentalism of De Facto is unsurprising-- it takes its title from the opening track of De Facto's 2001 LP Megaton Shotblast. What is surprising is that an undertaking of such magnitude and rich detail remains so shrouded in mystery.
There have been few concrete details revealed about this project; most of the information is fragmentary at best. Cryptic message board posts, befuddling repetitions, frustrating omissions, red herrings and blind leads accrue-- either no one knows anything about this project, or they just aren't willing to say. When queried, GSL Records founder Sonny Kay replied: "The film is 90 minutes long and will be out in the spring. That's all I know." Factual glimmers from the digital rumor mill maintain that the film is fictional and is nearing completion in Los Angeles, and that Rodriguez-Lopez collaborated with numerous friends on the soundtrack, including John Frusciante and members of De Facto and The Mars Volta. Between these shadowy spires of dubious information, a vast lacuna remains.
The word "shambolic" appears with startling frequency in reviews of A Manual Dexterity, Vol. 1. It's a good word, with a robust utility that belies its seldom-used stature (my word processor's spellchecker is trying to convince me that it doesn't exist), but one wishes "rambolic" and "fumbolic" were words as well. The record opens with "Around Knuckle White Tile", the title's abstract word collage representing Rodriguez-Lopez's lyrical tendencies, which are almost entirely absent from this mostly instrumental recording. The track's initial ambient rustles and haunted house sounds take a couple of minutes to set the scene, before morphing into a dim, lounge-y fugue with spinning traces of incandescent guitar. Freeform drumming enters to impose order upon the 7-minute walkabout as it assembles itself with subtle shadings of tone and color.
"Dyna Sark Arches" spends a full minute establishing an aura of receding, minimal atmosphere before collapsing into prickly, staccato funk embellished with crystalline string bends and solos that are strikingly reminiscent of pre-Good News Modest Mouse. "Here the Tame Go By" drops a sizzling cluster of prog-guitar into the center of an immense expanse of arid atmosphere. Fans of The Mars Volta should take note of "The Palpitations Form a Limit", the record's only foray into standard rock dynamics and vocals.
A "deus ex machina"-- literally "God from a machine"-- is a narrative device employed to resolve an inextricably tangled plot (e.g. "And they all died in an avalanche"). As such, it typically arrives at the end of a work. Rodriguez-Lopez placed his deus ex machina-- a standout track with that name-- in the center of his record. The song is a seamless fusion of foundational dub, digital glitz, and unadulterated Latin jazz, a moment of pop lucidity amid all the abstruse avant-gardism. However, since the denouement of this review won't truly resolve until the film materializes, I'll close with a divine intervention of my own:
"And the Internet, crumbolic bastion of misinformation, subsided at last beneath the digital sea. The end."
-Brian Howe, September 07, 2004 CITAZIONE popmatters.comOMAR A. RODRIGUEZ-LOPEZ A Manual Dexterity -- Soundtrack Volume 1 (Gold Standard Laboratories) US release date: 31 August 2004 UK release date: 30 August 2004 by Zeth Lundy De-ranged in the SoundtrackariumBetween dissolving At the Drive-In and reforming as the superior Mars Volta, Omar A. Rodriguez-Lopez (guitarist and co-songwriter for both bands) began work on a series of adventurous studio sessions to accompany the film-in-progress A Manual Dexterity. Rodriguez-Lopez has bypassed the film's indefinite delay by releasing the first half of the mostly instrumental soundtrack, appropriately titled A Manual Dexterity -- Soundtrack Volume 1, on his own Gold Standard Laboratories label. The film's music (performed by what the press release calls a "comparable" lineup of the players on the Mars Volta's De-loused in the Comatorium) represents a definite stop-gap between Rodriguez-Lopez's two bands, a palette-cleanser of sorts amidst his transition from histrionic punker to labyrinthian progger. It's a project that seems to neglect all invocations of the mainstream, opting to beat its own atypical drum loudly. A Manual Dexterity is a lot like finding your way through the dark, hands extended in helpless surrender. Sounds jump out of the tempestuous infrastructure, timbres and textures melt and fry. It's the kind of bi-polar frazzle suggested by De-loused's more avant-garde moments. Rodriguez-Lopez works with molecular structures on A Manual Dexterity, the mark more of a minimalist than the mad scientist team that fused De-loused's brilliant puzzle. The soundtrack focuses on manipulating sonic expectations, contesting and challenging concepts of sound over stark, one- or two-chord progressions (notably devoid of melodies). A song's path doesn't twitch and convulse like those in the Mars Volta's catalog; instead, the environment expands and recedes while the form remains constant. It's important to be reminded that A Manual Dexterity is ultimately a companion piece to the incomplete film. You can't help but wonder if the film's images will help to further assist in understanding Rodriguez-Lopez's creation. The majority of the record is challenging -- almost confrontational -- and not exactly something that will garner heavy rotation on the home stereo. "Dyna Sark Arches" is easily the most immediately accessible track: its funky robot groove, courtesy of a rhythm section wound elastic-tight, is matched by wah-wah guitars twisting around the set-up. "Around Knuckle White Tile" builds from a collage of free-form curiosities into a minor-key throb-drone, led by Rodriguez-Lopez's piercing, Jimmy-Page-on-Jack-Daniels electric guitar. But moments of clarity are merely fleeting, as A Manual Dexterity's thumbprint is full of experimental eccentricities. "Sensory Decay Part II" is Vangelis held to a hotplate: synthesizers boil and bubble, skidding sound manipulations scatter about like shrapnel in the unsteady atmosphere. "Of Blood Blue Blisters" is a Zappa freak-out in space, built entirely on jarring dissonance and shrieking lurches of beastly tones. Plaintive guitars arpeggio at a labored pace in "Here the Tame Go By", which keeps suggesting that it will descend somewhere dark, finally making good on the promise by intrusive electronics that are slowly bled to death. "Dramatic Theme" taunts breaking points of tolerance with chattering, swooning, and horrifically squealing layers of guitars. Rodriguez-Lopez throws rapid-fire curveballs throughout Volume 1's hour, from celebratory Latin excursions ("Deus Ex Machina") to gargling undercurrents of musique concrète ("Dream Sequence"). The record's most jarring moment could be its most conventional: the closer "The Palpitations Form a Limit" is a relatively straight-ahead rock thumper with vocals from Cedric Zavala (Rodriguez-Lopez's songwriting partner and fellow Mars Voltan). While his ambitions and risks are laudable, they're also very prickly and perturbed. The most devoted of Mars Volta fans will undoubtedly find his excursion into soundtrack impressionism a bit too impenetrable and not susceptible to revisiting. Easy listening notwithstanding, A Manual Dexterity continues to make the case for Rodriguez-Lopez's restless drive to create, even if it functions more as a footnote than a definitive entry in his catalog. — 7 October 2004 | | | |
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peccato, poteva essere una bellissima opera 