Dålig intervju med Ikey

David Farrier intervjuar Volta

Intervju i Einstein Music Journal

Thu 26 Jun 2008

The Haunt of The Volta

Much more exciting legends than the Chainsaw Masscare come out of Texas these days. Experimental art rock prodigies The Mars Volta are just that. They’ve nothing left to prove in New Zealand – they’ve come, played (twice), and conquered. Now they’re back to do it all over again!

On the eve of their third appearance on our shores, I talked to both Omar and Cedric at different intervals about the trials and tribulations they’ve experienced of late that are well-known by now, surrounding the making of their latest album The Bedlam In Goliath. Fortunately the weird psychotic reactions the boys have had now see them nurse what is arguably their most exciting and aptly titled album yet.

The monstrous gargoyle-esque beast that influenced The Bedlam (that is, the infamous cursed Ouija board they’ve spoken so much of in the press that saw them lose a band mate, lose tracks from the album and almost lose guitarist and auteur Omar Rodriguez Lopez’s entire studio), has seen them rise above, and in reconciliation and remembrance, they deliver explicit, telling and downright awesome answers.

Of the now infamous experience, Omar said previously “I’ve had my time with it and I just want to move on.” Looking back now, he says: “I’m not trying to glorify that or keep my interest in it… That was something that happened in my life and it happened almost a year ago now.”

When pressed on whether he thinks humans are prone to glorify or downplay the dramas in their lives – such as the one he endured, Omar is honest. “I think people have very different ways of dealing with trauma, and I think it’s not always up to them, you know? I think people have different reactions to things like that. Some people glorify them, some people play it down, some people become completely internal; I think everyone is individualistic.

“Even with that having been said I think people go through changes, you know, people can dramatise it then internalise it later, or vice versa. For me when I finished this record I didn’t want to talk about it, I didn’t want to play it, I wanted to move on to the next record and I said we cant play these songs while we’re recording the next record, I definitely don’t want to do interviews about it and I don’t want to talk about it. Cos people wont understand, they’ll just laugh at us.

“What people don’t understand, they ridicule, and they want to destroy it.” “So I was very serious at the time and I was wound up in my emotions about it, and the clichéd saying goes – time heals all wounds. And months later, like I said, I found my laughter again, and I became secure with myself and secure with my own beliefs and my own ideas. And when this happens, you really don’t care what people think.

“So I said, you know what? Let’s do this, let’s play this record; I like it now. Let’s not just talk about it, let’s make up something, let’s make up a different scenario of what the record’s about, you know. And then a month after that, I realised no, that’s stupid too, and then I re-re-became comfortable with everything that happened. And I said ‘you know what? I really don’t care who believes us, who doesn’t, what they say, blahblahblahblahblah’”, he mumbles, so quickly it’s barely audible. “So you know, I went through a series of emotions, from being dramatic about it, completely immersed in it to just finding it funny and saying you know, whatever happens let’s just put it out there, and now I’ve moved on.”

The band has a renewed energy that Omar says even the fans have noticed. “It was only one person that was replaced (in the band recently), and it was a night and day difference. It’s brought so much more energy to the band and togetherness and so much more power; it’s something we’re also hearing from the fans. You know, people that have come to see us eight, nine, ten times, they’re surprised that there can be more power, more energy, you know, they’re saying these are the best concerts. A lot of the fans also comment on how happy they are to actually see us so happy, and smiling and enjoying what we’re doing. So (the lineup change) definitely had an impact – it’s been a wonderful one.”

I mention when I spoke to Cedric earlier that he said he’s been unhappy with certain music videos that have been made for the band. Were the webisodes a revolt against all of that unhappiness? “I don’t know, maybe… Maybe it was just a revolt against the whole idea of a fucking music video, you know? I think people take music videos way too seriously, even people who have fun with them, you know what I mean?

“For the amount of money that people normally spend on a music video, I could make about three feature films.” “When we did Francis and we had to make a video, they gave us $500,000 to make the goddamn music video. And I made the video the way they wanted it to be made, the way that most labels want it to be made, with all the professionalism and all the sophistication, blahblahblahblah. And that $500,000 was just shit out the window for just nothing, for a piece of shit theatrical trailer, basically. For an album that’s gonna be run for maybe a month or two, and even if they play it, there’s all this bullshit behind the scenes and all your guidelines…

“I turn in your video and you say oh, ‘you can’t have blood in it, and there’s a guy smoking a cigarette in the first scene, and you can’t have blahblahblahblah’, but they can have women degraded at any moment, at any hour in the day, they can have women being degraded, they can have champagne poured on them, and being treated like animals, but you can’t show somebody smoking a cigarette, and you can’t show blood, and things that are normal to life. And so there’s all these politics, and there are politics about whether or not they’re going to play it, it’s not about if the band is good, it’s about how much you kiss ass to the executives there, and what have you done for them lately, and did you play their executive party they had lately that they wanted you to play, and have you said something nice about them in an interview.

“The whole thing is geared for such commercialism and such bullshit, and it has nothing to do with what the bands are doing and what the music is about, it’s just based on the levels that, ‘we want a video, we want one video’ and they’ll give you a fraction of the money that they gave us last time, they gave us $50,000. And I said fine, you know what? I’ll give you five videos. And I’ll make them for $10,000 a piece. And that’s what those webisodes were. That’s why I came up with the doctor’s scenario; because it was all about blood. So I guess in a way the rebellion is just all about these little trailers that people call music videos, and how much money and time that people invest in something that’s just really not worth it, when we could be using that money to make, you know, a short film, a feature film; things that are worthwhile.”

Speaking of worthwhile feature films, Omar recently scored the music for a film called El Buffalo Del Noche. “It was the fourth screenplay for Lenore Deigna (SP), who did Babel, 21 Grams and Amores Perros, those wonderful films. It was a very difficult but very nice experience,” he says. When asked if he’s seen any interesting films himself lately, Omar cites No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood as “phenomenal”. “I think that director with There Will Be Blood has just jumped a whole other level, he made it clear to us that he is probably the leading great visionary of cinema right now, and I think he will be remembered as such even if people don’t see it right now.”

To him there is no necessary differentiation between all of his artistic output. It is all relevant, regardless of the umbrella name it is published under. “There’s just a constant surge of energy and ideas and battery power that’s going towards making music. And I have to start spreading all the music kind of into groups, and say I want to focus on these songs right now. And then again with a big label, we get money, and having money means that we get time, and so when I get time I get to focus on certain ideas. So I have to scramble to pick which idea and which songs I want to focus on the most, and those become Mars Volta records.

“Now we’re also contractually obligated – we can only put out one record a year. So for most bands they put out one record every two or three years, but you know, I fought for the right to put out at least one, once a year. If I could have, I would put out way more out a year, but contractually I can only put out one a year. So then I have all this other music that sort of falls everywhere, that I work on, that I love, that turns into something later… but also at the same time, some of it I want to share with people, others I want to put it out because if I don’t I’ll grow sick of it and then I’ll just throw it away, and sometimes I just need money,” he laughs, “So I’ll put out a record. But contractually I can’t say it’s Mars Volta, even though it’s my music, even though I’m writing everything, producing, Cedric’s singing on my record; everything’s the same as Mars Volta, but we can’t put it out as such. So I put it out as a Omar Rodriguez Lopez record. And then I can get paid, and Cedric can get paid, and then we have some extra money.

“I’m always going broke, cos I’m always putting my money back into the work, back into the projects, because for me there is no separation.” “So I have to constantly be rehearsing, rehearsing with the studio, rehearsing my ideas, getting ideas out, and that way also that goes into whatever starts to become a Mars Volta record, and that way I’ve had all this time practicing with all this other material, so that I can take the best of the best ideas, everything that’s been refined, and sort of poured in to that moment, you know? And so what happens is a lot of things get made up on the side, and even for every quote-on-quote ‘solo record’ or ‘Mars Volta’ record that I put out, there’s still, as I mentioned before, plenty of records that just sit in my studio that are done. They’re mixed, they’re mastered, but no one will ever hear them because I just start getting bored of them.”

In the past year he has made eleven. Eleven Mars Volta records that might never see the light of day. Including, he says: “an all-orchestral record which was all string arrangements; one was a completely electronic record, and one was just a very simple rock record and I made also an ambient record. I have an experiment also with making traditional salsa music; I’ve made a record that was very melodic and it was all nice melodies with no percussion; and then I did another orchestral record that was completely dissonant.” Dizzy yet? “This is why, again, I’m always going broke,” he laughs good-naturedly.

The important thing to him is the process, not the end result. So it doesn’t bother him if these albums never see the light of day. Just the fact that he made an electronic record, an ambient record, a salsa record, all adds to where Omar stands now, at the pinnacle of experimental rock music. This is why he is amongst the best of the best; because of his tireless work ethic, un-ending humbleness and celebration of creativity and output that just soars light years above others. This is why he can now travel to places like New Zealand and lose himself in the ether of experimentalism on stage in front of a plethora of screaming, pulsating fans, come out on top, and do it all over again. Around the world a million more times or so.

This is why you should go to the Mars Volta’s show here in Auckland tonight(!), to bask in some of their creative energy, hope that it will rub off on yourself, then go start a band or something. Omar has said he is currently working on The Mars Volta albums five – an acoustic-based record – and six – a more “upbeat, aggressive record”, you know we’ll be all over those like a rash when they get released to the world.

Posted by Sarah Gooding under U.S.A

Omar på Rolling Stone-omslag

Omar stoltserar med sin nuna på senaste omslaget av Rolling Stone magazine, bredvid legender som Eddie van Halen, B.B. King och Jimmy Page. Dom kör i detta nummer det utomordentligt töntiga temat “dom 100 bästa gitarrlåtarna genom tiderna”. Om nu detta är slutgiltiga beviset på att The Mars Volta har sålt ut sig eller om Rolling Stone inte fick tag i Yngwie Malmsteen framgår inte. Se “bakom kulisserna”-videon också.

Och på själva listan så är Volta med på plats 91:

91 “Drunkship of Lanterns”
The Mars Volta (2003)

The Mars Volta brought prog rock into the 21st century with this thrilling blast, and Omar Rodriguez Lopez announced himself as one of this decade’s great young axmen, mixing Gang of Four riffs with Hendrix virtuosity, Latin rhythms and gallons of reverb.

Omar snackar salsa i Rolling Stone

Jävligt fin intervju.

You were born in Puerto Rico and originally wanted to be a salsa pianist. Where is the connection between the extreme prog metal you write and play on guitar for the Mars Volta and the salsa and traditional Hispanic music you heard as a boy?
A lot of what I play is in minor keys, so it has the feel of our folk songs. Chords that sound good to me always take me back to my childhood. “Asilos Magdalena,” on [2006's] Amputechture, started as an exercise. My dad played guitar with the thumb and first finger on his picking hand. I wanted to play like that and turned it into a song.

Music is a big aspect of Puerto Rican culture. At family get-togethers, everything revolves around improvising songs, singing about whatever is happening in the room. My father was a medic in the Navy, studying to be a psychiatrist, but he had his own salsa band with my godfathers and uncles, and he took me to practices.

What did you learn?
When I would get sad because it wasn’t working out with me and the piano, my father and uncles told me, “Learn about the conga. Once you know the conga, then you can play the bass. Once you know those things, you can play anything. This is the earth, the roots.” When I played with my father, it was always rhythm things, exercises. Talk about late blooming — I couldn’t stand Led Zeppelin at the time. But I thought John Bonham and John Paul Jones were amazing. I used to wish I could get those records without the singing or guitar-playing.

Where is the salsa in the staccato time signatures and distortion of the Mars Volta?
It’s the choice of notes and grooves. But a lot of the grooves are sped up so much that they are unrecognizable. The best example on [2005's] Frances the Mute is the choruses in “L’Via L’Viaquez.” But when you speed them up and add distortion and delay, it sounds like another thing.

You are often compared to John McLaughlin and King Crimson’s Robert Fripp. What was their influence on you?
They made me feel “I can do that,” which is funny, because they are the opposite of how I approached the instrument. They are technically proficient. They know exactly what they’re doing. When I first tried to play solos, I didn’t know scales. I made up my own. It was about what sounded nice to me, the dissonance of it. But when I heard those guys, I thought, “They’re doing it. It sounds good. That means I can do it too.” I heard Black Flag at 12 years old and King Crimson at 16. They were huge milestones for me in the way I understood English-speaking rock music.

Was Jimi Hendrix an inspiration? The suites and atmospheres on “Frances the Mute” remind me of his guitar orchestrations on “Electric Ladyland.”
That’s my favorite stuff, the textural things. A lot of the long segues, the intros and outros in my songs, are written separately. Sometimes I’m in the mood for meditation music, things that take a long time to unfold. Then I realize they are in the same key as another song I’m writing and are begging to be put together.

0 Before the Mars Volta, you were in At the Drive-In, a two-guitar band. What was your half of that sound?
I would describe it as warfare. I hated the guitar at that point. My thing was to make it sound like anything but a guitar in the choice of notes and effects pedals. I took it as my job to pervert the songs as much as possible, to give them a bit of character.

How would you describe your tone in the Mars Volta?
Anything that is hurtful to the ear. It’s been a running joke with engineers since the first album. I go, “We need more of this. We need that effect pedal.” They go, “Well, it’s completely fucking obnoxious now.” That’s my tone. There is something beautiful in anything intense and hard-going. The rewards are always greater.

You use dozens of effects pedals. What are good examples of how you use them?
I love the sound of delay pedals, particularly the Memory Man, because it has vibrato with the delay. It’s two effects in one, the way the note wavers in and out. It sounds like an old lady speaking. At the beginning of “Roulette Dares (The Haunt of)” [on 2003's De-Loused in the Comatorium], the guitar has a frequency analyzer on it. It goes from this warm, sweeping sound to the high-pitched registers. It feels like your eardrums are about to break.

But you can also play simple, beautiful things like “Tourniquet Man” on the new Mars Volta album, “The Bedlam in Goliath.” I’m surprised when I can play nice. I’m surprised even more when I keep it. I am such a child in that way. If I hear my engineer say, “Wow, I really like that,” I go, “Really? Let’s put that ring modulator on it. Now turn it backward. How do you like it now?”

[From Issue 1054 — June 12, 2008]

Norskt TV-inslag om konceptalbum

TMV är med i början.

Videointervju med Cedric på Pampelmoose

The Mars Volta Sasquatch 2008, video interview

I ran into Cedric and Omar from The Mars Volta back stage. We caught up about the last time we spent time together in Los Angeles in 2005 doing a remix together of Gang of Four’s ‘To Hell With Poverty’ with Cedric laying down the vocals in some serious street Spanish way. Of course it never saw the light of day. Pity. Anyway here’s the video.

The Mars Volta Sasquatch Festival 2008, an interview with Cedric and Omar from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Wes The Mes remixar Tourniquet Man

Finns på MySpace.

Intervju i Calgary Herald

Truth is way out there
Mars Volta make blissful sound out of aural bedlam
Mike Bell, Calgary Herald
Published: Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Spotlight

The Mars Volta perform tonight at the U of C’s MacEwan Hall.

One of the great ironies of life is that effort should seem effortless. The more you do, the less it should be apparent.

And when it does, when you’re successful at seeming nonchalant, you somehow give up all claims on that effort.

Such is the crux of The Mars Volta. For almost a decade, the progressive American rock act has dispensed the kind of aural explosions that, to a less discerning ear, may sound slap-dash, unstructured and entirely free-from.

The truth? Well, the truth couldn’t be further out there.

“It is somewhat of a slap in the face that people are like, ‘Oh you guys just jam and you make these records — they just come out,’ ” says the band’s songwriter and producer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez.

“I spend months putting all of these melodies together making sure that technically they all work together and interweave, and (figuring out) how it’s all going to come together in the end and the placement of each song and the order. And then I record this material completely out of order,” he says likening it to making a movie, which is recorded out of sequenced and then pieced together to make a narrative.

“But to do that you have to have an incredible sense of complete overview, of being able in your mind to picture how it’s going to work in the end.

“So there’s a lot of planning, there’s a lot of meticulous effort put into it . . .

“As I say, it’s a slap in the face for how much work I put in, but at the same time it doesn’t matter because that’s ego s—.”

The band’s latest, perhaps greatest sonic opus The Bedlam In Goliath — an album so exhaustive and exhausting in what it puts you and your mind through it should be sold with a towel and an intravenous tube.

Released earlier this year, it takes the band’s exploration of sound — one they’ve fearlessly charted over the course of five years and four studio albums since Rodriguez-Lopez and lyricist-vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala left ’90s rock act At the Drive-In — to entirely different heights and degrees of heaviness. It hits harder, funks louder, and never lets up over the course of its beautifully brutal barrage.

Again, to the uninitiated, it may not sound like a tremendous departure from past Mars Volta outings, but Rodriguez-Lopez says its origins lay in attempting to get as far away from its predecessor as possible.

“When you’re making a record you just always try to divorce yourself from the last experience and get as far away from it as you can,” he says.

“For me, when I wrote (2006’s) Amputechture it was — even though it doesn’t sound like it probably — it was about space and the space in between the notes. I thought a lot about water and water elements in things, and big hallways in architecture, and, again, a lot of space.

“So when I started this record I thought, ‘Well, then, this should be a jail cell. There should be no space, there should be claustrophobia, it should be the fire element . . .’

“Where normally I’m very comfortable with my compositions sort of crescendoing off and starting with one noise that turns into another that turns into another, I said, ‘F— it. I’m going to abandon all that. I just want this record to start and all the musicians are playing all at the same time and then we all keep going until the very end and then it’s done. Your space can be when you’re done with the record. And you throw it away.’ “

Doubtful anyone would think to throw away Bedlam — it’s one of those albums that demands repeated listens, and just as the way it was designed and recorded, requires a great amount of effort and attention to consume it in its entirety.

That in itself says not only a great deal about the band, but a great deal about Universal, the major label that continues to release Mars Volta’s albums despite their lack of marketability and willingness to conform, placing greater emphasis on artistry than commodity.

“I still don’t understand it, but it’s been very nice” Rodriguez-Lopez says with a laugh, noting it comes down to an understanding: ” ‘We make our music, you give us money, you sell the music . . . We stay out of your hair you stay out of ours and we can be friends.’

My biggest fear is to become a modern band of isolated moments,” he continues.

“And the way that most bands everything is centred around the single, and the song, the song on iTunes, that one moment you can sell to people with very short attention spans to throw in the shuffle list on their iPods and have playing in the background.

“That’s my biggest fear to become just background music,” he says. “Which is not to say I don’t love certain styles of background music. I also love single tracks from people, it’s just not what I want to be doing. I like the full read. I like the full meal.”

Rodriguez-Lopez admits he’s already begun writing the next feast, the one that will be the opposite to Bedlam — an album inspired by acoustic musicians such as Joni Mitchell or Vic Chesnutt.

But if that leads you to expect a Mars Volta unplugged album — well, then you really haven’t been paying attention, now have you?

“Most people take influence as a photocopy,” the songwriter says. “They say, ‘Oh I love Black Flag, I love Joy Division,’ and then you hear their music and you say, ‘Oh, yeah, Black Flag, Joy Division.’ Instead of it just being an influence, instead of being what it’s supposed to be, the spirit of those people, the spirit of their lives, the spirit of everything behind the music, everything that led up to the moment right before they strummed their guitars or pounded on their drums.

“To me, that’s what I mean when I say acoustic-inspired.”

mike.bell@calgaryherald.com

“Life On Mars”, artikel i Edmonton Journal

Life on Mars
Prog-rock band tours heavily symbolic fourth album
Tom Murray, Freelance
Published: 2:03 am
THE MARS VOLTA

When: Thursday night at 8

Where: Edmonton Event Centre

Tickets: $39.50 plus service charges at Ticketmaster, 451-8000

EDMONTON - When Elvis split the generations in 1956, he might not have been making a statement of disengagement between body and brain, but the message was clear to everyone else.

The apparently mindless clatter of rock ‘n’ roll appalled practically everyone over 15, but it did shake things up in a musically desiccated period.

That the same kids grooving to Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On may have eventually wanted to pick up those rhythmic cues and add something a little more thoughtful was probably inevitable. You can have fun tracing the beginnings of progressive rock if you want — the Beatles’ Revolver, Pink Floyd — but the fact is that musicians have been pushing at the genre’s 12-bar beginnings from the start.

Progressive rock in the ’70s — the heyday of the form — wedded the vitality of rock to the structural complexities of jazz, world music, classical. At its best — King Crimson, Gentle Giant, Peter Gabriel-era Genesis — it pointed a way out of an encroaching musical cul-de-sac. At its worst, prog laboured under the weight of an awful lot of pretension, an unbecoming embarrassment at basic rock ‘n’ roll.

That prog managed to hold on after punk rock reset the counter back to zero indicates unfinished business — whatever else, creative musicians are always going to want to shake off constraints. It’s pure irony that prog in the 21st century has found many devotees in musicians that started off playing punk.

Like The Mars Volta, a prog-rock outfit born out of the wreckage of post-hardcore punks At The Drive-In. You can barely find a focus in The Mars Volta’s music — it veers wildly between jazz, Latin and intricate hard rock — and the members are not interested in typecasting themselves musically. They’re more likely to point towards Werner Herzog films as primary influences.

“There are no training wheels,” spits out guitarist Cedric Bixler-Zavala about his band’s series of concept albums, the fourth of which, The Bedlam in Goliath, was released in January this year.

“There’s no one to hold your hand and explain things, no character that ‘plays a mean pinball.’ These are not obvious concept records — they’re steeped in symbolism, they’re a gigantic riddle.”

The recording of The Bedlam in Goliath had a run of bad luck attached to it, something that Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez attribute to the purchase of an Ouija board in Jerusalem.

“It’s all true,” he affirms about the spirit invasion blamed for tracks mysteriously disappearing, Bixler-Zavala’s foot surgery, and an engineer quitting after a nervous breakdown.

“Bedlam in Goliath is our Satanic Verses, our version of the film that van Gogh’s cousin (Theo) made that got him killed (Submission).”

Bixler-Zavala calls the offending Ouija board “cosmetic bait,” claiming that “in a weird way it found us, actively sought us out.

“The way I read it, most spirits are unfinished business; they’re lost and asking for someone to unravel the mystery of their deaths.”

It would be tempting to say that Canada’s own prog legends Rush have unfinished business to take care of, that their stock has dwindled since the days of

Caress of Steel or Farewell to Kings in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Tempting, but not true.

The power trio, who perform Tuesday, May 27, at Rexall Place, are still trundling along with a faithful fan base.

Last year’s Snakes and Arrows showed that the band had more to offer than their noted obsession with Objectivist author Ayn Rand or other science-fiction themes. The title of their latest album is a Buddhist allusion, the songs as forward-thinking and complicated as ever. The desire for prog was never more evident than when Snakes and Arrows hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts — no unfinished business to take care of there.

New York’s Coheed and Cambria often get compared with Rush, but guitarist Travis Stever doesn’t want to be lumped in with the current wave of prog rockers.

“Well, we’re always making progress as a band,” he says. “Whether we’re actually playing progressive rock or not, I’m not so sure. I think we’re a mixture of all different genres, but when you break it down, it’s all just rock anyways — we’re a rock band that experiments with every rock form, combining everything we love, but not intentionally.”

Coheed and Cambria also experiments with other media. The group’s albums are inspired by The Armory Wars, a series of science-fiction comic books written by singer Claudio Sanchez. Their fourth disc — Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume Two: No World for Tomorrow — completes the concept-album cycle, but Stevers notes that Sanchez has plenty more ideas within The Armory Wars universe to work with.

“Who knows what we’ll do musically after this,” Stevers shrugs.

“We don’t really feel that we have anything to prove, and we could just as likely be playing straight rock ‘n’ roll as so called ‘prog rock.’ Maybe the next album will be country.”