Bassplayer.com intervjuar Juan Alderete
Från junuari, men jag hade då inte sett den förut i alla fall.
| January, 2008
Some things are just meant to happen, even in the face of adversity. When Juan Alderete and the Mars Volta convened to begin recording the band’s fourth studio album, they’d already been through a change of drummers. In the interim, guitarist and producer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez’s studio flooded, and singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala needed foot surgery. Worse, when basic tracking for the new album was nearly complete, the band’s engineer temporarily flipped out and refused to give up the session tapes, claiming the product of their efforts was evil.
“It’s almost a blessing in disguise that all this has happened to us,” Alderete insists. “We’ve got a new drummer now, and it’s a new era of the band. We’re gonna have people who miss the old sound, but Omar’s never been about repeating himself. This is another stage in our evolution, because this record doesn’t sound like anything else we’ve done.” Pretty much immediately, The Bedlam in Goliath lives up to that assessment. The entire band crashes in on the first beat of “Aberinkula”—a menacing psych-rock onslaught with Alderete holding down his signature growly low end on a Lakland Darryl Jones bass, which he plays throughout the album.
Alderete’s roots in the Cali cult band Racer X have always informed his rapid-fire, hard-plucked technique—but in the Mars Volta, extreme signal processing plays an equally vital role in his sound. On the funk-flavored screamer “Ilyena,” he dials in a distortion-kissed tone that lies somewhere between the Jesus Lizard’s David Sims and Brit bass legend John Wetton (he acknowledges both as influences), while on the anthemic “Goliath,” he relies on a slew of stomp boxes—including a Dunlop Bass Wah and an Electro-Harmonix Bass Micro Synth—to achieve an alien, sawtooth-wave sonic texture. “That’s actually Omar manipulating the pedals on that,” Alderete reveals. “I’ve gotten to the point where I just let him pretty much go crazy in the studio, because a lot of times when we record, I don’t know what I’m about to play. He’ll show me a bass line, and while I’m trying to master the fingering of it, he wants to put sounds on it. So I’m just like, ‘Go for it,’ and he’ll freak it right there on the spot.”
To add to the constant learning curve, Alderete had to recalibrate his rhythm-section approach with incoming drummer Thomas Pridgen, who replaced longtime skinsman Jon Theodore. “I’ve always felt pretty competent that I could keep pace with a drummer,” Alderete says, “but I really had to practice for this tour because this dude is on another level. He’s just so fast and so quick, it’s like playing with Squarepusher programming the drums right there in the room. I’m just praying that I can ride with him live!”
CAN BE HEARD ON
The Mars Volta (all on Universal)
The Bedlam in Goliath [2008]
Amputechture [2006]
Frances the Mute [2005]Omar Rodriguez-Lopez Quintet, The Apocalypse Inside of an Orange [Infrasonic Sound, 2007]
Big Sir, Und Die Scheiße Ändert Sich Immer [Gold Standard Labs, 2006]
Racer X, Second Heat [Shrapnel, 1988]
CURRENTLY SPINNING
Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Renaissance Man [Gramavision, 1983]
50 Cent, The Massacre [Aftermath, 2005]
The Geto Boys, The Geto Boys [Def American, 1990]
N.W.A., Straight Outta Compton [Ruthless, 1988]GEAR
Basses Lakland Skyline Darryl Jones, Lakland Joe Osborn with Dark Star pickups, fretless ’71 Fender Precision, ’73 Fender Precision, ’77 Fender Jazz, all with Ernie Ball medium roundwounds
Rig Two Ampeg SVT-VR heads with two Ampeg SVT 810 cabs
Select effects Boss VB-2 Vibrato, Dunlop Crybaby Bass Wah, Electro-Harmonix Bass Micro Synthesizer, Maestro Ring Modulator, Musitronics Mu-Tron III, Sovtek Fuzz
