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