Julio Venegas, un artista de El Paso,Texas, se suicidó en 1996. Un espíritu libre y provocador, “Era definitivamente alguien que vivió la vida al máximo,” recuerda su amigo, Cedric Bixler Zavala. “Al final, estaba muy mal de una pierna debido a que estuvo en coma un tiempo. Tenía millones de cicatrices por todo el cuerpo y uno de sus más cercanos amigos lo llamaba Frankenstein. Tenía grandes cortadas en su garganta, marcas resaltadas, moretones y chipotes, y uno de sus brazos se encogió al ser salpicado por veneno de ratas luego de dispararle. Acumuló tantas cicatrices que parecía un mapa viviente.”
Cuando Cedric cantaba en At The Drive-In, escribió una canción llamada “Embroglio” en el disco Acrobatic Tenement (1996) acerca de Venegas, quien se había matado mientras la banda se encontraba en un ensayo. “No sentí que le hubiéramos hecho justicia,” continúa, “sentí que un disco en su totalidad debería ser dedicado a él.”
Ese disco es De-Loused In the Comatorium, el asombroso primer álbum de The Mars Volta. De-Loused In the Comatorium es iridiscente, carente de miedo y va directo al cerebro, es una celebración ‘ficcionalizada’ a la vida de Julio Venegas. Basado en una historia escrita por Cedric, es un álbum conceptual en el que el héroe intenta cometer suicidio mediante una sobredosis de morfina. En lugar de morir, cae en coma por una semana y experimenta fantásticas aventuras en sus sueños, batallas elementales entre los aspectos buenos y malos de su consciencia. Al final, sale del coma pero escoge morir.
Material ambicioso, pero hemos aprendido a esperar mucho de Cedric y Omar Rodriguez-Lopez. Como dice Omar, “Tenemos una ideología sólida, y parte de eso es siempre crecer y no tener las mismas ideas del año anterior.” En At The Drive-In, las letras de Cedric fueron influenciadas por el post-hardcore. Ahora, la música es más imaginativa y hace el compromiso a un lado al ver que las palabras: De-Loused In the Comatorium consisten en 8 tracks que perfectamente recuerdan a Led Zeppelin, Fugazi, Jane’s Adicction, Can, Santana, Spirit, el Miles Davis de los 70’s Dub ambiental…y hasta At The Drive-In ocasionalmente. Es música no encasillable en un género, que no tiene miedo a la seriedad, lleno de ideas en cada nota.
“Creo que el concepto de música progresiva siempre ha estado presente,” dice Cedric. “ Era el dinosaurio que los chicos querían derribar. Pero espero que nadie se imagine a un tipo tocando el teclado con una capa puesta presentando la música como si fuera Mars Volta on Ice. Tenemos los pies más plantados en el piso, hay mucha belleza punk envuelta en lo que hacemos.” Para Cedric y Omar, The Mars Volta también representa un escape, una manera de liberarse de la música rigurosa y limitada.
Al terminar At The Drive-In su gira por Europa en el 2001, Cedric no estaba feliz con las expectativas y las políticas de la banda. “Me aburrió la música que tocábamos,” recuerda. “Ibamos a hacer siempre los mismos discos. Fue padre poder llamar la atención con At The Drive-In luego de 6 años, pero nos dejó en banca rota, musical y espiritualmente.”
Omar cree que “siempre es importante alterar el orden en tu propio sistema, empezar con un tachones y no tener miedo a mostrarte como eres.” Entonces le contó a Cedric su plan. “La idea era tener una banda libre de cajas, libre de limitaciones conceptuales. Ambos sabíamos que esto significaba un sacrificio enorme, corazones rotos y un cambio radical en nuestras vidas. Pero aceptábamos eso para que la música no fuera quien sufriera.”
Así que llevaron a los otros miembros de ATDI al parque en donde todo comenzó y formalmente deshicieron la banda. Omar empezó a reclutar gente, músicos expansivos para The Mars Volta: el tecladista Ikey Owens de The Long Beach Dub All-Stars y John Theodore, un baterista que había tocado en Golden al igual que Jeremy Ward, su amigo de De Facto (banda experimental de Omar anterior a ATDI), quien se convertiría en el miembro secreto del grupo lanzando samples y efectos fuera del escenario. “Era increíble tocar con gente que entendía nuestra visión,” continúa, “aunque estas influencias siempre estuvieron vivas en ATDI.”
El EP titulado Tremulant, lanzado bajo su propio sello Gold Standard Laboratories, y una serie de aliados se hizo presente: Rick Rubin firmó como productor, Flea ayudó haciendo su parte en el bajo; John Frusciante otro viejo amigo y también miembro de Red Hot Chili Peppers añadió guitarras a la canción “Cicatriz”. A finales del año pasado se fueron a un lugar en Laurel Canyon con Rick Rubin, una casa embrujada con “fuerte presencia”, según Omar, y comenzaron a grabar De-Loused In the Comatorium. El resultado es un álbum apasionado, elaborado, inventivo y compensatorio, uno de esos discos raros en donde la innovación musical está muy marcada, movimiento a movimiento, por un jalón emocional bastante profundo. “Creo que este disco tomará unos cuantas escuchadas,” admite Cedric, “pero todos mis discos favoritos son así.”
The Mars Volta, parece demandar más de la música, y no pensar sin razón que no están solos. “Nuestra música es enteramente egoísta, pero somos humanos arriba del promedio,” reconoce Omar, modestamente. “Así que si lo hicimos nosotros, tiene que haber más gente que también lo hará.”
Julio Venegas, un artista de El Paso,Texas, se suicidó en 1996. Un espíritu libre y provocador, “Era definitivamente alguien que vivió la vida al máximo,” recuerda su amigo, Cedric Bixler Zavala. “Al final, estaba muy mal de una pierna debido a que estuvo en coma un tiempo. Tenía millones de cicatrices por todo el cuerpo y uno de sus más cercanos amigos lo llamaba Frankenstein. Tenía grandes cortadas en su garganta, marcas resaltadas, moretones y chipotes, y uno de sus brazos se encogió al ser salpicado por veneno de ratas luego de dispararle. Acumuló tantas cicatrices que parecía un mapa viviente.”
Cuando Cedric cantaba en At The Drive-In, escribió una canción llamada “Embroglio” en el disco Acrobatic Tenement (1996) acerca de Venegas, quien se había matado mientras la banda se encontraba en un ensayo. “No sentí que le hubiéramos hecho justicia,” continúa, “sentí que un disco en su totalidad debería ser dedicado a él.”
Ese disco es De-Loused In the Comatorium, el asombroso primer álbum de The Mars Volta. De-Loused In the Comatorium es iridiscente, carente de miedo y va directo al cerebro, es una celebración ‘ficcionalizada’ a la vida de Julio Venegas. Basado en una historia escrita por Cedric, es un álbum conceptual en el que el héroe intenta cometer suicidio mediante una sobredosis de morfina. En lugar de morir, cae en coma por una semana y experimenta fantásticas aventuras en sus sueños, batallas elementales entre los aspectos buenos y malos de su consciencia. Al final, sale del coma pero escoge morir.
Material ambicioso, pero hemos aprendido a esperar mucho de Cedric y Omar Rodriguez-Lopez. Como dice Omar, “Tenemos una ideología sólida, y parte de eso es siempre crecer y no tener las mismas ideas del año anterior.” En At The Drive-In, las letras de Cedric fueron influenciadas por el post-hardcore. Ahora, la música es más imaginativa y hace el compromiso a un lado al ver que las palabras: De-Loused In the Comatorium consisten en 8 tracks que perfectamente recuerdan a Led Zeppelin, Fugazi, Jane’s Adicction, Can, Santana, Spirit, el Miles Davis de los 70’s Dub ambiental…y hasta At The Drive-In ocasionalmente. Es música no encasillable en un género, que no tiene miedo a la seriedad, lleno de ideas en cada nota.
“Creo que el concepto de música progresiva siempre ha estado presente,” dice Cedric. “ Era el dinosaurio que los chicos querían derribar. Pero espero que nadie se imagine a un tipo tocando el teclado con una capa puesta presentando la música como si fuera Mars Volta on Ice. Tenemos los pies más plantados en el piso, hay mucha belleza punk envuelta en lo que hacemos.” Para Cedric y Omar, The Mars Volta también representa un escape, una manera de liberarse de la música rigurosa y limitada.
Al terminar At The Drive-In su gira por Europa en el 2001, Cedric no estaba feliz con las expectativas y las políticas de la banda. “Me aburrió la música que tocábamos,” recuerda. “Ibamos a hacer siempre los mismos discos. Fue padre poder llamar la atención con At The Drive-In luego de 6 años, pero nos dejó en banca rota, musical y espiritualmente.”
Omar cree que “siempre es importante alterar el orden en tu propio sistema, empezar con un tachones y no tener miedo a mostrarte como eres.” Entonces le contó a Cedric su plan. “La idea era tener una banda libre de cajas, libre de limitaciones conceptuales. Ambos sabíamos que esto significaba un sacrificio enorme, corazones rotos y un cambio radical en nuestras vidas. Pero aceptábamos eso para que la música no fuera quien sufriera.”
Así que llevaron a los otros miembros de ATDI al parque en donde todo comenzó y formalmente deshicieron la banda. Omar empezó a reclutar gente, músicos expansivos para The Mars Volta: el tecladista Ikey Owens de The Long Beach Dub All-Stars y John Theodore, un baterista que había tocado en Golden al igual que Jeremy Ward, su amigo de De Facto (banda experimental de Omar anterior a ATDI), quien se convertiría en el miembro secreto del grupo lanzando samples y efectos fuera del escenario. “Era increíble tocar con gente que entendía nuestra visión,” continúa, “aunque estas influencias siempre estuvieron vivas en ATDI.”
El EP titulado Tremulant, lanzado bajo su propio sello Gold Standard Laboratories, y una serie de aliados se hizo presente: Rick Rubin firmó como productor, Flea ayudó haciendo su parte en el bajo; John Frusciante otro viejo amigo y también miembro de Red Hot Chili Peppers añadió guitarras a la canción “Cicatriz”. A finales del año pasado se fueron a un lugar en Laurel Canyon con Rick Rubin, una casa embrujada con “fuerte presencia”, según Omar, y comenzaron a grabar De-Loused In the Comatorium. El resultado es un álbum apasionado, elaborado, inventivo y compensatorio, uno de esos discos raros en donde la innovación musical está muy marcada, movimiento a movimiento, por un jalón emocional bastante profundo. “Creo que este disco tomará unos cuantas escuchadas,” admite Cedric, “pero todos mis discos favoritos son así.”
The Mars Volta, parece demandar más de la música, y no pensar sin razón que no están solos. “Nuestra música es enteramente egoísta, pero somos humanos arriba del promedio,” reconoce Omar, modestamente. “Así que si lo hicimos nosotros, tiene que haber más gente que también lo hará.”
The Mars Volta is neither a concept album band nor a prog band. Sure, they excel at both, but Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala formed the Mars Volta in 2001 in order to dispose of labels and limitations of any kind, to move beyond genres strip-mined into obsolescence--be they dinosaur prog or 2-D punk.
"We are really tired of those labels and questions," says guitarist, co-founder and producer Rodriguez-Lopez. "Concept album? How can any huge project that takes up most of your life for a year not have a concept? Prog? How can any innovative, forward-thinking art or music not be progressive? It reminds me of when I first heard the label "Emo," which was the most ridiculous label ever. How can anything you put your heart and soul into not be emotional?"
With that out of the way: The Mars Volta's Frances The Mute is NOT a "sequel" to 2003's De-Loused In The Comatorium. Yes it builds a story around the memory of a dear departed friend--but the similarities end there. Where De-Loused was a finite sci-fi narrative that took place entirely in an imaginary universe created for the story (and rife with vocabulary peculiar to the story at hand created by Bixler-Zavalas), Frances transpires in the real world, inspired by a diary found by late bandmate Jeremy Ward (R.I.P.) and the similarity of the anonymous author's life to his own.
"The story is inspired by a diary that Jeremy found in the backseat of a car while working as a repo man," singer/lyricist Bixler-Zavala. "He discovered he had a lot in common with its author. He kept it and let us in on it. The diary told of the author being adopted and looking for his real parents. The names of each song are named after people in the diary. Each person he meets sort of points him in the direction of his biological parents.
"Every work of music or art is going to reflect your experiences and feelings at the time," Omar adds. "This record was obviously influenced by the trauma of losing Jeremy. But Cedric consciously omitted anything with too much clarity or resolution, It's like when he was singing 'Now I'm lost' on the first record: It could be literal or it could apply to anything!
"This could have been a much angrier record. When we made the last record, Julio (Venegas, band friend and mentor whose life and death inspired De-Loused) had already been dead for 10 years. These feelings and experiences were much more fresh. But we didn't want it to be that literal. And there are things about it we don't want to share, that would be too personal or redundant to even talk about..."
"It's a story of abandonment and addiction," Cedric concludes. "As to whether any of it really happened is not certain. That's something best suited for the listener to figure out. We can only provide the pieces."
Which leaves Frances The Mute to do the talking. Featuring the first in-studio foray of the finely honed Mars Volta live machine and Omar's first time in the producer's chair, Frances is basically five interconnected songs (the band considers silence between songs "a distraction like if there were gaps between every scene in a movie"): Trademark Volta crescendos of opener "Cygnus Vismund Cygnus" dissolve amidst a cacophony of electronic pulses and ambient washes of surf--or are they highway?--background noise, giving way to majestic ballad "The Widow," which itself splinters and careens into the powerhouse stomp of "L'Via L'Viaquez," a showstopper highlighted by career defining performances from every member of the band: Bixler-Zavalas' hair-raising en Espanol vocal, Rodriguez-Lopez' guitar speaking in tongues, drummer Jon Theodore alternately invoking Bonham's ghost and taking backseat to half-tempo salsa grooves conjured by bassist Juan Alderete- De la Pena , keyboardist Ikey Owens and newest member Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez Dive in at the 3:45 mark and tell me you're not listening to the classic rock of the future. "Miranda That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore" hits full rock throttle around the eight-minute mark before concluding with several minutes of Morricone-esque atmospherics and segueing into the explosive intro of "Cassandra Gemini," kicking off a 32-minute epic that ultimately returns to the opening motif of "Cygnus" thus rounding out the five-song 75-plus minute epic.
Despite familiar trappings such as colorful aliases for amalgams of real-life and fictionalized characters (the title character is the birth mother of protagonist Cygnus), Frances is a much more organic and reality-rooted experience-it even has a moral: "You learn so much about people from their roots. If I meet my friends' mothers and fathers, I learn so much more about them. That's a big aspect of this story. But if there's a moral to the story, it's the main character's discovery of the meaning of family: He learns that family is the people around you that care about you and that you care about-not necessarily people you're tied to by blood."
Somehow, the Mars Volta's steadfast refusal to deviate from a singular vision has resulted in both artistic and commercial triumph. The band's 2003 debut, De-Loused In The Comatorium, was based on a story by Cedric in which hero Cerpin Taxt (inspired as noted above by the late El Paso artist Julio Venegas) falls into a coma, experiencing fantastic adventures in his dreams, elemental battles between good and bad aspects of his conscience, ultimately emerging from the coma, but choosing to die. With little to no support from conventional promotional avenues, De-Loused In The Comatorium sold in excess of half a million copies worldwide, bolstered by the already legendary Volta live experience that has since become an SRO experience in theaters and festival grounds the globe over. By the close of 2003, De-Loused In The Comatorium had racked up raves from SPIN (A), ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY (A-), the LOS ANGELES TIMES (four stars), BLENDER (four stars) and MAXIM (five stars!), and placed in the year-end Top 10s and readers/critics polls of the NEW YORK TIMES, LOS ANGELES TIMES, TIME OUT, GUITAR WORLD, MODERN DRUMMER, ALTERNATIVE PRESS, REVOLVER, XLR8R, the NEW YORK DAILY NEWS and more.
Prior to De-Loused, the Mars Volta's sole recorded output was the Tremulant EP on their own Gold Standard Laboratories label, while a formative series of early yet still extraordinary shows brought more allies: Rick Rubin signed on as De-Loused producer; Flea helped out on bass; old friend John Frusciante added guitar to the track "Cicatriz." From the start, however, the core vision and intent was clear and the result is passionate, elaborate, relentlessly inventive and utterly rewarding music, one of those rare instances where musical innovation is matched, measure for measure, by a profound emotional connection.
"It feels like right now is the starting point," Omar concludes. "This is where I would objectively introduce someone to us. The last few years felt like our adolescent period, where we were allowed to go out and play but still had to be home by a certain time. Now that's over. The strings have been cut. Anything tying us to any sort of convention has been severed. We're just a self-indulgent group of friends, painting how we feel."
The Mars Volta is neither a concept album band nor a prog band. Sure, they excel at both, but Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala formed the Mars Volta in 2001 in order to dispose of labels and limitations of any kind, to move beyond genres strip-mined into obsolescence--be they dinosaur prog or 2-D punk.
"We are really tired of those labels and questions," says guitarist, co-founder and producer Rodriguez-Lopez. "Concept album? How can any huge project that takes up most of your life for a year not have a concept? Prog? How can any innovative, forward-thinking art or music not be progressive? It reminds me of when I first heard the label "Emo," which was the most ridiculous label ever. How can anything you put your heart and soul into not be emotional?"
With that out of the way: The Mars Volta's Frances The Mute is NOT a "sequel" to 2003's De-Loused In The Comatorium. Yes it builds a story around the memory of a dear departed friend--but the similarities end there. Where De-Loused was a finite sci-fi narrative that took place entirely in an imaginary universe created for the story (and rife with vocabulary peculiar to the story at hand created by Bixler-Zavalas), Frances transpires in the real world, inspired by a diary found by late bandmate Jeremy Ward (R.I.P.) and the similarity of the anonymous author's life to his own.
"The story is inspired by a diary that Jeremy found in the backseat of a car while working as a repo man," singer/lyricist Bixler-Zavala. "He discovered he had a lot in common with its author. He kept it and let us in on it. The diary told of the author being adopted and looking for his real parents. The names of each song are named after people in the diary. Each person he meets sort of points him in the direction of his biological parents.
"Every work of music or art is going to reflect your experiences and feelings at the time," Omar adds. "This record was obviously influenced by the trauma of losing Jeremy. But Cedric consciously omitted anything with too much clarity or resolution, It's like when he was singing 'Now I'm lost' on the first record: It could be literal or it could apply to anything!
"This could have been a much angrier record. When we made the last record, Julio (Venegas, band friend and mentor whose life and death inspired De-Loused) had already been dead for 10 years. These feelings and experiences were much more fresh. But we didn't want it to be that literal. And there are things about it we don't want to share, that would be too personal or redundant to even talk about..."
"It's a story of abandonment and addiction," Cedric concludes. "As to whether any of it really happened is not certain. That's something best suited for the listener to figure out. We can only provide the pieces."
Which leaves Frances The Mute to do the talking. Featuring the first in-studio foray of the finely honed Mars Volta live machine and Omar's first time in the producer's chair, Frances is basically five interconnected songs (the band considers silence between songs "a distraction like if there were gaps between every scene in a movie"): Trademark Volta crescendos of opener "Cygnus Vismund Cygnus" dissolve amidst a cacophony of electronic pulses and ambient washes of surf--or are they highway?--background noise, giving way to majestic ballad "The Widow," which itself splinters and careens into the powerhouse stomp of "L'Via L'Viaquez," a showstopper highlighted by career defining performances from every member of the band: Bixler-Zavalas' hair-raising en Espanol vocal, Rodriguez-Lopez' guitar speaking in tongues, drummer Jon Theodore alternately invoking Bonham's ghost and taking backseat to half-tempo salsa grooves conjured by bassist Juan Alderete- De la Pena , keyboardist Ikey Owens and newest member Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez Dive in at the 3:45 mark and tell me you're not listening to the classic rock of the future. "Miranda That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore" hits full rock throttle around the eight-minute mark before concluding with several minutes of Morricone-esque atmospherics and segueing into the explosive intro of "Cassandra Gemini," kicking off a 32-minute epic that ultimately returns to the opening motif of "Cygnus" thus rounding out the five-song 75-plus minute epic.
Despite familiar trappings such as colorful aliases for amalgams of real-life and fictionalized characters (the title character is the birth mother of protagonist Cygnus), Frances is a much more organic and reality-rooted experience-it even has a moral: "You learn so much about people from their roots. If I meet my friends' mothers and fathers, I learn so much more about them. That's a big aspect of this story. But if there's a moral to the story, it's the main character's discovery of the meaning of family: He learns that family is the people around you that care about you and that you care about-not necessarily people you're tied to by blood."
Somehow, the Mars Volta's steadfast refusal to deviate from a singular vision has resulted in both artistic and commercial triumph. The band's 2003 debut, De-Loused In The Comatorium, was based on a story by Cedric in which hero Cerpin Taxt (inspired as noted above by the late El Paso artist Julio Venegas) falls into a coma, experiencing fantastic adventures in his dreams, elemental battles between good and bad aspects of his conscience, ultimately emerging from the coma, but choosing to die. With little to no support from conventional promotional avenues, De-Loused In The Comatorium sold in excess of half a million copies worldwide, bolstered by the already legendary Volta live experience that has since become an SRO experience in theaters and festival grounds the globe over. By the close of 2003, De-Loused In The Comatorium had racked up raves from SPIN (A), ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY (A-), the LOS ANGELES TIMES (four stars), BLENDER (four stars) and MAXIM (five stars!), and placed in the year-end Top 10s and readers/critics polls of the NEW YORK TIMES, LOS ANGELES TIMES, TIME OUT, GUITAR WORLD, MODERN DRUMMER, ALTERNATIVE PRESS, REVOLVER, XLR8R, the NEW YORK DAILY NEWS and more.
Prior to De-Loused, the Mars Volta's sole recorded output was the Tremulant EP on their own Gold Standard Laboratories label, while a formative series of early yet still extraordinary shows brought more allies: Rick Rubin signed on as De-Loused producer; Flea helped out on bass; old friend John Frusciante added guitar to the track "Cicatriz." From the start, however, the core vision and intent was clear and the result is passionate, elaborate, relentlessly inventive and utterly rewarding music, one of those rare instances where musical innovation is matched, measure for measure, by a profound emotional connection.
"It feels like right now is the starting point," Omar concludes. "This is where I would objectively introduce someone to us. The last few years felt like our adolescent period, where we were allowed to go out and play but still had to be home by a certain time. Now that's over. The strings have been cut. Anything tying us to any sort of convention has been severed. We're just a self-indulgent group of friends, painting how we feel."
|
De-loused In The Comatorium
Tremulant
Frances The Mute
Amputechture
A Missing Chromosome
