In
case you don’t know either of them, both Omar Rodriguez and John Frusciante are
undisputed geniuses. Criminally underrated musicians, Lopez and Frusciante have
been close friends since the first half of the 2000s when Frusciante guested on
a Mars Volta record – Omar’s own band. The EP is not a collection of tracks. It
is a proper sequence of sounds. And by golly, what sounds they are. The EP from
the first track 4:17 am to the last, 5:45 am is like an acid trip. Incredibly
visual and suggestive with moments of panic but ultimately, one of the most
beautiful things you’ll come across. Here’s an excerpt from an interview Omar
gave on this EP:
On many of your solo records you actually have John
Frusciante, formerly of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers performing the guitar parts,
I'm curious as to how that relationship came about?
We met at a club years
ago, one of my band's De Facto was playing, and John was a fan of De Facto so
he was there, and I just met this guy in the crowd and we started talking about
Louis Benoit films and I said that I didn't know anybody else who liked Louis
Benoit and he was like "Oh yeah you should come over to my house and we'll
watch some" and I was like "Oh yea let's do that, have you got such
and such, cool I haven't seen that, let's do it." So I went round his
house and he had a bunch of guitars and he was like "Oh yeah I play in
this group Red Hot Chilli Peppers" so it was kinda like that. I personally
didn't know anything about the Chilli Peppers besides obviously just knowing
the name because they were one of the biggest groups around, but I didn't know
obviously what any of them looked like or what their songs were besides that
bridge down town song (Under The Bridge) and so it was nice you know, it was
nice for him and it was nice for me.
It was a true
friendship that started over a love for Louis Benoit and then we started
playing some music together as you would with another person who loves music
and then eventually you realise that one of your closest friends is quite
literally a musical genius so you just try to pick up as much as you can from
that person and make sure that you are having a good time and that results in
records together when you can. He is also a go-to person because I can write a
lot of things that I can't even play, I write things that I hear in my head and
can't play sometimes so it's nice to have a master musician, and also a lot of
the times hearing the thoughts I had in my head become a tangible reality, or
even just seeing him do it, then all of a sudden I'm able to do it. So that
works out good too because I'm a very visual person, I don’t have any musical
training or theory or anything, it's more like when I tried skateboarding when
I was a kid, if I watched somebody do it I could do it, "Oh, that's how
you do an ollie? What are you doing with your back leg there, ohhh ok," so
it's the same when somebody plays guitar and they can play something or find
their way around something and I can look at their hand then I get it and I can
do it. *laughs*
It’s really interesting that you didn’t know anything about
him when you guys met, that’s a cool little twist, people probably wouldn’t
have thought it went down that way.
Yea it was great, and
like I said it was De Facto so it was like a small, two hundred person club and
the fact that he was coming from a band that big and even knew who De Facto was
just shows his interest in everything music related and everything that happens
with records and *laughs*, when I first went to his house I took him a copy of
the first Mars Volta EP because he liked De Facto and I said “here this is this
brand new thing that we’re doing and we’re gonna be giving all our energy to” and
the next time I visited him a couple of nights later he was like “Yea man
that’s so cool on the record how you do this and this” and I realised as we
were having the conversation that he had learned and memorised and was able to
play the entire EP from front to back, all the parts.
Wow, that’s amazing.
*laughs* I know right?
He was getting excited about things, and he knows all this theory so he was
like “Oh, it’s great how you put that seventh over the third and the five” and
all that kinda talk and he’s playing it for me so slowly I’m realising he
learnt this whole thing that I wrote then broke it down in his mind which is
really impressive.
Notable tracks: 0=2 and VTA.
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