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I'm interested in the parts of religion that aren't talked about. The Bible was just too many cooks in the kitchen. It's just a bunch of men telling you what happened, and I just don't believe it's that way. I think any intelligent person would know that. For all we know, Jesus was a black woman.
-Cedric Bixler-Zavala |
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Photo of Cedric from tmvfr.info
JamBase: I figured as much and given the news today, I thought it would be a good way to start. One of the other things I wanted to talk about is the role of religion in your music. On the new album, you have song titles like "Vicarious Atonement," "Tetragrammaton," "Asilos Magdalena" – all have obvious religious connotations. What role has religion played in your music or what influence has it had?
Cedric Bixler-Zavala: I think the closest we come to a spiritual band is when we improvise because that's something that's beyond our control. We do have some sort of control of it, but it really is something else coming through us. That's as far as spirituality comes with us.
"Tetragrammaton," meaning the infallible name of God, is the name you're not supposed to say or use. I thought it would be perfect to use it for a song title. I like using these religious terms and subject matters because I think that they could be taboo sometimes, like the whole don't bring up religion and politics conversation because someone might get mad. Using those words is almost like trying to diffuse the potency of it and show that it's just a word. So I'm just dressing the compositions with these kind of taboo things, taboo for me because of growing up in a Catholic family and always having the fear of God looming over me instead of an appreciation for it.
I've been reading a lot of books about DMT use and how some atheists would take DMT and their doctors would tell them that if you took .35 grams, if you're an atheist, you wouldn't be anymore. I'm interested in the parts of religion that aren't talked about. The Bible was just too many cooks in the kitchen. It's just a bunch of men telling you what happened, and I just don't believe it's that way. I think any intelligent person would know that. For all we know, Jesus was a black woman. I'd be excited if that was the case because, God, can you imagine the wrath that's going to come down on the supposed Armageddon Day? I mean, Jesus, all the male species will be wiped out or something...
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned...
Yeah, exactly!
Are you a practitioner of organized religion today?
No, not at all. I don't believe. If anything, I think Americans should look to Native American Indians. They just built a teepee and worshipped in there. In general, white America seems to put this emphasis on everything but spirituality. There's a church. There are monetary donations. There's all this stuff attached to it that's just horrible. Catholicism is horrible in general. They had the chance to stand up to Nazis; that wasn't a shining moment for them. I don't agree with a lot of it. Having grown up Mexican Catholic, I just saw a lot of hypocrisy in it. I don't want to be afraid of my creator, and that's what I was taught to be. If I was afraid of this guy, why would I even want to be friends with him?
I suppose the idea of a vengeful God was some sort of preventative measure to keep people in line...
Yeah, and then he's also supposed to be loving too? It's a bit too much for me...
Is there any specific piece of art – a book, a painting, a poem, or maybe another piece of music – that informed or influenced the making of this record?
Helena Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled." That stuff's really interesting. I've been watching a couple of documentaries about the occult roots of Nazism and things like that. I just think it's really interesting subject matter.
What other themes or threads run through and interconnect this new album?
Omar & Cedric - The Mars Volta |
Well, there are the marches that just happened and the whole discussion of should we kick immigrants out and if so, where are they going to go? I've always been interested in the Latin community. In California, it's common to have Latin people cutting grass, being nannies, doing everything that actually keeps society glued together. And it's totally underappreciated. So I thought, "What if this person at the other end of the world had influenced an uprising of the people that are the glue of California?" What if that was the connection? I'd actually seen some girl on the news when I was in Poland that was supposedly possessed, and they didn't know what to do with her. So the priest put her outside in the rain and shoved a sock in her mouth, and the next day she was dead. They showed the footage of the actual mass happening on CNN the next day. The priest was some kind of Rasputin character, and so I just wanted to connect both - an uprising that happens in Latin-majority California and kind of tie in the whole schism that's going on with foreigners wanting to be recognized as people instead of just immigrants.
I just thought it would be interesting if that was their trigger, if that was the gunshot. Like the catalyst to the supposed holy race war. I thought it would be more interesting to have this character in Poland with the thread of Catholicism being the identifying mark for Latin people to go, "That's her. That means it's on. Let's go. Let's take what's rightfully ours."
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