Formed out of the drug-fuelled implosion of influential post-hardcore group At the Drive-In, US progressive/psychedelic rockers The Mars Volta have never been ones to do things by the book. With the release of The Bedlam in Goliath, their fourth studio album, in January The Mars Volta once again redefined their sound, moving away from the Latin-infused psychedelic rock of their first two offerings, De-Loused in the Comatorium and Frances the Mute, and ushering in a more precise and metered, yet incredibly frenetic, version of the progressive stylings of their third album Amputechture. Wireless Bollinger’s Alex De Petro spoke with vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala on the eve of their 2008 Australian tour.

The story behind the album is interesting enough in itself, involving a Ouija board named the Soothsayer which guitarist and composer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez picked up in Israel, inciting a drummer’s departure, insane music techs and flooding studios. If only American teen starlets had such tools at their disposal in recording their ‘albums’! Bixler-Zavala offers a no less potentially hyperbolic rendition of the genesis of the album, saying that “it’s a record essentially about what in Muslim society is called an honour killing. The Ouija board is the prison and the women who tried to contact us were the inhabitant. The male who contacted us was also murdered as well in retaliation by the women. Essentially its ghosts trying to get someone to do a little detective work and figure out why it is they are ghosts and why it is that they met with foul play. So it’s an album that comments heavily on organized religion, because in my opinion at the root of most human atrocities in the world is extreme organized religion.”

Of course getting to the root of the enigmatic Bixler-Zavala’s opinion is arduous enough in itself; his unfathomable lyrics are written in a language not known on earth, which just by a cheerful coincidence happens to use English and Spanish words. “Essentially I just try to get the emotion out first and to write the lyric later… for some bands it works that way and for some bands you are really concerned with what he says.” Not conveying emotion is something that could never be said of Mars Volta records, the lack of conventional comprehensibility aside. “The main concern with what we do is with the emotion you feel from it, you shouldn’t be like ‘is it grammatically correct?’, ‘what is he saying?’, ‘what word is that?’. You know I’m painting with language and when you paint with language it doesn’t always make sense. So Omar usually likes me to blurt out my first reaction and he likes to keep that. And later I’ll write it, or later I’ll claim that it’s a word.” The collaboration between Bixler-Zavala and the portentously prolific Rodriguez-Lopez has been a fruitful one, described as “an instant chemistry that I can’t put into words” and it’s obvious that both gain a lot from the partnership.

But Bixler-Zavala draws inspiration from everywhere it seems, not only from the countless other talented musicians he has worked with, including Larry Harlow, Flea and John Frusciante, but directors, actors and even soccer players. “I’d like my lyrics and my performance to read and sound the way Joan Crawford’s behavioral instability looked and acted, and I’d like it to come off as attractive as Helen Mirren is to me and I’d like it to be as subversive as Mark Gonzalez is on a daily basis. I’m just taking influences that aren’t very musical all the time.”

Their projected output for the immediate future is looking to redefine all concepts of what fans can expect from even the most hardworking of groups, with the band working on an acoustic album, an album with the equally productive LA based drummer Zach Hill, several soundtracks (including one for controversial Mexican director Guillermo Arriaga), a split EP with Canadian band The Evaporators (whose lead singer’s name, Nardwuar The Human Serviette, could serve as a Mars Volta album title in itself) and two movies, a new live DVD incorporating much of their 2007 Australian tour and a retrospective narrative film to be released when the band completes its run. Change is also in the air, as the band end their five year long relationship with Universal Music: “Technically when we signed to Universal they didn’t sign the contract so we don’t have to be in contract with them anymore. But it’s hard to get your foot in the door without flirting with a major label, not everyone can be like this socialist kind of band like Fugazi: that’s great when you have four people who are willing to take on that kind of work but it doesn’t work with this kind of band. You kind of have to flirt with the big guys, and now that we’ve flirted we know what it is we don’t like, there’s a lot of stuff we don’t like, and at the pace that we release material not even our own management can keep up with us. So it’s a nice prospect to think that we can do things on our own.”

Their legion of black-clad, luxuriously coiffured fans will sing their praises (perhaps not in the blinding falsetto that Cedric frequently unloads) as unequivocally epic masters of musical excess, and their detractors will call them out for their over-intensity and refusal to make easy, accessible music, but this doesn’t matter to a band like The Mars Volta. They make music not to please fans or pander to the critics, not to sell records or merchandise, not even, to quote an old cliché, for music’s sake, but to fulfill some great manifest destiny that can only come about when the stars and planets align and two intensely genius musicians combine. And are given a haunted Aramaic Ouija board.