Omar Rodriguez Lopez
Mantra Hiroshima

Omar must have a different metabolism than any other artist, or he simply draws time from another space-time dimension, to manage to release records every month, and of such intensity. He writes them, trips out at home, I can see him, in the middle of this vast desert with his electric guitar in hand, his pedals and effects, the synths, while looking at a photo of Carlos Castaneda and chewing a root of devil's weed. Then he picks up the phone, thinks about which musician could help him translate that hub of hallucinations into music for an ensemble and the game is on. That's how I think this "Mantra Hiroshima" is born alongside the good Mars Volta Zach Hill (already with Hella and in El Grupo Nuevo de Omar Rodriguez Lopez, indeed) and Juan Alederete (whom we've heard in Racer-X and as Omar's partner in Mars Volta), in short, the level of madness is decidedly balanced, and that of technique as well.

The disc in question is this: a series of extremely hallucinatory mantras launched into a sea of synths and interspersed with absurd counter-times. It starts with "Acerca De La Vida" which lasts just under 30 seconds but in those twenty seconds you will remember how insistent it was, to enter the warm desert lounge of "On The First Look", the guitar occasionally makes notes to the synthesizers, remains underneath, just gives a voice of its presence. We thus slip into another hypnotic moment with "El Oyente", a regular piece but battered by the snare, which emerges from everywhere, accompanied by a guitar at times psychotic at times totally Hendrixian, warm and sensual, phrases with the piano, insists on the same notes, until sudden accelerations and explosions, then the desert tale disappears and the time is halved, the rhythm breaks and everything becomes prog and fast, we are in the middle of madness. "Mastering Death" is a noise piece in medias-res, as it begins you are catapulted into an oblivion of synths and mescalito useful to transport us into "Los tres "Yo's"", which picks up the crazy insistence of the intro of the record, adds broken rhythms and a screaming synth in the background, cascades of wahwah-tinged anxieties. It's the moment of "Reason And Understanding", which opens with an always Hendrixian note upon which an 8-bit theme makes its way, seemingly freshly emerged from an '80s video game, but it's just a moment, or rather, a minute, and it's time for the "mid tempo" of "El Hacer", with its almost sensual groove, the drums is the master of the game, Hill is an unrelenting time machine, the single-note synth never leaves us, sad and melancholic, it leads us towards the mid-piece openings, as if Santana and Emerson Lake and Palmer walked arm in arm on a desert dune, until going mad far away at sunset, and at the end of the piece. "Hope" is the samba of synths, an orgy of snare, 8-bit, and screaming guitars that leads us dancing towards the last exhausting mantra of the lot "Sobre La Resurreccion", the drums rages over synths born from '70s horror movies (Goblin? Who knows), to transform into a prog piece from those years, a faux-Hammond dancing over the wild snare and the eternal solo of Lopez, up to the noise-industrial explosions that warn the listener that we are almost at the end, but only almost, because a groove returns that leads to the end a relentless that seems to have no end. And yet here it is. 

It is impossible to translate such a record in a few words, but the boundless work of the good Rodriguez Lopez we can transpose with the words of the master (more his, certainly, than mine) Don Juan: "A path without heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to undertake it. On the other hand, it is easy to follow a path with a heart, because you love it without effort."

Tireless.