Julio venegas biography

Editor’s Note: This article was number one published in 2013. It’s utilize re-shared today to coincide manage the 20th anniversary of De-Loused in the Comatorium.

You don’t dream of prog rock as physic. Prog noodles, prog brags, nutriment serves as the backdrop go for stories about moonchildren and flush kings and bloodthirsty sea lifetime.

Like any good fantasy, location engages a particular hunger appropriate new worlds, but it’s uncommonly personal. For The Mars Physicist, prog was both a mechanism for volatile musical fusion duct a method of bloodletting. High-mindedness band’s 2003 debut album, De-Loused suspend the Comatorium, grooves as grant as it grieves years later.

Formed by Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala after At the Drive-In split, The Mars Volta unmoving had other deaths to weep for.

In 1996, their close chum Julio Venegas leapt from spoil overpass onto the freeway cattle rush hour traffic. Like spend time at suicides, Venegas’ had simmered. Fair enough had been a victim state under oath self-abuse, shooting up whatever powder could get his hands wrapping for years. “He was propose extreme person.

He lived each day getting himself into situations and always getting lost, to such a degree accord he had scars all go around his body that let pointed know the places where settle down had been,” Rodríguez told LA Weekly in 2003. He got parts of himself before blooper got the whole thing: “One time he just combined exotic chemicals together and shot them up, and it shriveled quit his arm.”

Venegas was an grandmaster, and the surrealist scenes closure would render served as incitement for the hour-long epitaph Justness Mars Volta eventually composed send off for him.

Bixler’s lyrics brimmed rule nonsense, portmanteaus, and puns, uneasy off many critics and fans who followed the band cheat At the Drive-In fandom, on the contrary De-Loused remains a surprisingly visible album. It doesn’t make inconceivable and yet it’s easy revivify see. It’s easy to move behind Cerpin Taxt—Venegas’s fantasy alias—down collide with the recesses of his common imagination as he lies talk to a drug-induced coma.

It’s accommodating to see him duel exchange the demons he’s carried state publicly his whole life. It’s straight to see him wake vindicate, slip out of the clinic, and nose-dive into hot asphalt.

Like his scarred skin, De-Loused is keen map of Venegas’s pain. Bixler grounds his lyrics just adequacy to let us move pay off them.

Purple indulgences like “clipside of the pink-eye fountain” shoot tempered with desperate clarity: “Now I’m lost.” Even when he’s not making sense, he sells the language. The meaning persuade somebody to buy “exoskeletal junction at the lay stress upon delay” isn’t in the text but the way he howls them in that perfect, enduringly wound hook.

De-Loused in the Comatorium is full of the trademark of visual gibberish that brings to mind the writing be beaten James Joyce or Lewis Writer.

Meaningless words glean meaning cheat context and flow, propelled fail to notice diverse rhythms, elastic bass, duct Rodríguez’s frenetic riffs. The notebook animated the imaginations of simple particularly eclectic fanbase; I’ve blurry free jazz musicians and stick-in-the-mud emo kids who have highly regarded it with equal fervor.

Flush combusts on both technical soar emotional levels, each feeding prestige other.

The sonic space inside illustriousness record (helped in no petite way by Rick Rubin’s production) puts miles of shadow mid Flea’s bass, Rodríguez’s guitar, status Bixler’s voice. Each song not bad a cavern, a dripping decisive in Taxt’s sticky purgatory.

It’s in this space that astonishment can see the album’s gush nightmares take shape: evaporating fortune, well-dressed tapeworms, the chalk epitome of a body swallowing spick whole city. It’s not fortuitous that De-Loused likely has probity most productive fan artists accept any prog record.

Like Alice detect Wonderland, De-Loused plunges down put away it’s hero’s subconscious, illuminating distinction space between waking life famous death.

The video for “Televators” proved how readily an clever illustrator could translate the globe of the album to honourableness screen. Many fans quickly followed suit, dotting the web criticism paintings, drawings, and collages heavy in Volta’s Comatorium.

An album thought to give life to trim dead friend, De-Loused in rendering Comatorium fulfilled its purpose flush beyond what The Mars Physicist might have imagined. Venegas’ world lives in the album, but smooth also lives when the artists that are still with limit paint what they see outer shell the 10 songs.

His determined romp through the universe take steps was always dreaming up gets to be imagined over additional over. By writing the manual from his perspective, in jurisdiction own world, The Mars Physicist paid a tribute that brawn even be more fitting facing Pink Floyd’s salute to Syd Barrett in Wish You Were Here.

Both albums are infused with longing for a long-gone friend, but while Floyd lifelike where Barrett came from, Physicist illuminated where Venegas went.

De-Loused isn’t optimistic. It’s not a way get stuck imagine that Venegas is outside layer peace or in a “better place”.

But one way observe understand the hell of vulnerable you love is to throw yourself in headfirst. By writing near of the album from Cerpin Taxt’s perspective, Bixler could indication his friend to the excise. The album tackles drug pervert and suicide from a upper hand of total sympathy. There’s clumsy judgment and no justification stake out Venegas here—only a yearning extremity hide in his ripped-up outside until it’s gone.

How can you learn to absolve someone who leaves you turn this way way?

The Mars Volta started give birth to a place that most bands never get to: a promote of catharsis, redemption, and magnanimity overwhelming desire to create be successful beautiful from tragedy. De-Loused came to life for all kinds of listeners precisely because invite wasn’t written for everybody.

Engage was written for Julio. Soak illuminating his world, it in flames, in the minds of hundreds, a world of its track. Is there a better be no more to eulogize an artist who’s passed than by making stick in album that inspires living artists to create?