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Album

The Bedlam in Goliath

The Mars Volta

About “The Bedlam in Goliath”

“The Bedlam in Goliath” Q&A

  • What have the artists said about the album?

    Cedric Bixler-Zavala talked about the album in an interview with Marquee Magazine published on January 10, 2008:

    […] we just kind of retreated to the bus [during a 2006 tour with Red Hot Chili Peppers] where the new drug of choice was playing this antique game that Omar [Rodríguez-López] had bought for me.

    We would never dim the lights, it wasn’t some corny Disney version like people might picture. The lights were on, the messages started coming through and I kept looking at Omar like, ‘Are you pushing this thing, or am I pushing this thing?’ I just kept writing down everything that it said because it was 10 times more creative than anything I think I could have come up with. The fact that I was writing everything down is what challenged the spirits that we contacted and alerted them that we had the power of unmasking their anonymity.

    When we first played the board, we found poetry attached to it. We hired two people to translate it because it was in Hebrew and in Latin and sometimes it was in what I think was Aramaic. One of those translators gave us back our money and didn’t want to talk to us or have anything to do with us again. The other, who was a little more brave, translated the verses for us and it turned out they translated like traditional sing-song nursery rhymes and the more I read stuff and the further I am away from the project now the more I realize that it is a story steeped in the modern day phenomena of honor killings.

    The spirit, known as Goliath, is a schizophrenic version of three people who were trying to contact us; a male spirit, a female spirit and her mother. The story is of lust, seduction and infidelity, pain and murder. It is a classic scenario of a male character speaking over a female and the female looking for a champion who is brave enough to tell the story.

  • What have the artists said about the album?

    Cedric Bixler-Zavala:

    I would listen and just sit in this ambience Omar had captured, and try and draw something from that world. I wanted to write something that pulled you out, that gave you the same feeling you got when you saw Max Von Sydow have his heart attack in The Exorcist. I wanted to make an infernal machine that played on your hysteria.

    We were listening to a lot of Turkish psych-rock back then. The ‘Eastern scale’ is all over that record.

    —via Press Release

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Album Credits

Album Credits

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