Chris MartinsMuch has been made of legendary L.A. hip-hop producer Madlib's 2010 album-a-month series. But another of this city's storied musical madmen has been doing his part to flood the market with quality product.
The Mars Volta's Omar Rodriquez Lopez has released seven full-lengths over the past year, ranging from live prog-rock epic Los Sueños De Un Higado, to an often acoustic collabo with John Frusciante, to the unannounced record he dropped yesterday, which puts him in league with Madlib in a way we never saw coming.
Tychozorente finds O.R.L. hanging up his guitar to collaborate with his long lost brother in Latino fro'dom, DJ Nobody, a.k.a. Elvin Estela, who's best known as one of the resident DJs at L.A. beat music mecca, Low End Theory.
Listen to the entire album:
The first song, “Los Siete Sermones a los Muertos,” sounds like something dreamed up in the basements of Dublab, finding O.R.L.'s main squeeze Ximena Sarinana Rivera (a Grammy-nominated Mexican pop star) cooing ghostly over a beat-heavy mix of samples, synthesizers and — it bears repeating — NO GUITAR WHATSOEVER.
Truly, there's not a single ax strummed on this record. The erstwhile Volta guitar god instead devotes his abilities to keyboards, programming, xylophones and spoken word pieces (the latter sparingly). His little brother Marcel Rodriguez Lopez also contributes to the eight-song set, which can be purchased digitally here.
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