We Live Inside You (30 page)

The depth of that entanglement becomes apparent when you realize that Omar, always at the center of these struggles, almost gave up on this record. The same Omar Rodriguez-Lopez that moved to Amsterdam and cut four solo albums while also working on Amputechture and a soundtrack for the Jorge Hernandez film El Bufalo de la Noche. The same guy that’s probably working on a DVD, his own film, and 10 new albums right now. But at certain points during work on Bedlam his nearly incandescent creative force was on the verge of being snuffed out. And he was sure Goliath was behind the chaos. After his studio flooded, Omar even banned all mention of the Ouija board for fear that simply acknowledging its existence might bring down some fatal blow. Despite the disallowance, he remained haunted. He’d wake to fits of late night inspiration only to find that there was a power blackout (but only in his loft), or that the parts he’d crafted in the midnight hour would later vaporize. Production work became so nightmarish and Sisyphean that he’d occasionally check on the Soothsayer’s burial site, to see if it had been exhumed and “reactivated.”

Knowing about the immense challenges faced in the creation of The Bedlam in Goliath only elevates my appreciation for Omar’s production. With this record he has laid out a blueprint for anyone else seeking to combine the complex with the primeval and make it all hit you where it counts. This is an album that’s electric for both the 3:00 AM headphone listener and the guy doing 90 on the interstate with the windows down. This is an album with an immense level of control
and
experimentation on display; for every section with intricately panning gut-punching drums and shimmering horn sounds and scorching guitars there’s another where you can sense a mischievous musical mind at play (e.g. the fuzzed out bass tones at the end of Ilyena or the real inserted recordings from Jerusalem or the sound of a live jack switching between demo and final versions on Askepios). As a filmic analog, picture Kubrick or Fincher working in tandem with Bunuel or Jodorowsky.

Actually, similar analogs could be extended to the whole of the album itself. The Volta have acknowledged the immense influence of surrealism and film on their work. In relation just to Jodorowsky, The Bedlam in Goliath manages to evoke the languid madness of Fando y Lis, the infidelity and murder and worship of Santa Sangre, the broad-spectrum religious imagery of Holy Mountain, the sheer guts-on-the-table awe of El Topo. Throw in the identity confusion head-fuckery of Lynch’s strangest films, Werner Herzog’s sense of obsession, a few dollops of Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, and pinches of The Exorcist and Don’t Look Now and you’re starting to get the right idea.

On the lyrical front, you should be warned: This is an unsettling piece of work. You’re welcome to take Cedric’s vocals at surface level—he sounds incredible, his range broader than ever, his energy and emotion undeniable.

Or you can begin to translate. Cedric Bixler-Zavala, like fellow musical mavericks Bjork and Ghostface Killah, uses primarily English words but speaks his own lyrical language. If you examine the meaning behind his shrapnel-burst imagery, his obsessions with the grotesque and the profoundly sacred, you begin to realize he’s created a complex associative tapestry that’s designed with spider-web precision. And before you know it you’re trapped.

The more you read the story he’s laid out (an intricate meta-fictional narrative reminiscent of Danielewski’s House Of Leaves, involving both the transgressions of the past and the desire of the Goliath parasite to infest the Ouija-using host), the more you research his allusions and the history of the spirit board, the more uncanny connections you are bound to make. You start to recognize a tie between certain vocal effects and messages from the board. You wonder if focusing on this story too much might invite Goliath into
your
world. Soon you’re jumping at shadows, shopping for salt and all-white outfits, surrounding yourself with graphs and counting words and letters and looking for codes, creating your own primordial cymatics using the album, feeling phantom tendrils in your bones. You begin to hope that all the positive elements Cedric covertly slid into the songs (a legion of religious references including snippets of Santeria-derived prayers, classic fables, the hidden name of a regal actress he holds in high regard, an underlying reverence for creation/menstruation, vague hints of redemption) really are helping to balance out and maybe even negate the darkness that has infested the album.

You’re bound to have questions. What exactly transpired in the tragic triangle? Who was really in control and who were the victims? Was
anyone
innocent? How did they die and what happened to the bodies? How did they come to rest within the Soothsayer? If they return to our world, what will they do?

Those answers (and more) are in there, fused at every level to songs of equal complexity and gravity. And the closer you listen, the further you voyage into The Bedlam in Goliath, the more disquieting and compelling the Volta’s brilliant audiocelluloid epic becomes.

This album is the sound of a band playing—magnificently—for its life. And it is a recording of such strange power that I believe the Goliath that haunts them will be forever struck down.

Word.

—Jeremy Robert Johnson, October 27
^th
, 2007, Portland, Oregon

The Zayin Division—A Second Stage Burial

I. I am the simian martyr’s bullet-borne deliverance.

II. Ideomotor effect. Forced cryptomnesia. Your shroud returns stale whispers. Ropes tighten at each limb.

III. He half-woke to a wild leopard, to blood-pregnant air, the smell of his courted collapse. Laurel twigs crossed her hidden tools.

IV. The holy glyph floats close, its gray light angles suffuse the bones now dust, flesh now jelly. Every cell shakes loose its viral code.
Supernus pacta sunt servanda
.

V. Its hands swept through in the crooked mandible, the chemical lobotomy swung blind, the monoxide possessions. All of it annelid territory.

VI. Sandover light shone symbiotic until you saw it swallow-shift. Your retractions granted final grace.

VII. I will not follow your collapsing oblivion.

—JRJ, October 28
^th
, 2007, Portland, Oregon (First print copy interment)

The Oarsman
— Written for the Fractal 10 conference, based on their event theme: Reinventing the world. The result is a bit grim, I admit, but the organizers knew my work and were pragmatists about the result. Step on a rattlesnake, he bites you. Ask me for a story based on themes of ingenuity, creation, hope and rebirth, and I give you Buddhist empathy bombs and stranded sociopaths. (Thanks are due to event artist Oscar Montoya, who allowed his wonderful art for the story to appear with the story’s US publication in Dark Discoveries.)

When Susurrus Stirs
— There might be a list on the wall beyond my laptop, and that list might include the names of several parasites I find endlessly revolting/fascinating. So if I do, on occasion, produce a story about a mutant variation on the parasitic wasp/bot fly/candiru/guinea worm/liver fluke/etc., please permit me my obsession and attempted exorcisms. And for anyone who thinks I’m going for the “gross-out” here, spend about five minutes looking up the above creatures on YouTube and you’ll see I’ve been rather gentle in relating their methods.

Persistence Hunting
— Just prior to the release of Angel Dust Apocalypse I had shifted to a mostly nocturnal writer’s schedule, and I was also training for my first go at the Portland Marathon. Chugging down the road in a black stocking cap and baggy gear at 3:00 AM in the morning, and the cops never gave me a second glance. The bum camp that popped up beneath the underpass at 17
^th
and Powell gave me plenty of grief for running through their temporary bedrooms, but I think I would have had to bring along a chainsaw to catch a cop’s interest.

The Witness at Dawn
— The first of the four fixed form stories that made up my contribution to the symmetrina “Faded Into Impalpability.” I’ve always found it intriguing how people are more accepting of vigilante justice if it stems from a paranormal source. Charles Bronson shoots a murderer, and you’ve got yourself a moral gray area. Ghost kills the same murderer; the world is back in balance. Ghosts are so obsessed with accountability. And ominous plate throwing.

Consumerism
— Yes, this is the same Ron from “Priapism” in ADA, and I originally intended to write a trilogy of his father’s one-sided “dialogues,” ultimately allowing Ron some kind of revenge. But then this idea landed and it wouldn’t go away, and I don’t know if the ending constitutes “revenge” or is just one more fundamental life changing abuse that further ruins Ron’s life.

Trigger Variation
— Every rat finds a button to press. Even self-flagellating ascetic monks are trying to flip a switch. Some rats are just more self-righteous about their particular button.

The Gravity of Benham Falls
— The original version of this story included a very pornographic scene beneath the waterfall, with all kinds of intimately described oral and breath control play, and I read that version to a number of elderly folks at a Boy Scout camp site. By candle light. And despite the number of times I have wished otherwise, this story remains true. (Scene altered for pace/gratuitousness and in an effort to erase the memory.)

Cathedral Mother
— Did I mention the list on my wall? Two Richards are owed for this tale. The first debt is to Richard Selzer, whose essay “The Exact Location of the Soul” sparked in me an early fascination with infestation and parasitism (human and otherwise). The second debt is to Richard Preston, whose wonderful non-fiction book The Wild Trees chronicles the alien environment of the giant redwoods and the brave explorers who venture there.

The Brilliant Idea
— The second of the “Faded…” stories. All of it—the tense, the precise word count, even the content of the allusions—dictated by the laws of the symmetrina. I recommend this form to every writer I know. The restrictions and obstacles in place create challenges which leave you with new tools, and the form can drive you to create a story outside of your normal mode. I don’t normally play with “fun” or “quirky” but I think I skirted both for this flash.

Simple Equations
— Written for an anthology of horror stories set during WWII. I was initially hesitant to participate because of the sheer pre-existing quantity of stories set in that environment, and the danger of writing Wolfenstein-style stock Nazis. But after watching Trinity and Beyond I researched the way scientific communities in Germany, Japan, and the States all acquiesced to the military (out of fear, for funding, or due to a “pure” desire for knowledge outside of moral bounds). Those scientists who are still alive almost uniformly state that their efforts were about saving lives and making future wars so destructive they’d become untenable for the human race. But as McNamara pointed out in The Fog of War, when addressing the Cuban Missile Crisis, rationality won’t save us.

Cortical Reorganization
— The third of the “Faded…” stories. Portland has its share of corner “spangers” and I have a history of coughing up for those who have dogs with them or are missing limbs. I once spotted a “spanger” in Eugene who I thought was exploiting people by wearing a baby doll in a harness on her chest. It looked very real and she pretended to rock it and concealed the plastic face from you as the traffic light turned green. I was pissed every time I saw her, until I had a conversation with a mental health professional who told me that they frequently provided such dolls to folks with mental illnesses, as it gave them a companion and someone to care for. So this lady was either a con artist (she raked it in) or a very sick woman whose only friend had a tiny plastic head and plush body. Due to the ambiguity I had to remove her from my Things to Pointlessly Seethe About list. (On the flipside I once tried to give a spanger a Taco Bell Ten Pack and he replied, “What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?” Which says something about Taco Bell Ten Packs. He acted like I’d tried to pass him a box of diarrhea, and I guess that if you follow the process all the way down the line, he was kind of correct.)

A Flood of Harriers
— When I was younger and my family would travel up the I5 corridor, I would beg for a visit to a corner bookstore in Eugene that carried Cemetery Dance and Fangoria, both of which had proven more difficult to cop in Bend. So when this story appeared in Cemetery Dance so many years later, it meant a great deal to me. I was
very
surprised when the story sparked controversy and debate with some readers radically misinterpreting the piece as racist anti-Native American propaganda. When someone earnestly (if absurdly) equates you with Goebbels, it’s a bad time. I wondered if they’d even read through to the end, which seems to embrace the idea of genocidal blowback (a sort of Re-Manifested Destiny) as a terrible return to karmic balance. The fact that the opening scene is a barely fictionalized version of an actual conflict my then girlfriend and I had at a rest stop in Warm Springs made the issue even more complicated. However, the editor at CD stood behind the story’s publication, and in the end I was introduced to a large and appreciative horror readership and given some great advice by Nick Mamatas: Not everyone is going to “get it.” Always be true to your vision for the story and write with your ideal reader in mind. (Thanks are due to all the folks who helped me through the exciting/wildly stressful time after this story’s release.)

The Encore
— The last of the “Faded…” stories. Probably the most “quiet” story I’ve written in some time. Which is weird since it was inspired by my repair of a busted vacuum, an event which was far from quiet and almost cost me a finger. Before you rush in to mend a smoking piece of machinery, no matter how bedraggled and rushed you are, UNPLUG IT. That’s sound advice.

Laws of Virulence
— That parasite list on my wall sits right next to some inspirational quotes from Mailer and Ellroy (I know—Muy Macho). I’d always wanted to attempt a story told through transcript, as Ellroy did with a lot of the transitional and buffering “documents” in American Tabloid. I was originally going to mirror an actual CDC outbreak report, but they leave little room for the human aspects of the story. Plus, the formatting, with all of those little boxes, was a bitch.

States of Glass
— I now have difficulty, having done the research on under rides and having seen some awful photos, driving even fifty yards behind a semi truck trailer. Most have protective bars extending below the bed of the trailer, per regulations, but I’m not sure those things would hold up at decapitation velocity.