Zechs Marquise build new sound from the ground up

The progressive jazz-rock band from El Paso with oft-mentioned ties to Mars Volta via Marcel, Marfred and Rico Rodriguez-Lopez, just finished touring in support of the RX Bandits before prepping for the release of their second full-length studio album [their first LP was live], Getting Paid.

Drummer Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez, who is also a percussionist for Mars Volta, won't be on the band's few summer headlining shows and brother and bassist Marfred Rodriguez-Lopez talked to College Times about playing without his older brother and the how the psychedelic sound on their upcoming album (released Sept. 27) is the result of failing at making hip-hop, but a successful attempt to represent the energy of the band's live shows in a less "slightly depressing" way, as Rodriguez-Lopez put it.

College Times: Where was the band at during the writing of Getting Paid?

Marfred Rodriguez-Lopez: Where exactly did we do the writing?

I meant more of a state of mind rather than a place, but place is fine.

Oh, okay. After we did A Delicate Strand of Nightmare and we started touring the record, we realized it would give the songs a bit more life live through different parts and arrangements and making things heavier and messing with dynamics. So when we started talking about doing a new record, we kind of wanted to bring that energy to put it onto a recording as opposed to just keeping it strictly for the live show. We just wanted something that was a better representation of the way we play our music and just the kind of energy that is in one of our live shows. We wanted to bring that into a recording.

You guys built the songs up from the drums, right?

Not actually from the drums, but percussion tracks or just sequences on synthesizers.

Would you say that's the heart and soul of the band?

No, not necessarily. We used the same method on the last record. It's just kind of starting ground. We're all big fans of hip-hop music and electronic music that can just be chopped up and made up into its own way. I mean, really, it's more of the backbone of the music than anything.

You guys had some bad luck recording the last record. Was it smoother this time around?

Yeah, way smoother. Before we recorded our very first LP, we did some demos then we went into a studio in El Paso, paid money for studio time to record what was supposed to be our first record and it ended up not happening because the studio engineer that we were working with and the studio we were recording at, they were in some lawsuit or something and through the lawsuit things got bitter and they deleted all of the work we had done because it was work he did so they got rid of it. We were never able to recoup it. When we did the last record, we opted to just buy all of our own gear and record our records ourselves. Definitely with this new one, Getting Paid, it made it a lot easier because we were more familiar with what we were doing but, more importantly, we had a definite direction and an idea of what we wanted to do.

What was that idea?

[…] The way the record kind of came out sounding is a bunch of guys, [playing] psychedelic rock and prog rock and jazz from the '60s and '70s, that want to play hip-hop, really. Guys that don't really know how to play that kind of music. It's something with more beat, more sway, more swagger. Something you can tap your toe, nod your head to and possibly even dance.

And something you can sample.

Yeah, absolutely. When my brother and I first really got into music, a lot of the stuff we were listening to was hip hop. From there we learned a lot of hip-hop beats are worked off of samples from older songs. […] You look through the book, find the sample, go back, listen to the original song and from there you're finding all these old records [and] all these old songs and bands and artists we never knew about. We kind of wanted that — "Wouldn't it be cool if someone sampled that guitar line from the record or, you know, used that for a second beat or for a remix or something?" So, it was definitely in our minds to make melodies that are something someone would say, "I wanna sample that."

And what is the key to making something sample-worthy?

For us, a lot of it was: "I would sample that." Or, based on a lot of the hip-hop records we've listened to. Or […] it has a good drive or a good hook, especially when it comes to some of those rhythms and the melodies. […] In reality, I guess it's kind of hard to explain what classified it as sample-worthy. In the end, it's coming up with something and everyone going, "That's awesome. I love it. I would sample it."

If you guys could pick one artist to sample your music, who would you love to touch it?

We'd really love to have someone like Flying Lotus sample it. […]

There are vocals on this album. How is there room for that?

On the first record, there was just humming on one of the songs. After that, we were discussing for the last year or two about incorporating vocals here or there, sort of like the [Pink] Floyd stuff after Syd Barrett, before Dark Side of the Moon. Or the band[s], Gong or Soft Machine, where singing isn't on the full song but just parts of the song. We left little parts open here or there on the record. We worked around it that way. We put a little less in some parts.