The Quintet also performed live with Damo Suzuki, parts of which were recorded and incorporated into a 25-minute EP titled Please Heat This Eventually, which was released in 2007.ĭuring this time Rodríguez-López was also working on The Mars Volta's 2006 record Amputechture and composing the score to the film El Búfalo de la Noche, a film by Guillermo Arriaga and Jorge Hernandez Aldana simultaneously to his work with the quintet. It was characterized by long, improvisational songs with Dutch titles and no lyrics. The songs featured on this tour later appeared on the album Omar Rodriguez. Rodríguez-López played several live shows in Europe with his quintet, which in 2005 also included three members of The Mars Volta Group ( Juan Alderete, Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez and Adrián Terrazas-González) and Money Mark. His first solo project was the "Omar Rodríguez-López Quintet". In 2005 Rodríguez-López relocated to Amsterdam, where he eventually wrote and recorded four separate albums.
On February 8, 2009, he and his fellow The Mars Volta bandmates won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance. However, Rodríguez-López stated that he does intend to release both Volume 2 and the film at some point in the future. Conflicts over ownership of certain footage and Rodríguez-López's reluctance to revisit the project which featured his late friend Jeremy Michael Ward were both cited as reasons for the delay.
The release of the second volume, which was originally planned for Spring of 2005, and the film were both delayed indefinitely due to legal problems.
The soundtrack A Manual Dexterity: Soundtrack Volume 1 was released in 2004.
The Mars Volta's second album, Frances the Mute, would later be dedicated to Ward.ĭuring the early years of the band he also worked on a low budget movie called A Manual Dexterity which starred Jeremy Ward. Since then he has been clean and credited his newfound musical work ethic on his new lifestyle. This event, coupled with the memories of the suicide of his friend Julio Venegas years earlier, finally convinced both him and Bixler-Zavala to quit using hard narcotics. On less than a month before the release of their first full-length album, De-Loused in the Comatorium, bandmate and close friend Jeremy Ward was found dead of a heroin overdose. Once again starting from scratch he wrote and toured with the band which consumed almost all his time and money. Eventually the same collective of musicians in De Facto would be expanded into Rodriguez-Lopez's new band, The Mars Volta. They refocused their efforts on the dub reggae outfit called De Facto which also included Jeremy Michael Ward and Ikey Owens which they had started years before while still in At The Drive-In.
Although his free time away from his obligations to the band, says he enjoys the company of his close friends and family. He attended Coronado High School in El Paso. During this time he frequently collaborated with his friends and future bandmates from El Paso, which included people such as Paul Hinojos, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Julio Venegas and the now late Jeremy Michael Ward. Since then Rodríguez-López has spent most of his career living and working with his close friend Bixler-Zavala. It was during this time that Rodríguez-López met Cedric Bixler-Zavala while practicing with friend Paul Hinojos. He began playing the bass at age 12, but then switched to guitar at 15 because he "needed more strings". Rodríguez-López was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in El Paso, Texas, but spent some of his childhood in South Carolina. He has also embarked upon a prolific and genre-defying solo career, both in studio and in concert, frequently described as experimental, avant-garde and/or progressive and has collaborated with numerous artists spanning from John Frusciante to El-P. He is the composer, guitarist and producer for the progressive rock group The Mars Volta, and the former bassist and guitarist for the dub reggae band De Facto and the post-hardcore outfit At The Drive-In respectively. Omar Alfredo Rodríguez-López (born September 1, 1975) is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, writer, actor and film director who was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Ibanez ORM1 Omar Rodriguez Lopez Jet King Model Guitar, bass, drums, piano, synthesizer, sitar, drum machine, vocals, percussion, organ, wurlitzer, sampler, clavinet, rhodes Progressive rock, psychedelic rock, alternative rock, experimental, electronic, math rock, post-hardcore, dub