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The Mars Volta plays a unique style of progressive rock and roll, with songs that can last longer than 30 minutes and require an Old English dictionary and a thesaurus of the occult to translate.

Formed after guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala left the post-punk indie band At the Drive-In, The Mars Volta have taken on their own identity--one that shoves hard rock up the a**es of freestyle jazz and Latin fusion--that is met with very different opinions from listeners.

For most bands, putting together an album means coming up with a catchy melody and slapping cheerful lyrics on top of it; spice it up a bit, then move on to the next song.

Not so with The Mars Volta.

The band's fourth studio full-length, The Bedlam in Goliath, hits stores Jan. 29 and returns the group to concept-album territory. Legend has it that the concept for the band's second album, the underappreciated 2005 record Frances the Mute, originated from a diary found by the late Jeremy Ward, a former repo man and audio artist for The Mars Volta. The diary detailed someone's search for their biological parents, and many of the characters' names in the operatic Frances were lifted from the book's pages.

In part one of a two-part interview, Mars Volta guitarist and songwriter Omar Rodriguez-Lopez talks with MP3.com about the origin and making of the upcoming Bedlam, and lucky for us, it's full of curses, Ouija boards, and haunting spirits.

MP3.com: The Bedlam in Goliath marks the return to concept-album territory for you guys. And I was wondering if you could tell us what it's about. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez: Well, conceptually just with the lyrics and everything, I guess it starts when I finished mixing Amputechture in 2006. On a whim the very next day I bought a ticket to Israel, and I didn't know exactly why but I just went. I spent 10 days over there, I had a great time, I collected a lot of things, and I brought back a lot of trinkets and artifacts that I had bought over there.

And one thing I had gotten for Cedric, which I thought he would like, was a very old talking board, which people refer to as Ouija boards. I didn't think much of it. I'm a believer in those sort of things. Of course, I'm not a very scientific person. I'm much more of a spiritual person. And being from the Caribbean I was raised with things like this, so it's something that I take seriously but I guess not serious enough. I brought it back for him as a gift. I just thought it was nice.

And then we went on tour and I started organizing this record, The Bedlam. On tour, Cedric surprises me because he's brought it on tour when we were out with the Chili Peppers. Now we have our own bus, and the drives are long and we get bored sometimes and he started f***ing with it. That sounds awfully dangerous. We started communicating with spirits, and there was a voice that came to us through the board. It referred to itself as Goliath. And the more we messed around with it, the more we saw that there were actually three voices coming through the voice of one; what seemed to be two women, a mother and a daughter, and a man in some sort of a love triangle and some violent act--what people in the Middle East refer to as an honor killing, this absurd notion that if a woman gets raped, the best thing you can do for her is to kill her because she's ruined, she's dishonored the family.

So we just started getting a lot of really intense and interesting information from the board. Cedric started writing these things down, started writing, for example, the name Goliath, the Soothsayer, started writing down names and words that were being used in the transmissions that we were receiving. I didn't like the idea very much but he seemed really into it.

And as the board started coming apart, because it's old, we started peeling back part of the paper and wood there. Inside we found poems that Cedric had translated. He ended up using a lot of that as actual lyrics [for The Bedlam in Goliath]. And the overall sort of interpretation of what was being told to us is what started as the [album's] concept. As it went on, the Goliath or whatever you want to call it, maybe our imagination, starting asking us for things, which again in my culture is very normal.

So when the talking board started asking for offerings, like rum, which just seemed innocent, we started giving offerings to it so that it would tell us more. And at a certain point it started to get dark and it started to ask to trade places or that it needed a vessel or that it wanted out, this sort of thing. And it started saying that if we didn't listen to it that it would throw a curse on us.

And so for me that was enough. You know, I didn't want to mess with it. Cedric had written these things down. He insisted on using the titles and the subject matter. I took the board back and I broke it and I went and buried it. I just didn't have a good feeling about it. Now the month that came after this--again, whether you want to call it our imagination, or us trying to make connections or things, or whether there really is a curse--everything started going downhill after this. Like what kind of things? We started having a lot of problems internally. We started having a lot of personal problems. We started having health problems. Our bass player got a really rare blood disease that only one percent of the population gets, and usually they're Asian. My engineer lost his mind right at the beginning of the recording session--he had a mental breakdown. I've made over 15 records with him and I know him well. We've worked seven days a week, 15-hour days, and he tells me one day, "I'm not going to help you make this record. You're trying to do something very bad with this record, you're trying to make me crazy and you're trying to make people crazy."

He had no idea about this talking board stuff. Nobody at the time did. We didn't tell anybody about it. And here is this guy that I know who is dependable saying, you know, "You're trying to do this thing. There is something bad here. I'm not going to help you and I'm going to take the [computer disc] drives." He wanted to take the drives and he wanted to destroy them.

So I had to have my technicians and the roadies--in mafia style--go over to his house and extract the drives from him. When I got the drives back, he had deleted any notes that I made about the songs. He's completely scrambled all the music, so technically it was just a complete nightmare. Did it go any further? So then thing after thing happens like this. My studio floods twice. I shared a basement with about eight other people there in New York. Mine is the only one that floods and it happens twice. I lose half of my gear. Tracks are missing. Even through the mix, things are disappearing and I have to go back into sessions to try and find them or to retrack them.

And these things keep happening and they happen in front of Rich Costey, my mixing engineer, who's a very scientific man. So he's the type of person that you tell this story to and he says, "No, it's your imagination. You're making connections that aren't there." And he sees it finally. Throughout the process, tracks disappear before his very ears or before his very eyes, however you want to look at it. And we go backwards into the older playlists and it say that the track never existed and there's no history of it. We go backwards into the older drives and there's no history.

And he just can't understand it. He goes home and he does research and he comes back the next day. He says, "You know what it is, I figured it out. I looked it up. It's quantum entanglement. It's not a curse. It's quantum entanglement." So for Rich, he needs a scientific explanation, which is quantum entanglement, whatever the f*** that is, and for us we see it as the curse. It seemed evident that there was so much fighting against [making] the record that the only way to lift the curse was to actually finish the record. This became my everyday battle with tracks disappearing and going through three different computers and 16 different drives that this insanity of wanting to give up on the project and just start fresh with something else and wipe my hands clean of it, but understanding that if I do that things won't be right and we'll just keep having this bad luck. And so that's the long version there.

Actually, that's the very short version of what the concept is and how it morphed from something that was being told to us into something that we were sucked into directly. And Cedric kept a lot of those things, by the way, a lot of the song titles are things that were told to us directly [by the board] and a lot of the pieces of the story. But it all started to gel into one thing conceptually as far as the lyrics are concerned in many ways. That's an insane story. Do you feel that the record's release date of January 29th is the final obstacle to get over the curse? Or do you think the curse passed after the record was completed? Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm going to knock on wood and say after I finished mastering it, everything seemed to calm down and the rehearsals have been great, things have really been coming together and have been much lighter. This "new record" [was finished] five months ago. The master is five months ago and I'm knee-deep right now in the new Mars Volta record.

Check back closer to the album's release date for part two of MP3.com's interview with Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, where he'll discuss being simultaneously loved and hated, the band's new drummer, and his take on the Internet's relationship with the music business.