His father, Dennis Bixler-Marquez, was born in Mexico City to a white American man of partial German ancestry and a Mexican woman.

In the early 1990s, Bixler-Zavala played drums and was a vocalist for a band named Foss which included Beto O'Rourke on bass before the latter's political career.

Closer to the dub of De Facto and the ambient experimentation shown in Omar Rodríguez-López's records than the prog-rock of the Mars Volta, the two songs Bixler-Zavala has produced under this alias are entirely instrumental.

I wrote the bass line...hummed it to Juan...Omar came up with the guitar and chorus section and Adrian played flute on it.

Side 2 "Sapta Loka" is a bit of an homage to ambient German music from the [1970s] ... it's one long drone spliced in four places and stacked on each other playing at the same time.

The band is set to play a number of West Coast tour dates throughout June, supported by Dot Hacker and EV Kain.

[5] On June 3, 2013, a snippet from song "Blue Rose of Grand Street" off their upcoming album All the Nights We Never Met was released on YouTube.

In February 2018, Bixler Zavala confirmed on Twitter that the Mars Volta would reunite,[7] but later clarified that At the Drive-In activity will take precedence for the immediate future.

In November 2017, he said in a pair of tweets that actor Danny Masterson had sexually assaulted his wife, and that he wrote At the Drive-In's song "Incurably Innocent" about the alleged incident.

"I was spending $1,000 a week on weed", he said, and rationalized his use by believing it made him more creative, when he later came to realize "I was using it to form this stoned bubble that helped me justify not wanting to interact with people.

[23][24] In 2020, Bixler-Zavala's dog died after allegedly eating raw meat laced with rat poison that had been tossed into their yard.

During the following year, two of his bandmates of the group The Fall on Deaf Ears, Laura Beard and Sarah Reiser, died in a car accident.

[27] In May 2003, their sound manipulator and longtime friend of Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López, Jeremy Ward, was found dead of apparent heroin overdose.

[28] In October 2014, Isaiah "Ikey" Owens, former bandmate and keyboardist for Bixler-Zavala's previous bands De Facto and the Mars Volta (the latter from 2001 to 2010), was found dead in Puebla, Mexico, while on tour with Jack White.