A regional metal sound is made by whoever holds the mixing desk and whoever pays for the hours, far more than by the weather outside the studio window, and the proof is that a Brazilian band could sound like Florida and a Norwegian one could sound like a concert hall basement. The cold, the heat and the national character make good copy. They make very few records.
The physicist who grew the first artificial snow crystal, on the tip of a rabbit hair in a cold room at Hokkaido University on 12 March 1936, was Ukichiro Nakaya, and the diagram he spent the next years drawing settles the matter. The water is the same everywhere. What decides the crystal is the air it grows in: flat plates a couple of degrees below zero, needles and hollow columns a few degrees colder, the branching six-armed stars only near fifteen below, the same vapour hammered into a different shape by every cloud it falls through. Scenes work like that. The riffs arrived from the same few British records; the cloud did the rest.
What makes a regional metal sound
Four conditions do nearly all the work, and they rank in this order: the desk, meaning the producer and the room he works in; the money, meaning how many hours of tape a band can afford and what gear it can buy; the language the songs are sung in, which decides who the record is aimed at; and, a long way behind, the climate. The scenes themselves, place by place, are laid out in the full chapter. The causes cut across all of them.
The ranking is not a matter of taste. Each of the first three can be tested by moving one band from one set of conditions to another and listening to what happens, and the history of the music has run that experiment several times over. The weather cannot be moved. That alone should make anyone suspicious of it.
| Cause | Case | Where | What it did to the sound |
|---|---|---|---|
| The desk | Harris Johns at Music Lab | Berlin, mid-1980s | One engineer's sound across a label's roster |
| The desk | Scott Burns at Morrisound | Tampa, late 1980s | A Florida sound that travelled to Rio |
| The money | Sepultura, Beneath the Remains | Rio de Janeiro, 1988 | An eight thousand dollar budget, recorded through the night |
| The language | Trust, "Antisocial" | France, 1980 | A French hit that crossed in translation |
The desk: one engineer, one city
Founded in Berlin by Karl-Ulrich Walterbach in 1983, Noise Records signed young German bands by the handful and sent a great many of them to the same room, so that for the middle of the decade a whole national style was being cut on one console by one pair of ears. The engineer who turned Music Lab, a Berlin studio, into the house sound of German speed and thrash, rough and raw, was Harris Johns, whose desk also took Voivod's Killing Technology in 1987.
The title track of Kreator's Pleasure to Kill, released by Noise in 1986, is that desk working at full stretch: the guitars come off the tape like a steel grater raked at full speed down a bare forearm, every edge taking skin off whatever it passes, and the whole thing sounds like a band recorded inside an argument. Put Helloween's Walls of Jericho of 1985 beside it and the melody is from another planet, yet the air around the instruments is the same air. That is the engineer, not the Ruhr.
Florida ran the same experiment at a larger scale. Morrisound Recording, the studio Tom and Jim Morris ran in Tampa, gave death metal its low, thick, clinical finish in the late eighties, and the man behind most of those sessions became a sound in his own right: Scott Burns. A band that wanted it had two choices. Go to Tampa, or bring Tampa home.
The Belo Horizonte four who got a Florida engineer to Rio de Janeiro for their third album, and got him for two thousand dollars because he was curious about Brazil, were Sepultura, and Beneath the Remains, released by Roadrunner in 1989, came out sounding like a Morrisound record made more than four thousand miles from Morrisound. For Arise in 1991 the band went to Tampa itself. The accent of the playing stayed Brazilian. The finish was Floridian, beyond dispute.
The accent of the playing stayed Brazilian. The finish was Floridian.
The money: what an hour of tape costs
Every regional sound is also an invoice. A scene with cheap studio time, or a producer who will work nights for less, gets records that breathe; a scene with none gets records made in a rehearsal room on whatever machine the drummer's cousin owns, and that sound, forced at first, becomes the dialect the next generation copies on purpose. Poverty is heard long after the money arrives.
Rio had already proved it: Beneath the Remains was budgeted at eight thousand dollars, cut between eight at night and five in the morning, and still ran to nearly twice the money. Bergen got its records out of one room. The engineer who kept the tape rolling at Grieghallen, the studio inside the city's concert hall, for one young band after another in the early nineties was Eirik Hundvin, Pytten to everyone who used him. Emperor, Enslaved and Immortal all passed through that desk.
"The Call of the Wintermoon", from Immortal's debut Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism in 1992, is one of those sessions, cut there in April that year: a raw, hazy, lo-fi mix with nothing polished anywhere in it. Bands across Europe later spent real money trying to sound that raw. The rough edge had become a pedigree.
The language: who the song is written for
A band that sings in its own language is writing for the people at home, and a band that sings in English is writing for export, and the two decisions produce different records long before anyone plugs in. The first gets the local radio, the local press and a chorus the whole country can sing; the second gets a shot at the world and a vocal line shaped by someone else's vowels.
The French four who put "Antisocial" on Répression in 1980, sung in French with the heavy rock of their own country hammered underneath, were Trust, and the song forced its way onto RTL and France Inter, national stations that almost never played heavy metal, while the album went platinum at home. The English version they cut the same year, words adapted by Jimmy Pursey of Sham 69, is the one a band from Queens picked up. Anthrax recorded "Antisocial" on State of Euphoria in 1988 and took it to number 44 in Britain as a single, and the song the rest of the world knows is the translation. Same riff. Different market, different record.
The Hanover band that went the other way, singing English from its very first album in 1972 and writing its choruses out of the plainest words the language offers, was Scorpions, and by 1984 Love at First Sting had put a German band into the American top ten, at number 6. Plain English turned out to be the ideal material for a stadium chorus. Nobody in Hanover had planned it that way.
The weather: the weakest witness
Climate is the explanation everybody reaches for first, and it fails the simplest test. Florida, a state of beaches and air conditioning, gave the world the heaviest death metal records of the late eighties; Brazil, hot for most of the year, gave it Sepultura. If the cold made the music dark, Tampa would be playing surf rock. It is not.
The cold of the Norwegian records is real, but it was chosen and then produced. Bands picked frost and forests for their sleeves and lyrics, then made the recordings sound that way with thin guitars and buried drums, on budgets that pushed them in the same direction. The long winter may have kept a few teenagers indoors with a guitar. That is a rehearsal schedule, not a sound.
What the climate does do is travel as an image, and an image sells. The desk, the money and the language are the causes; the weather is the story the scene tells about itself afterwards, and a good story is worth keeping as long as nobody mistakes it for the mechanism. Heat is no better an explanation than cold. Texas heavy metal grew in some of the hottest country on the map, and its sound came from a family studio, a label run out of the same building and a club circuit that paid bands to play tight, which is to say from the desk, the money and the room.
