The version of this story that reaches the outside world is a band from Belo Horizonte who signed to an American label and sold millions. The version that matters more is what was happening around them, which was stranger, more extreme and considerably less rewarded.
Warfare Noise
The 1986 compilation on Cogumelo carrying Sarcofago, Holocausto, Chakal and Mutilator, and the single best document of what Belo Horizonte actually sounded like before anybody got out.
It is crude, it is fast, and the four bands are recognisably from the same room without sounding like each other. What it demonstrates is that Sepultura were not an isolated phenomenon; they were the band from a scene who happened to get the deal.
Sarcofago
Wagner Lamounier had sung on Sepultura's first recordings and left. What he formed instead went further than either band's contemporaries anywhere in the world.
I.N.R.I. in 1987 has corpse paint and bullet belts on the sleeve in a year when nobody in Norway had formed a band, and D.D. Crazy's drumming reaches something close to a blast beat before the word existed. The record is genuinely difficult and it is the single most influential thing Brazil produced.
Vulcano
From Santos, and earlier than most of the Belo Horizonte bands. Bloody Vengeance in 1986 is primitive, filthy and completely convinced, and it is regularly cited as one of the first genuinely extreme South American records.
Holocausto and Chakal
The other two from the compilation. Holocausto's war imagery is confronting and their music is ferocious; Chakal are the most straightforwardly thrash of the four and the easiest way into the scene.
Neither had any expectation of leaving the country, which is the condition under which people make records that do not compromise.
| Band | Key release | Year | Label | What it did |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sepultura and Overdose | Bestial Devastation split | 1985 | Cogumelo | The label's first release |
| Vulcano | Bloody Vengeance | 1986 | Rock Brigade | Among the first extreme records from South America |
| Four bands | Warfare Noise | 1986 | Cogumelo | Documents the whole scene |
| Sarcofago | I.N.R.I. | 1987 | Cogumelo | Corpse paint and blast beats, early |
| Holocausto | Campo de Exterminio | 1987 | Cogumelo | The most confronting of them |
Why it went further than Europe
Because of the tape. These bands were working from copies of copies of German and British records, in which the detail had been destroyed by successive generations of analogue duplication, and they reproduced what they heard rather than what had been recorded.
Add the absence of any local industry to impose standards, an economy in which nobody expected a career, and a political situation that had only just stopped being a dictatorship, and the result is music with nothing to protect and nothing to lose.
The countries with the best access to the source records produced the most polished version of this genre. The countries with the worst access produced the next genre.
What survived
The records, mostly through reissues, and an influence that is far larger than the sales. Norwegian black metal took its appearance and part of its attitude from a photograph taken in Minas Gerais; the extreme end of death metal took a great deal from the same handful of releases.
Sepultura, meanwhile, got out, sold millions, split acrimoniously and remain the only band from this scene most listeners can name. The gap between what the scene produced and what it received is as wide here as anywhere in this history, and the story of the shop that made it possible is Cogumelo Records.
Canada's version of the same pattern, proximity to nothing and originality as a result, is in Canadian Thrash Metal Bands.
The equipment
Worth describing, because it explains the sound more directly than any aesthetic argument.
Guitars were domestic copies or whatever had come into the country second hand. Amplifiers were repaired repeatedly and shared. Cymbals cracked and were played cracked because a replacement was not affordable. Strings were used long past the point where anybody in Europe would have changed them, which is a substantial part of why the guitar tone on these records is so dull and so unpleasant.
None of that was a choice and all of it is audible, and the effect is a set of records that could not have been made anywhere with money. When these bands did eventually get access to better equipment, several of them lost something.
Where to hear it
Start with Warfare Noise, which puts four bands in front of you in forty minutes and requires no prior commitment to any of them. Then I.N.R.I., which is the record everything else in this article points towards and which will either land immediately or not at all.
Then, if it lands, Bloody Vengeance and Campo de Exterminio. Four records, about three hours, and a complete picture of a scene that the standard histories cover in a sentence.
The band from that scene who got out, and what they made once they had, is covered in Brazil, Canada and the Rest of the World.
What Norway took
The specific inheritance is worth stating precisely, because it is frequently overstated in one direction and denied in the other.
What the Norwegian scene took from Sarcofago was visual and attitudinal rather than musical: the corpse paint, the bullet belts and spikes, and the position that a recording should be deliberately primitive. Several Norwegian musicians have said so in print and one of them has described the I.N.R.I. sleeve as directly formative.
What they did not take was the music, which sounds nothing like Norwegian black metal. The sound came from elsewhere, principally from Sodom and Bathory. So the accurate statement is that a photograph taken in Minas Gerais in 1987 shaped how a Scandinavian scene looked five years later, which is a smaller claim than the internet usually makes and still a remarkable one.
Sources and notes
Years and labels refer to original pressings. Attributions of influence follow published interviews with the musicians concerned.
