On 30 November 1986 a record came out of a shop in Belo Horizonte with four bands on it, a quarter of a side each, recorded that August in a local studio for almost nothing. Its distribution was so poor that hardly anybody outside Brazil saw a copy, and it is the founding document of extreme metal in South America. Chakal, Mutilator, Sarcofago and Holocausto had between them no international press, no manager, no contract worth the paper and no expectation of any, and within five years their sleeves were being described in letters posted from Norway and Finland.
The standard European account of the founding records keeps one South American album and throws the rest away. That is not a ranking, it is a filing error. A continent produced a decade of this music on pressings of five hundred, in three countries, with a chain of influence that can be traced by name, and reducing all of it to a single photograph on a single front cover misses both the size of the debt and where it was actually owed.
Santos, 1981, before anybody had a word for it
The oldest thread in the story starts on the coast of Sao Paulo state, four years before the Belo Horizonte bands existed. Vulcano were assembled in Santos in 1981 by Zhema Magrao and Carli Cooper, put out an album called Om Pushne Namah in 1983 and a demo called Devil on My Roof the year after, and then did something no Brazilian metal band had managed, which was to release a live album, recorded in Americana in 1985. Bloody Vengeance, their first proper studio album, arrived on 10 August 1986, with Anthropophagy in 1987 and Who Are the True in 1988 behind it.
Terrorizer put the case for them plainly, that many believe Vulcano started musical blasphemy not only in Brazil but across the whole of Latin America. They fed Sepultura directly and they were known to the Norwegians by reputation before any Norwegian record existed. They are also almost never named in a European history of this genre, which tells you how the canon was assembled and by whom.
A record shop that turned itself into a label
Cogumelo opened as a shop in Belo Horizonte in 1980 and became a label in 1985, and no other address in this history did as much with as little. Its first release was the split that introduced Sepultura, its second year produced Morbid Visions, and in the same period it assembled Warfare Noise out of four local bands who rehearsed within a few streets of one another. The whole thing was cut at J.G. Estudios in August 1986 by musicians in their late teens who had learned the form from tapes rather than from records, because a shop counter in Minas Gerais in 1986 was not stocked the way a shop counter in Hamburg was.
That poverty is the engine of the entire scene and it is worth stating without romance. Small pressings, a distribution network that amounted to one man with an address book, and imported records scarce enough and dear enough that the music mostly arrived in Brazil on copied cassettes and left the country the same way. What the tape traders got in return was a set of records nobody had softened for a foreign market, because there was no foreign market to soften them for.
Holocausto, one of the four on that compilation, released Campo de Exterminio through Cogumelo in 1987 and has been argued about ever since, because the record describes crimes committed in the Nazi camps in explicit detail. The band's stated position was that the detail was there to produce revulsion, and that the name was chosen for the same reason. The album is part of the record and so is the objection to it, and both belong in any honest account of what came out of that shop.
The photograph that did more travelling than the songs
Sarcofago came together in Belo Horizonte in 1985 around Wagner Lamounier, who had briefly sung for Sepultura, and reached its defining shape in 1987 when Eduardo Patrocinio, credited as D.D. Crazy, took over the drums and Geraldo Minelli took the bass. Cut at J.G. Estudios in July 1987 and out that August, I.N.R.I. runs on blast beats held for whole songs at a speed the tape can barely contain, and Lamounier has never pretended to be happy with how it was recorded. He has complained about the sound of it and about the state of the band while it was being made, which is a more useful piece of testimony than any amount of retrospective reverence.
The front cover outran the music by a decade. Four young men photographed in white face paint, leather, spikes and bullet belts is the first complete statement of what this genre would look like, and it was assembled in a city with no scene to copy from, four years before anybody in Bergen or Oslo put the same kit on. Everything about that image was later claimed by a country five thousand miles north, and the claim has stuck so firmly that the photograph is usually described as an influence on the look rather than as the look itself.
The uniform was cut and stitched in Minas Gerais. Norway only ever wore it.
Medellin, and the records nobody files
Colombia is the part of this story that even specialist accounts skip. Parabellum formed in Medellin in the early months of 1983 around the drummer Cipriano Alvarez and the guitarist Carlos Mario Perez, and Terrorizer has called them one of the first black metal bands in the world and the first extreme metal band the country produced, describing what they played as sitting somewhere between hardcore and speed metal riffing turned backwards. Reencarnacion worked in the same city and put violin and classical guitar into something otherwise implacable. Further south, Chile had Pentagram from 1985, a band whose demos circulated for fifteen years before a proper album existed.
A scene with no shops, no press and no money produced the visual grammar of a genre it was then written out of. That is not an accident of geography. It is what a canon does when it is assembled in the countries that could afford to print one.
Eirik Solvang, KaosMetal
What the north actually bought
| Record | Act | Country | Label | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Om Pushne Namah | Vulcano | Brazil | Independent | 1983 |
| Bloody Vengeance | Vulcano | Brazil | Independent | 1986 |
| Warfare Noise | Four bands | Brazil | Cogumelo | 1986 |
| Sacrilegio | Parabellum | Colombia | Independent, 500 copies | 1987 |
| I.N.R.I. | Sarcofago | Brazil | Cogumelo | 1987 |
| Campo de Exterminio | Holocausto | Brazil | Cogumelo | 1987 |
| Mutacion por radiacion | Parabellum | Colombia | Independent, 600 copies | 1988 |
| Wicca | Mystifier | Brazil | Heavy Metal Maniac | 1992 |
The debt is documented rather than assumed, which is rare in this history. Euronymous of Mayhem corresponded with Lamounier directly and named Parabellum as an influence on his own band. Fenriz of Darkthrone called the Sarcofago debut a record you buy or die and put "Satanic Lust" on a compilation of his own favourites. In Finland, Nuclear Holocausto of Beherit named the same band as foundational, and Mika Luttinen of Impaled Nazarene has said that nothing tops either Reign in Blood or that Belo Horizonte album. Terrorizer, weighing all of it, concluded that it is sobering to think what would not have happened had that album never come out.
The bands themselves did not stand still to be admired. Sarcofago put out the Rotting extended play in 1989, had its sleeve censored by an American label without permission and went to law over it, then turned technical on The Laws of Scourge in 1991, brought in a drum machine for the album after it in 1994 and finished in 2000. Mystifier, formed in Salvador in 1989, went to Osmose in France for Goetia in 1993 and is still working. The continent kept producing while the north was busy writing the history of it.
The verdict is not that South America invented black metal. It is narrower and harder to dismiss: the speed, the blast beat held as a texture rather than an event, and the entire visual apparatus were all in place here first, and the atmosphere, the tremolo line and the production doctrine were not. Two of the four things a listener now recognises came from the southern hemisphere on records almost nobody could buy. Where each of them entered, and in which year, is set out in A Black Metal Timeline, 1981 to 2000.
