In 1987 a band in Medellin pressed five hundred copies of an EP. The plant that made it was Discos Fuentes, a company that had spent forty years putting out tropical dance records. The city outside was in the middle of a war.
The EP is Sacrilegio. The band is Parabellum. Five years later you could hear its fingerprints all over Norway. Five hundred copies. Sit with that number for a second, because it is the whole story of this continent in one figure.
Start with what they did not have
You know the American version by heart. A studio in Tampa. A producer with a diary. A label you could reach by phone and a shop that would order anything you asked for. Now take all of it away and keep the ambition.
Europe had it hard, and Britain, the Low Countries and Poland shows you how hard. South America had it harder and had it for longer. Import duties made a foreign LP cost a week of wages. Currencies collapsed on a schedule. Customs opened the parcels. There was no distributor, no chart, no radio that would touch it and, in several countries, no pressing plant that would take the job once somebody read the lyrics.
So tape trading was not a hobby down there. It was the distribution system, the press, the record shop and the booking agency all at once. Everything that follows came through the post.
Medellin, and the loudest thing anybody had heard
Parabellum started in Medellin in early 1983 around the drummer Cipriano Alvarez and the guitarist Carlos Mario Perez, the one everybody called La Bruja. Sacrilegio came out on Discos Fuentes in 1987 in five hundred copies. Mutacion por radiacion followed on Sonolux in 1988 in six hundred. By the end of that year the band was finished. Two EPs, eleven hundred records, five years of existence.
Then look at what those eleven hundred records did. Colombians do not call this music black metal or death metal. They call it ultra metal, their own word for it, because it was neither and it got there first. Reencarnacion and Blasfemia came up alongside Parabellum and the three of them are still discussed together. Euronymous of Mayhem named Parabellum and Reencarnacion among his own influences, which puts a city under curfew in South America directly upstream of the most documented scene in metal.
Nobody in Medellin was trying to invent a genre. They were trying to make a record that sounded like the street outside, and the street outside happened to be worse than anything Europe could imagine.
Rafael Quintero, KaosMetal
The scene had an organiser too, which is the part that usually gets left out. Mauricio Montoya, known to everyone as Bull Metal, drummed in Masacre and ran a radio programme called La Cortina de Hierro to get this material on air in a city where getting anything on air was a negotiation. Parabellum themselves turn up on screen in the 1990 film Rodrigo D: No Future, which is how most people outside Colombia first saw the scene at all.
Masacre are the ones who turned all of that into a career. Eleven albums to their name, from Reqviem and Ola de violencia at the start of the nineties through Sacro and Muerte verdadera muerte to Brutal Aggre666ion in 2014, and they are still crossing the Atlantic to play European festivals four decades after Medellin gave them a scene to come out of. Nobody predicted that in 1988. Most of the bands around them were gone inside three years.
Lima did it twice, nine years apart
Mortem formed in Lima in July 1986 around Fernan Nebiros and Alvaro Amduscias. Then they put out four demos and waited. Evil Dead in 1989. Superstition in 1991. Vomit of the Earth in 1992. Unearth the Buried Evil in 1993. Nine years of cassettes before an album existed.
The album was Demon Tales in 1995, and it was the second metal record ever released in Peru. The first was Aquelarre by Hadez in 1993. Read that again: a country of twenty three million people had produced two metal albums by 1995, and both of them were extreme. After Demon Tales, Mortem signed to the German label Merciless Records and became the first Peruvian metal band on a European contract. They are still going, through The Devil Speaks in Tongues in 1998, Decomposed by Possession in 2000, De Natura Daemonum in 2005 and Deinos Nekromantis in 2016.
A country of twenty three million had produced two metal albums by 1995, and both of them were extreme. Nobody was making a living. Everybody was making a statement.
The rest of the map, quickly
Chile is its own case and gets its own piece, so here is the short version: Santiago had bands from 1985, had a tape network that reached three continents, and had no label prepared to sign a single one of them.
Argentina was thrash country and stayed thrash country. The death metal came late and small, with Extreminio forming in San Martin in 1989 and Vibrion, Gastre and Escabios working the same underground. Venezuela's oldest extreme band, Stratuz, has been going since 1984, and Venezuelan musicians will tell you their models were Sepultura and Sarcofago rather than anything American, for the simple reason that Brazilian records were the ones that reached them. Ecuador and Bolivia have plenty of bands and almost nothing on record before 2000.
| Country | Band | Release | Label | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brazil | Sarcofago | I.N.R.I. | Cogumelo | 1987 |
| Colombia | Parabellum | Sacrilegio (EP) | Discos Fuentes | 1987 |
| Colombia | Parabellum | Mutacion por radiacion (EP) | Sonolux | 1988 |
| Peru | Hadez | Aquelarre | Independent | 1993 |
| Peru | Mortem | Demon Tales | Merciless | 1995 |
| Brazil | Krisiun | Black Force Domain | Dynamo | 1995 |
What killed the old system was not a label. It was cheap technology. The blank CD arrived, then the internet, and a scene whose entire logistics had been built on hand dubbed cassettes and international reply coupons suddenly had no logistics problem at all. That is why the continent's bands started turning up on European festival bills in the 2000s and 2010s rather than in the 1990s, when they were making the records that deserved it.
What eleven hundred copies bought
Here is the thing about this continent that nobody says plainly enough. The influence has no relationship whatsoever to the sales. A Florida band that shifted forty thousand units changed the way people wrote riffs in Florida. A Medellin band that shifted five hundred changed the way people wrote riffs in Bergen. The tape network did not care about units, and it moved faster than any distributor ever has.
Every record I own out of that scene came to me at fourth hand, dubbed onto whatever was lying around, with the title written on the shell in biro and half the top end gone. It sounds terrible. It also sounds exactly like what it is, which is a signal that survived a journey it had no business surviving. The largest scene on the continent is the one that eventually got the distribution everybody else deserved, and that is brazilian Death Metal Bands.
