>>So the possession of an instrument meant a lot in Belo Horizonte. Igor's drum kit in those days looked nothing like the kit he bashes now.
Igor : I had a snare drum, a floor tom and a cymbal, that's all, and I tried to keep up a rhythm with that. I played like that for most of 1983 an
During the Metal Belo Horizonte festival, the band was noticed by the owners of the Cogulemo Record Store and they gave Sepultura the chance to rec
Max: It really wasn't too good and
the video was bad. We only had two days to record everything. The funny
thing is that on two songs the instrumen. So if you want to play the songs
along with the album, you have to tune your guitar differently after two
songs
Igor : Cogumelo released the
record as a test to see how the audience would react to Sepultura and Overdose.
I think the Brazilinas were pretty su
Max : The deal financially
was not too good, but it wasn't important for us. We just wanted to have
an album out and tour. After the split LP was
corded 'Morbid Visions', on which the guitars are also tuned wrongly.
In Europe, their records became collectors items
and were received on the underground scene with cheers. In the meantime
Sepultura were hitting the
Max : After those gigs it
became time to start rehearsing material for the second album. Jairo hardly
showed up and when he didn't show up for thr
the band because he didn't enjoy the music.But he wanted to give us
time to find a suitable replacement before we went into the studio .
Andreas : I was on holiday
with a friend in Belo Horizonte. I had already got to know the guys a month
before .
Max : Yeah, he was my guitar
roadie for one gig.
Andreas : That was the first
time I saw Sepultura live
Igor : We already played some
songs together with him in the rehearsal room. We were playing some covers
just for fun .
Andreas : Yeah, they were
rehearsing for a gig where I was to be the guitar roadie and in the intermissions
we jammed together .
Max : We wanted Jairo to be
replaced by someone from the band Mutilator, but he didn't want to leave
his band. Then I remembered Andreas .
When 'Schizophrenia' was released, Cogumelo, who had sold 10,000 copies in Brazil, got the American label New Renaissence to release the album. People like Don Kaye and Borivoj Krgin were calling the band the new Slayer and helped Sepultura get in touch with the right people outside of Brazil.
Max : A friend of mine who
was working with Pan Am Brazil got me a plane ticket. I had to wear nice
clothes for two days and behave like someone w
for New York, and visited, with the help of Borivoj and Don,
record labels like Noise, Combat and Roadrunner. Most of the AR managers
knew the band
Later, Roadrunner got a new AR manager called
Monte Connor. He was interested in the band and saw signing them as a challenge.
They had a deal but was any new material written. The band even missed
the first deadline to start recording. Roadrunner, in the meantime, was
looking for a suitable prod
urns who, together with Dan Johnson, had done
Death's 'Leprosy'.
Max : We were really afraid
to work with a producer. Our first three albums we produced ourselves.
We didn't want anybody to touch our music. We o
For us, 'Beneath The Remains' was a sort of debut album, because
it was our first with a decent record company.
But the record company wanted to limit the financial risk as the band hadn't proved anything yet.
Max : We recorded 'BTR' in
nine days. Actually, it was nine nights because the studio was cheaper
at night time, so we had to record by night and
110 degrees and we were in a very dirty and noisy hotel and we had
to try and get some sleep during the day so we would be fit at night to
go to t
I didn't have enough time in Brazil to record all the vocals
so I flew with Scott to sing the rest in Florida .
The album was chosen in many fanzines as the best
death/thrash album of 1989 and the band and members did well in popularity
polls. Now they had to
tart in June 1989 but Sodom had recording delays
so it was postponed until September. In that month the band touched European
soil for the first tim
came specially for Sepultura.
Max : After three gigs I got food poisoning and had to go to hospital for treatment. The crew and management of Sodom were treating us very badly.
After that, the band went to America to do a headlining tour, mostly on the East Coast, with Faith Or Fear as support.
Max : We did a Halloween show at The Ritz [New York] with King Diamond and Sacred Reich and that was totally sold out. We got an excellent reactio
The band had also planned some gigs in Los Angeles but the promoter didn't pay the insurance.
Max : A thousand tickets were sold and when we arrived three hours before the show, there were three hundred metal heads waiting at the door who,
In the first month of 1990 the band mainly worked
on new material but in June Sepultura were back in Europe for two gigs
in Eindhoven, Holland and
en Air Festival.
Max : We were so nervous, we could hardly stand. We thought we had played to a lot of people in Brazil, where sometimes 5,000 turned up. We got a
At the Dynamo Festival the band met Sacred Reich's
manager, Gloria Bujnowski and decided to take her as manager.
Max : We wanted Scott Burns
to re-mix the whole album totally, and we wanted to record two extra songs
as a bonus for the CD, 'Troops Of Doom' and
me booked. We were very happy with Scott's re-mix, but you could hardly
call it a re-mix. Our old record company was so smart they had erased the
16
ade to press up the album.
During the recording of 'Arise', Bozo, the singer from Overdose, designed a new Sepultura logo, a large 'S' made of bones.
Igor : We wanted to have a symbol for the band, not just a band name but a logo everyone could recognise .
The logo is tattooed even on Igor and Max's mother's
leg! 'Arise' was due to be released in February 1991 but was postponed
until 25 March because
nd was booked on the 23rd of the month at the
Rock In Rio II festival. So 20,000 copies of 'Arise' were released in Brazil.
All of them were sold.
Andreas : The organisation
only took care of the big foreign bands. They didn't do anything for the
Brazilian bands. We didn't get any money, the
Igor : Rio was a big surprise for us. We had played the
Dynamo in front of 25,000 but on that festival only more underground bands
were playing. A
Max : It was unbelieveable.
We had a huge mosh pit with about 10,000 headbangers in front of the stage
when we played 'Orgasmatron' .
Andy Wallace re-mixed 'Arise' without the band.
Max : We recorded 'Orgasmatron' at 5 a.m. and the next day we did our first gig in Florida for the 'Arise' tour.We couldn't help it because the to
'Under Siege' was released as a single before the album came out.
Max : It was the wrong single
choice. I don't know why we chose that song.
Andreas : I think we chose
it because we wanted to make a video of the song first. I think 'Dead Embryonic
Cells' would have been a better single
Max : We wanted to film the
video in an Inca ruin in Peru but at that atime there was a Cholera epidemic
over there .
>>