Heavy Metal Nation is a place for fans of heavy, interesting music to come and read, write, and comment on articles about heavy music. A Season In Hell, from Brazil, started life out after a group of like-minded music students wanted to start something heavy and unique for their school. Expecting to get bottled off-stage, instead they've gone from strength to strength. I caught up with Thiago Oliveira, guitarist and forming member, to discuss how it's all going for metal in Brazil.

Pharmer4: G'day Thiego, cool to catch up. We'll get the more boring stuff out of the way first - who would you include as your predecessors; which bands inspired you to make the music you do?

Thiago Oliveira: Well. We listen to a lot different types of music. I mean it’s really easy for us to listen to some jazz stuff like Miles Davis and then listen to Cradle Of Filth and Cannibal Corpse. And there’s the classic stuff by Zeppelin, Queen and tons real experimental stuff like the crazy music by Schoenberg, Phillip Glass.

It all melds together in the twisted melting pot our band is. I think it would be too much to mention here, but I could mention the sounds of Extreme Metal bands like Death, Cannibal Corpse, Slayer, In Flames, Morbid Angel along with the fusion Jazz by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Miles Davis and many others and some other classical XXth century music, metal and rock stuff like Pink Floyd, Zep, Queen, Dream Theater, Maiden and so on.

P4: It is really refreshing to see bands who have a real depth to their influences, especially different styles. Does the jazz play into your music, give you ideas that are fresh for metal?

TO: Yes it definitely does. Especially in terms of harmony and rhythms which are very different from what metal usually sounds. We also get different ideas from contemporary classical music which sounds weird but yet gives our music a different touch.

P4: In terms of lyrics the band explores the works of famous authors in literature. Which authors inspire your work? And which authors’ work did you base your demo on?

TO: Well in the demo CD it was Arthur Rimbaud, but we decided to change the lyrics and this time it will be T. S. Elliot.

P4: Do you have other ideas for future releases?

TO: Well, for the forthcoming album it’s going to be inspired by two poems by Elliot, Hollow Man and Wasteland. We still can’t say it’s going to be for the whole thing and I have tons of music written but our singer hasn’t written any lyrics yet.

P4: What do you think of other band’s work based on literature (ie many bands use the Cthulhu mythos, Mastadon’s Leviathan is based on Moby dick, etc.)

TO: I think it’s great. It shows people that metal is not made by moronic teens. I remember Maiden had this type of thing going on some of their stuff and it was cool because the lyrics made you go after the book and then you could discover tons of nice things to read. I read Conrad and Poe because of Maiden.

P4: Who would you class as your contemporaries; bands that you see as your equals in the current scene?

TO: I can’t really think of any specific bands as I think we kinda sound a little different. We can sound really extreme sometimes, with some blast beats and death metal vocals, some times really wacky as King Crimson and Zappa and we also have some more sides to it like Pink Floyd and fusion Jazz. Not to mention our fondness to contemporary classical music made by composers like Arnold Schoenberg, Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky. Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass trying to pin down a specific influence (Lol).

But I think in terms of attitude towards music and creativity it would be as Opeth and Pain of Salvation, but with the extreme and experimental sides to it.

P4: Who would you like to tour with?

TO: Lots of bands! Dream Theater, Pain of Salvation, Meshugah, Opeth, Dimmu Borgir. Lots of them!

P4: Which bands would you just as soon see disappear altogether?

TO: All the emo shitty crap, and some crap over rated bands like nightwish. And some that you can that are just in it for the money and should have ended many years ago like Iron Maiden (which is a band I love but nowadays are just old and don’t have it anymore).

P4: Which sub-genre of metal would you class yourself as?

TO: I don't Know! You tell me! (lol). Well, it would be something like Progressive, extreme, psychedelic metal…I just don’t know.

P4: How did A Season In Hell come together?

TO: Well, me and Sheba, the other guitar player, were at music college studying and I think that there weren’t many students who were into metal. And one day a gig came up and I knew he had some music and I also had some and no band to play it! So we decided teamed up with some freshmen who were also into heavy stuff and did the gig with a name that was something like Bandless Composers Association. Or something twisted like that. We thought that we would start to play and people would throw shit at us, as it would be a pop gig and we were a metal band and at the time we sounded much more extreme, I did all the vocals. But it turned out good and we decided to keep going. I had some new stuff and it changed a lot but it kinda worked musically.

P4: Cool, so you are all music students? Is it more about theory at the college, or is it more practical and hands on?

TO: Well, we do get practice, which is more classical orientated and theory as well. I think that in Music College you come in contact with many genres that you wouldn’t otherwise, and that brought us many different elements to our music that makes us sound the way we sound. It also brought broadness of musical ideas and openness.

P4: Tell me about the band members

TO: Well, me and Sheba are the original members both of us guitarists, there’s also William (vocals), Moisés Mega Hair (Drums), Fernando (keys) and we are testing bass players.

P4: How is the bass player hunt going?

TO: The hunt is over. Unfortunately Mike our former and very fine bass player moved and is not able to work with us anymore. But now we have Rafael Vazz, a great player and a very nice chap, he also plays in the power metal band Suprema.

P4: How did you come up with the name A Season In Hell?

TO: Well, as we couldn’t have a name like Bandless Composers Association I suggested “A Season In Hell” which is name of a book by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Everyone in the band agreed and that’s it.

P4: So again, taking influence from literature. Does the poetry have similar themes to what you write about?

TO: Well, in the beginning, working over the weird structures of Rimbaud’s poems showed a different approach towards songwriting and the use of unconventional song structures, it kind of showed us a way to go, it gave us purpose and meaning to what we did. It taught me a lot. It also had the thing that sometimes I read his poems and the melodies just came up you know, sometimes the whole imagery for a whole song just came as I read, it was weird and sometimes kind of supernatural. I believe that sometimes music is not an earthly thing and we as musicians are just means for something else to communicate.

P4: Tell me about where you are from.

TO: We are from Brazil, in the city of Uberlandia, which is in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais.

P4: What is you local scene like - are you one amongst many, or a lone torch bearer for Metal?

TO: It’s really crappy. Not just for metal, but for rock music in general. You don’t get a lot of gigs, and the ones you get you get a crappy sound and a hostile audience who only want to hear cover songs. Our scene sucks.

P4: Harsh. Why on earth would people not be interested in new material – even if you have to chuck in a few covers, they should be proud that metal is being created there!

TO: I don’t know. I wish it wouldn’t be that hard! The place in which the band began is really weak for metal and we were always treated as shit even by the “headbangers”. That made us give up playing Uberlandia and we are looking for gigs someplace else, where we can get the respect that I think we deserve. Once we did a Sao Paulo gig and people really showed us respect for achieving the sound we do. I really hate to talk about this, but now things are only better because some major metal magazines gave us some great reviews. Hell, that is the part in the band that pisses me off and almost made us give up the whole thing.

P4: What do you want to achieve with A Season In Hell; a way to avoid mundane employment; notoriety amongst metal fans, or world domination?

TO: Well I want to write music that matters, original music, experiment with fresh ideas, try to be different from many clone bands that we hear everyday. If someday it becomes a success we’ll be glad, but I’d rather receive recognition as a creative artist than a commercial success.

P4: Would you be mortified if you came up with something fresh, and imitators started coming out of the wood works, as happened with nu metal in the 90s, and metalcore these days?

TO: I don’t really give this a lot of thought. I never thought that we would be popular enough to be imitated by other people. Now I think it could actually happen. Lol. I would only be mortified if these copycats didn’t give us the credits (lol). You know if we ever become popular I just hope if anyone copies us that we at least would be ahead of the pack. You know like Dream Theater, many bands copy them but they are know as leaders of a musical genre and are always someplace else than the other bands who follow the trend.

P4: Do you still have day jobs?

TO: Yep. Writing metal music in Brazil doesn’t pay the bills so we have to do a lot of other stuff. Most of the guys in the band are professional musicians and play other types of music and teach. I am doing a Master’s degree in Musicology in Sao Paulo and teaching classical guitar. For us the band is our medium for artistic expression, and we don’t expect it to be a commercial success when we write music.

P4: What exactly is musicology – is it studying techniques, musical history, what?

TO: Well, I never thought you would ask that! (lol) Well it’s like musical research and analysis. I decided to pick a classical guitar piece by composer Sérgio Assad and decided to analyze the different aspects of it, like structure, the history behind it, the performance aspects and style. It’s a lot of work but it’s something that is making me grow as a musician.

P4: What have been A Season In Hell's highlights so far?

TO: I think the recognition that we have been receiving from the specialized press kind of said to us not to give up and that we had a powerful material.

P4: Any lowlights?

TO: Lots of them. When we began recording our demo CD our drummer and bassist left and only me and the other guitarist had to do everything and we had no idea of how produce a recording. And on top of that when we finally got new members, things didn’t work out and many gigs were shit.

P4: Why did the original drummer and bass player leave – did they just get other offers, or was metal just not their thing?

TO: Well. I’m not really sure why. Esther our former bass player said that she was in a lot of bands and couldn’t commit to us, a shame because she’s a really nice person. And Tiago, our former drummer had another death metal band and was winding us on, and that really sucked, because he said he wanted to make it happen and was always giving excuses not to show up at practice, eventually he left and it was relief but also a shame because he was a great drummer.

P4: When you say things didn’t work out after you got the new members, was it because you were still getting to know each other etc, or did you go though a bunch of new members?

TO: Well it worked out with most of our new people since most of them are still with us. It only didn’t work with one of them in a musical level. This person had musical problems and just simply had difficulty with our songs, also wouldn’t say a word at practice and that was really weird because I think we are easy going people. We would spend months on a single song and when it came to play live it didn’t give us the confidence to play at all and it was crap. We eventually couldn’t take anymore and gave this person the boot.

P4: What are you current tour plans?

TO: Well, we really focused on the songwriting for the album and we are not really that concerned with gigs at the moment. Once we’ve finished that, we are back on the road.

P4: Your first release, which is self titled, has six songs on it. Tell us about them.

TO: Well, it actually has four because two of them didn’t make it into the release. The first one which was called Pt I, a very heavy, very fast song which I wrote and didn’t enter because of recording problems, it had some orchestral parts and it was an excellent song, I hope we can include it on our CD.

The other, Pt VI was written by Sheba and didn’t enter because the Demo was ready when he finished it, it’s also a great heavy song with some jazzy parts in it, and I also hope we manage to squeeze this one in our CD.

The first song in our Demo which is called Hunger is like a really heavy fast song with some mixed vocal parts, and it has some death metal parts, some melodic parts, some progressive jazzy bits and the cool thing is that it all works! (lol)

The second one The Song of The Highest Tower is an electronic ballad with female vocals by our friend and guest singer Daniela Alves. The cool thing was that I used some tricks I took from the Brazilian composer H. Villa-Lobos.

The next one is PT III, which mixes some odd meter rhythms with Dodecaphonic Arnold Schoenberg style composition and some Death Metal stuff, and some really calm parts which sound a bit like Pink Floyd.

The last Song pt V it’s like a sum of all our sounds, it has the female vocals, the dissonant stuff, the aggressive grunts and the melodic parts, it’s a great song and a new version of it is available at our Myspace (www.mypace.com/bandaseason).

P4: Who designed the artwork for you?

TO: The artwork was done by Shebas’ friend Isis Viera.

P4: Do you have a label to promote and distribute it?

TO: Well, now that the hunt for a bass player is over we are now hunting for a label, we want to get ou music around, tour and promote the band properly. So, if you know any one who would do that, just get in touch with us.

P4: Which countries are you aiming to have it released in?

TO: Well, we are trying to get it released in Brazil, The States and Europe, we are in touch with some people who might help us do that and as soon as it is released we’ll send Heavy Metal Nation a copy for review.

P4: How has it been received so far?

TO: Well it really surprised us, the reception of our music. We got used to be disrespected at our home town and press reviews we got, totally blew us away and we didn’t expect it.

P4: Have you been getting much media/radio support so far?

TO: Well some radios are playing our stuff, but we don’t get many radios for metal music over here, we are getting a good press reception and also many people wandering where this music comes from.

P4: Thanks for your time Thiago. I wish you all the best in the future - Brazil needs more metal, and metal needs more bands who have a deep musical knowledge, and are not affraid to use it!

Posted 20th November 2007 by Pharmer4
Updated Sunday, 27 June, 2010 3:02 PM