O CORACAO NEGRO DE TERRA BY MARCELO FONSECA
Formed in 2015, in the riff metropolis of São Paulo, Brazil, Basalt unifies elements of doom, black metal and dark experimental tones, subverting musical archetypes and create new extreme audio terrains. Harkening to the dense low-end, cavernous and intense depths of the heavy sonic, Basalt fuse this fury with extraordinary ambient and atmospheric scope, incorporating a unique channelling of influences and sounds. Melding rawness and discordance with progressive and expansive breadth, Basalt truly wields aural transgression and transformation.
Our new record it’s a remastered version of our first full-length, that was recorded between April and July of 2016, around a year after the band actually started. So it has a kind of rawness and urgency that’s even more amplified by this new and great mastering done by Adam Richardson (11PARANOIAS, Ancient Lights, Ramesses).
Basalt is a collective construction. An exercise of micro-democracy in some way. After all, each person does their own part, but that has to be in harmony with everything else, achieving some kind of equilibrium. That’s much more than just thinking about music from a mathematical point of view. This relationship spawns out of our own personal relations, where we see eye to eye, and where we disagree too. This generates not only the music itself but also a series of questions like “In what conditions are we going to play?”, “How are we recording our stuff?”, “What kind of support do we need?”. These are not merely management issues, but also important parts of the whole creative process.
The creative process of writing, in my personal experience, has its specificities. I dislike some older lyrics of mine, but at the same time, I see them as a ‘polaroid’, a small portrait of my understanding of a given subject at a given moment. I know that at some point this can happen with the lyrics of “O coração negro da Terra”. There are also things that are more ephemeral that I get very excited about for a while, after a period of time I forget them, and then I get excited again afterwards. But, speaking for today, one favourite passage for me is the final verse of the song ‘Aurora’ which says: “The darkest hour comes before the sun. Naked, unarmed, the pure essence of who we are. In the dark abyss. The abyss we are.” This piece has hope camouflaged in bitterness put in a very simple way.
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