Sepultura pays loud homage to the music of its native Brazil.

By Tim Kenneally

    The terrain outside Indigo Ranch Studios in Malibu, California, is as tranquil as the heavens, a verdant Eden overlooking the scenic Pacific Coast Highway. Within the rustic walls of the studio proper, however, it's a different story. Hunched over a thoroughly battered Gibson SG, Sepultura guitarist Max Cavalera is beating ungodly washes of white noise from the beast with a length of chain ("It's a Gibson S&M model," he later quips). Meanwhile, producer/head cheerleader Ross Robinson sits by Cavalera's side, twisting the guitar's tuning pegs at random and feverishly patching cords into one or another of the plethora of vintage pedals heaped before the pair's feet. The result? Pure sonic meltdown. "Roots" (Roadrunner), the ultimate outcome of these sessions, is full of wild sounds, and not just because of Cavalera and Sepultura co-guitarist Andreas Kisser's guitar savagery. The band's first album since 1993's "Chaos A.D.," "Roots" is a conceptual work that pays homage to the indigenous music of its native Brazil. It's an idea that Sepultura has toyed with before, most notably on "Chaos'" "Kaiowas," but "Roots" ups the ante considerably: to attain the album's metal-cum-tribal synthesis, the band brought in guest percussionists and a host of traditional Brazilian instruments, creating frenzied bursts of South American rhythms that pepper the familiar Sepultura squall with a distinctly primal flavor. "It was a jungle here, man," Cavalera enthuses. "There were instruments here that you'd only ever see in Brazil. It wasn't just the typical bongos, like you see in movies."

    Most ambitiously, the band spent three days in the Amazonian village inhabited by the ancient Xavantes warrior tribe to produce "Itsari," a collaboration between Sepultura and the Xavantes that uses a chant from the tribe's healing ceremony as its foundation. Given Cavalera's penchant for pointedly topical lyrics, it would be easy to interpret the culture-melding of "Roots" as the ultimate political act. Both Kisser and Cavalera, however, decline to give credence to such readings. "I don't really want to put an activist spin on all of this," Cavalera insists. "We are a political band, but, on the other hand, music is always the first thing. That's what this album is about-music."

GUITAR WORLD: You have remarked that "Roots" is your "most Brazilian record to date."

MAX CAVALERA: Yeah. The whole concept behind the album is about understanding things from our roots that never went away and using them again. For us, obviously, that means exploring our Brazilian heritage. I think the songs have a Brazilian feeling to them. There's almost a Brazilian sound to the way we play, especially with the rhythms. All of us can play percussion, and that rhythmic aspect of our music training always works its way into our songwriting. GW: The newfound emphasis on percussion is certainly one of the more striking things about "Roots." What was the reason for the shift?

ANDREAS KISSER: It wasn't really anything we planned. We had a lot of really great experiences on "Chaos A.D.," especially with "Kaiowas," because we recorded it in a very special way, in a castle with acoustics. When we started touring, we thought it was pretty lame to put acoustic guitars in the middle of our set, which is very energetic and powerful, so we adapted "Kaiowas" with distorted guitars and explored the more percussive part of the song. We've had really great results live with everybody playing the drums. Since then, we've had the inclination to work more with that.

GUITAR WORLD: I understand you enlisted some help in that direction.

KISSER: Yeah. The more simple percussion-the little details here and there in the songs-we're doing ourselves, but we called in this percussionist from Brazil, Carlinhos Brown. He put some percussion on two songs of ours, and we wrote a song from scratch with him in the studio ["Ratamahatta"] that's sung in Portuguese.

GUITAR WORLD: So did he adapt to the Sepultura sound pretty easily?

CAVALERA: Oh, yeah! He's insane. He doesn't see metal like we see metal. It's almost more of a punk rock thing for him. He totally got into the vibe. Instead of sitting there and saying, "Oh, man, you're crazy!" he went for it, too.

GUITAR WORLD: There wasn't any culture shock there?

CAVALERA:Not at all. There would've been with somebody else. We thought about that: "We're going to bring a 40-year-old percussionist in here, and he's just going to fucking die when he hears this shit!" But most percussionists are open-minded, because they're insane by nature. A real percussionist will bang two rocks together and make a sound out of it. They are open-minded, unique people, and they can easily understand what we do, which is a real gut-feeling thing. If we brought in a guitar player from a bossa nova band, it might really freak him out. [laughs] That would have never worked. The only funny thing with Carlinhos was that he said, "Why is there all this low end? Everywhere, there's so much low end!" He liked it, but he just wanted to know why we play like that. He was kind of in shock. There's not a lot of that in Brazilian popular music.

GUITAR WORLD: Did you appreciate traditional Brazilian music when you were growing up?

KISSER: We didn't really listen to that stuff when we were kids like we did with metal, but everywhere in Brazil you've got lambada [a Brazilian dance music] on TV, on the radio-especially during Carnaval [a traditional Brazilian ceremony celebrating the arrival of the Spring equinox, which is a sacred time for Brazilians-GW Ed.] So we grew up with that in our blood, but at the time we thought all of that was crap. We just liked metal. We had a very radical point of view.

GUITAR WORLD: So why the change of heart?

KISSER: Because we see Brazil differently now. We've traveled a lot, and we've seen that Brazil is very, very rich in rhythms and different cultures. We're exploring more of that now. It was inside of us all that time, but now we're bringing it out.

CAVALERA: Actually, I liked some of it as a kid. The samba thing, live, was always cool. When I was a kid, my mom and my dad took us to this square in town, and 100 drummers would be playing at the same time, practicing for Carnaval. They practice religiously, starting about two months before Carnaval, every night, for three or four hours. It gives you goose bumps. For me, it's always been like that; music didn't really need to be metal or rock-if something gives you goose bumps, that's good music right there.

GUITAR WORLD: Like with the Xavantes tribe?

CAVALERA:Right. The person in charge of the tribe was really cool, and he thought it was a great idea that would heighten awareness of the tribe culture, which is really low right now. The youth don't want to know about any of that. All they want to know about is fucking McDonald's and MTV. Maybe after the album comes out, a lot of our fans will see things like that, which they'd never even thought about before, in a cooler way.

GUITAR WORLD: You've got a history of exposing other cultures. for instance, in your "Third World Chaos" video, you documented ancient Indonesian piercing rituals. What makes Sepultura open to that kind of stuff?

CAVALERA:Well, we just respect other cultures a lot. I think it's cool to understand the values of older stuff like that. Tribal cultures used the Earth without destroying it and fucking it up like the white people did. They used it, but they also gave back to it. For us, it's almost about keeping those values in sight. But we also tend to see anything as an art form first. Like when we went to Indonesia and filmed those rituals-we view what they're doing in the same way we view our own music: they're expressing themselves through that, and we're doing the same thing. When we go to the Xavantes tribe and play this, they're probably going to think we're crazy at first, but I think they'll understand that it's just our way of expressing ourselves, same as them.

GUITAR WORLD: Do you feel like your guitar playing has evolved much over the years?

KISSER: Yeah, it's gotten tighter. In the past, like on the "Beneath the Remains" and "Arise" albums, everything we did on the guitar, it was, "Okay, let's use it." So there were thousands of different parts. But right now we're more careful; we work a little bit more on the riffs and everything and put the right things in the right place. I think we're more careful when we write songs nowadays. CAVALERA: Actually, in the studio, I've become more sloppy, more live, than I used to be. In the past, I didn't really follow my gut feelings that much. On "Chaos A.D.," I started feeling that I was playing my own style. It's not the normal guitar-playing style, but more freaked-out and noisy.

GUITAR WORLD: It sounds like there are two different schools of thought at play here--"more careful" and "more sloppy."

CAVALERA: Yes, but that makes it really interesting. We have Andreas, who tends to be a more traditional player, and me, who's more non-traditional and freaked out, almost ignorant in a way. I don't want to know about notes and things, I just want to know what sounds cool and fits the music. So together we work as a great team. It's very complementary.

GUITAR WORLD: You've also mentioned that you're playing around with tunings on the new songs.

CAVALERA: On some of them, yes. Half of the album is in standard tuning, and for the other half we decided to go with that old death metal school, but without playing the death metal riffs. We're playing what could be called "Sepultura riffs," but really tuned down.

KISSER: Right now we're using a lot of low tunings-very low tunings, like having our guitars tuned down a flatted fifth [low to high: Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, F, Bb]. I'm using heavier strings on my guitar-.056 for the first and .013 for the last-so the tuning holds well and you can hear the picking. That characteristic Sepultura picking sound, with the heavy attack, is still there.

GUITAR WORLD: If you're playing "Sepultura riffs" with the characteristic Sepultura picking sound, why tune down?

KISSER: Because it's a great way to develop new ideas: with different tunings, you get different moods. There's a much darker vibe to the newer material that wouldn't be there without the lower tunings.

CAVALERA: Actually, on "Bestial Devastation," our first record, we used different tunings, but that's only because we recorded two songs the first day and the other two the next day, and the guitar tuning had changed overnight. We didn't even use tuners, just whatever tuning was on the guitar. It turned out well, though-one of these days I should put that record on and figure out what tuning it was.

GUITAR WORLD: So it's not an entirely new concept to you.

KISSER: No, but to this extent it is. We have songs in D, and "Arise," for example, is in D#. We'll be going crazy live, trying to figure out how to manage it all. But we're always in tuning hell anyway, because Max's guitars are crap.

GUITAR WORLD: Crap? Could you elaborate on that?

KISSER: Well, he only uses four strings, so the balance of the guitar is all fucked up. Plus, his guitars get all crashed up from tours.

GUITAR WORLD: Why only four strings?

CAVALERA: Good question, man. I was waiting for that one. Well, I don't do any leads, never did. Like I said, I usually just do my noisy stuff on the bottom four strings, so it feels better for me, even though it goes out of tune a lot. I've been with Gibson up until now, and I'm trying to find a smaller company where I can build my own four-string guitar so that I don't have to take the strings off anymore, and the bridge and everything will stay in tune.

GUITAR WORLD: This album is a bit different for you guys. Do you think it might entail a period of adjustment for your fans?

CAVALERA: Yeah, I think so. But with every Sepultura album, there's been evolution, because that's how we are. There was a big difference from "Arise" to "Chaos," and I think there's another big difference from "Chaos" to "Roots."

KISSER: It'll be different, but I think that's what Sepultura fans expect: the next step forward