The Andean is a chronicle dedicated to the archaeology of silence in a contemporary media ecosystem obsessed with the viral present, where this space is reserved for the artifacts that were buried—often violently—under the weight of history. Our mission is to exhume the cultural flashpoints of the region that demand a forensic dissection, not because they are new, but because their resonance refuses to decay. As always, we operate without a timeline, breaking the surface only when a subject demands to be heard, or a ghost from the past comes across our desk.

To christen this chronicle, we turn our gaze to the breathless altitude of the High Andes, where the Aburrá Valley traps heat and violence with equal indifference. Here, the pressing of a vinyl record in 1987 was less a commercial endeavor than a ritual of exorcism. The city was Medellín, the atmosphere was one of decomposing social order, and the sound was the ‘Sacrilegio’ EP by Parabellum.

Released into a vacuum of car bombs and curfews, this twelve-inch slab of wax did not merely document a musical style; it codified the terrified scream of a generation designated “No Future.” Unlike the theatrical rebellion of its Northern Hemisphere contemporaries, Parabellum’s output was a direct acoustic mirror of the carnage unfolding in the “comunas.”

To examine this artifact now is to touch the third rail of extreme music history, revealing how a group of impoverished teenagers in a narcoterrorist war zone inadvertently constructed the sonic blueprint for global black metal long before the churches of Oslo ever caught fire.

It is a record that carries within its grooves the precise, terrified frequency of a city under siege. To hold this limited run of 500 copies is to hold a fragment of shrapnel. It does not hum with the polished, theatrical rebellion of British or North American heavy metal. It hisses. It bleeds. It sounds, to use the terminology of the audiophile turned coroner, “wet and squelchy,” like industrial machinery grinding through organic matter.

This investigation of the historical record descends into the “Ultra Metal” movement—a term coined indigenously to describe a sound that predated and eventually fed the Nordic black metal explosion, yet remained hermetically sealed within the violence of Colombia.

The story requires us to descend into the Guanábana rehearsal rooms, to sit in the stifling heat of Luis Emilio’s house, and to read the fading correspondence between a Colombian postman named Mauricio “Bull Metal” Montoya and a Norwegian radical named Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth.

The Geology of Hate in the 1980s

Eternal Spring and Eternal Funeral

To comprehend the noise, one must first process the silence that follows a detonation. In the 1980s, Medellín was sarcastically referred to as the “Silver Cup,” a city of commerce, orchids, and textile industries, but beneath this veneer, it was being hollowed out by the Medellín Cartel. The narcoterrorism crisis was not a backdrop; it was the atmosphere. It was the air pressure. The youth of the barrios—Manrique, Castilla, Aranjuez—were living in a necropolis.

The daily reality involved car bombs, “limpieza social” (social cleansing) squads, and a curfew that turned the city into a ghost town after dark. In my years observing the sociological strata of Antioquia, I have found that the violence of the 80s created a specific psychological condition in the youth: a “hyper-presentism.” There was no past, for the traditional values of the Catholic Paisa culture had failed to protect them. There was no future, for the life expectancy of a male in the comunas was statistically negligible. There was only the now, and the now was terrifying.

In this context, the imported sounds of Judas Priest or Iron Maiden, with their operatic fantasies and technical proficiency, felt inadequate. They were too clean. They were too hopeful. They spoke of dragons and battles in the sky, while the bodies of police officers were being left in the streets of Laureles for a bounty. The youth of Medellín required a sound that mirrored the chaos of the streets—a sound that was anti-technical, dissonant, and suffused with the stench of death.

The Invention of Ultra Metal

It is essential to note that the term “Black Metal” was not the primary identifier for these youths in the mid-80s. They coined the term “Ultra Metal” to demarcate their territory. Ultra Metal was not merely a subgenre tag; it was a demarcation line against the “poser” culture of traditional heavy metal and the polished thrash of the Bay Area.¹

It was a declaration of war against melody itself, a genre born from the necessity of expressing a reality that standard musical scales could not contain. This sound was characterized by a distinct lack of fidelity—not as an aesthetic choice, as it would later become in Norway, but as an unavoidable consequence of poverty.

Instruments were second-hand, amplifiers were blown out, and recording studios were makeshift. The “Ultra Metal” sound was the sound of limitations being pushed until they broke.

Economic Scarcity and the Intercambio

The isolation of Colombia in the 1980s was not just cultural; it was economic. Import restrictions and the stigma of the drug trade meant that international records were scarce. Professional instruments were luxury items, unattainable for the working-class kids of the “laderas” (hillsides).

This scarcity birthed the “intercambio” (exchange) economy, a system that relied on the postal service and immense patience. A metalhead in Medellín would save pesos—often devalued by inflation—to buy a stamp. They would wrap a few dollar bills in “papel carbón” (carbon paper) to hide them from the postal workers who might steal the cash or from customs agents looking for contraband.

They would send this package to a label in Europe or the United States, hoping that months later, a cassette would return. This delay created a culture of deep appreciation and forensic listening. A record was not a disposable file; it was a miraculous arrival. The tapes were copied and re-copied until the hiss of the magnetic tape was as loud as the music itself.

This degradation of audio quality became part of the aesthetic. When the Norwegians later purposely lowered their production quality to sound “necro,” they were imitating the natural degradation that the Colombians experienced by necessity.

Patient Zero and the ‘Sacrilegio’ Artifact

The Archaeology of the Riff

The release of the ‘Sacrilegio’ EP in 1987 marked a definitive rupture in the lineage of Latin American rock, transforming the band Parabellum from local agitators into the architects of a new sonic nihilism. While recorded tracks had circulated as early as 1984, the physical pressing of the vinyl crystallized a sound that was no longer just “heavy metal” but something far more malignant.

This was not a gradual evolution from the hard rock of the 70s; it was a mutation forced by the radiation of the cartel wars. The EP stands as a chronological anomaly, pre-dating the seminal releases of the Norwegian Second Wave by several years while containing the very bloodline—tremolo picking, blast beats, inhuman vocals—that would later define the genre globally.

However, where the Scandinavian sound would eventually be curated to evoke a “cold” northern mysticism, Parabellum’s output remains hot, humid, and suffocating. A forensic listening of ‘Madre Muerte’ and ‘Engendro 666’ reveals a production quality that defies standard engineering logic, capturing the “wet and squelchy” atmosphere of a city drowning in blood.

The guitars, played by Carlos Mario Pérez (“La Bruja”), buzz and crackle not out of avant-garde intent, but from the necessity of pushing damaged amplifiers and frayed cables beyond their breaking point. This “industrial machinery” tone, often compared to early Swans recordings, was not an aesthetic choice but a document of survival—the sound of equipment, like the city itself, dying in real-time.

The Structural Collapse of ‘Madre Muerte’

The opening track, ‘Madre Muerte’ (Mother Death), serves as the manifesto for this new anti-musicality. Abandoning the verse-chorus-verse structure of North American thrash, the song descends into nearly eight minutes of structural anarchy that mirrors the unpredictability of a street skirmish.

Drummer Cipriano Álvarez plays with a “maniacal” intensity, his tempo fluctuations creating a sensation of disorientation that mimics panic rather than keeping time.² Drummer Cipriano Álvarez plays with a “maniacal” intensity, his tempo fluctuations creating a sensation of disorientation that mimics panic rather than keeping time. At the 4:50 mark, a high-pitched, rapid-fire tremolo riff emerges—a sonic fossil that musicologists now identify as a “missing link,” foreshadowing the shrill guitar textures Aarseth would later popularize.

It is a moment of convergent evolution, proving that the youth of the Andes and the youth of Scandinavia arrived at the same sonic conclusion through vastly different traumas.

‘Engendro 666’ as Industrial Accident

If the first track was a collapse, ‘Engendro 666’ is the rubble. It begins with a clean guitar section so severely out of tune it borders on the avant-garde, before exploding into a “raging crust” beat that fuses British punk aggression with a demonic vocal performance of low growls and barks.

The mix is dominated by a “constant noise in the left speaker,” likely a grounding issue or a damaged tape head that, in any professional studio in London or New York, would have resulted in a discarded take. In Medellín, this noise was retained not as an error, but as an essential texture of reality.

The absence of bass guitar leaves the listener with no sonic floor, enhancing a feeling of vertigo that critics have noted makes the recording feel “honest” in a way that later, contrived lo-fi black metal could never replicate.

The Politics of Blasphemy

The lyrical content, obsessed with “death, hell, and blasphemy,” must be viewed as a political rejection of the specific theological order of 1980s Colombia.

In a country where the Church held immense power and “sicarios” prayed to the Virgin Mary before assassinations, Parabellum’s embrace of blasphemy was a rejection of the hypocrisy that surrounded them. While rejecting God, they were rejecting the social contract that promised salvation but delivered only corpses. ‘Madre Muerte’ was not an ode to a fantasy villain, but a recognition of the only reliable authority figure left in the city: Death itself.

Reencarnación and the Expansion of the Front

Beyond Patient Zero

To treat Parabellum as an isolated anomaly would be historical malpractice. They were merely the tip of a spear honed in the fires of the Aburrá Valley.

By 1988, a legitimate “Ultra Metal” scene had coalesced, defined not by commercial ambition but by a shared commitment to sonic extremism. The band Reencarnación, led by the enigmatic Víctor Raúl Jaramillo (known as “Piolín”), served as the philosophical counterpart to Parabellum’s brute force.

Their 1988 LP, self-titled ‘Reencarnación,’ pushed the chaotic structures of the genre into even more avant-garde territories. Tracks like ‘Funeral del Norte’ were not just songs; they were dissonance manifest, using complex, almost jazz-like tempo changes that alienated the casual listener and attracted the obsessive devotee.

The Primitive Assault of Blasfemia

Flanking them was Blasfemia, whose 1988 EP ‘Guerra Total’ (Total War) stripped the Ultra Metal sound down to a prehistoric, punk-infused primitivism. While Reencarnación flirted with complexity, Blasfemia embraced a barbaric simplicity that mirrored the blunt force trauma of the daily violence in the barrios.

These bands formed a tight-knit, almost monastic circle in the “comunas,” sharing instruments, rehearsal spaces, and a nihilistic philosophy that viewed musical proficiency as a bourgeois indulgence. They did not play for audiences in the traditional sense; they played for each other, in spaces like the “Battle of the Bands” at the Plaza de Toros La Macarena, where the distinction between the mosh pit and a riot frequently evaporated.

This trifecta—Parabellum, Reencarnación, and Blasfemia—constituted the “Unholy Trinity” of Medellín, a collective vanguard that established the rules of engagement for South American black metal.

Mauricio Montoya as the Diplomat of Hell

The Gatekeeper of the Andes

At the center of this expanding web of noise stood Mauricio Montoya Botero, known universally as “Bull Metal,” whose role evolved from musician to the central nervous system of the Colombian underground.

More than just a drummer for bands like Masacre and Typhon, Montoya positioned himself as the diplomat of a besieged scene, using his radio show La Cortina de Hierro (The Iron Curtain) to broadcast extreme sounds to a youth population starved for a reflection of their own reality.

Decades before the internet, he became the primary node connecting the isolated violence of Medellín to the global metal community, curating a canon of violence that would eventually influence the very Europeans he idolized.

The Path of Total Resistance

Montoya’s trajectory offers a critical counter-narrative to the nascent mainstream history of Colombian rock. While other figures emerging from the same chaotic rehearsal spaces would eventually sanitize their sound to find success in the world of Latin pop and “rock en español,” becoming celebrated symbols of resilience, Montoya drilled deeper into the darkness.

He embraced the nihilism of the “comunas” not as a phase, but as a permanent station. This divergence was not merely musical but philosophical, illustrating the two stark survival mechanisms available to the city’s youth: the path of commercial integration and hope, or the path of absolute disintegration and “No Future.”

Letters Wrapped in Carbon Paper

It was through his well-known correspondence that Montoya solidified the link between the Andes and the Arctic. Typing hundreds of letters on a mechanical typewriter, he established a direct line to Øystein Aarseth in Norway, creating a peer-to-peer exchange that bypassed the cultural embargo of the time.

To evade the sticky fingers of the Colombian postal service, he wrapped cash for record orders in “papel carbón” (carbon paper), a tradecraft born of necessity that allowed the “intercambio” economy to flourish.

Aarseth, seeking a sound that was “anti-technical” and purely evil, found in the tapes sent by Montoya—Parabellum, Reencarnación—a confirmation of his own theories. The Colombian sound was the “real” evil he was trying to manufacture in his basement in Oslo, validating the Medellín scene not just as a consumer of global culture, but as a progenitor of it.

The Norwegian Mirror of Theology and Survival

The Divergence of Evil

The relationship between the Medellín Ultra Metal scene and the Norwegian Black Metal scene (specifically the “Inner Circle”) is often framed as a simple exchange of influence. However, a deeper sociological excavation reveals a profound disconnect in their origins.

Boredom and Theology in the Norwegian Genesis

The Norwegian scene, birthed in the late 80s and early 90s, was a product of one of the world’s most stable, wealthy, and secular welfare states. The violence of the Norwegian scene—the church burnings, the murders—was performative and ideological. It was a rebellion against safety, against the crushing “greyness” of social democracy, and specifically against the Lutheran Church, which they viewed as a tool of suppression.

Their Satanism was theological; it was a philosophical rejection of Christian morality. They sought to create chaos in a vacuum of order. As Varg Vikernes and Øystein Aarseth famously debated, their war was for the “soul” of Norway.

Terror and Necessity in the Colombian Genesis

In stark contrast, the Colombian scene did not need to manufacture chaos; chaos was the ambient weather. For the youth of Medellín, “evil” was not a theological concept to be flirted with—it was a “sicario” (hitman) on a motorcycle. It was the “limpieza social” (social cleansing) vans.

The Colombian musicians were not rebelling against a stifling safety; they were screaming to drown out the sound of a failing state. Their Satanism was not an intellectual exercise in anti-Christianity, but a “dirty realism.”

In Medellín, the Devil was not an abstract adversary; he was a neighbor. The hitmen often prayed to the Virgin Mary (“La Virgen de los Sicarios”) before committing a murder, creating a surreal theological milieu where the sacred and the profane were blood-relatives. Ultra Metal was a mirror held up to this hypocrisy. It was not about burning a wooden stave church to make a point; it was about surviving a Tuesday in Aranjuez.

A Transatlantic Pact of Death

Despite these divergent origins, the two scenes found a meeting point in the aesthetics of death. When Per “Dead” Ohlin, the vocalist of Mayhem, committed suicide in April 1991, Aarseth famously did not call the police immediately. Instead, he rearranged the scene and took photographs of the corpse.

Aarseth sent copies of these photographs to his most trusted allies. One of them was Montoya in Medellín. The letter that accompanied the photos was chillingly detached. “Relax, I have photos of everything,” he wrote.

This statement serves as a diagnostic marker for the Norwegian scene’s pathology; it was not merely a reassurance to a friend, but the calculated move of an ideologue curating his own mythology. He described the suicide with a graphic precision that reveals a performative obsession with transgression: “Excuse the blood, but I have slit my wrists and neck… If I do not succeed dying to the knife I will blow all the shit out of my skull.”

The Dawn of the Black Hearts

In 1995, three years after the suicide and two years after Aarseth himself was murdered, Montoya released the bootleg live album ‘Dawn of the Black Hearts’ on his Warmaster Records label. The cover art was one of the photographs Aarseth had sent him: Ohlin’s body, slumped with a shotgun, the brain matter visible.

This release cemented the link between Norway and Colombia. It was an act of transgressive solidarity. By publishing the photo, Montoya was fulfilling Aarseth’s wish to “exploit” the death for the sake of the “true black metal scene.”

However, the irony remains: for the Norwegians, the photo was the ultimate “reality check” in a scene obsessed with fantasy. For Montoya, accustomed to seeing bodies left by the Cartel in the Medellín River, the photo was less a shock and more a grim confirmation that the darkness they felt in the tropics was universal.

The Genealogy of Ruin in the Canon of Disaster

A Lineage of Anti-Art

To isolate Ultra Metal as merely a musical subgenre is to miss its broader ontological frequency. It must be situated within a genealogy of “disaster art”—aesthetic movements born not from the academy, but from the trenches. In this light, Parabellum has more in common with the Dadaists of 1916 Zurich than with the hair-metal bands of the Sunset Strip.

Just as the Dadaists dismantled language to reflect the senseless butchery of the First World War, the youth of Medellín dismantled musical structure to reflect the incoherence of the Cartel Wars. It was a rejection of the “virtuosic”—the technical proficiency of Iron Maiden or Metallica—in favor of the “authentic,” where incompetence became a stylistic virtue because it mirrored the broken machinery of the state.

The Specter of Nadaísmo

Locally, this nihilism found its intellectual ancestry in Nadaísmo (Nothing-ism), the Colombian avant-garde literary movement of the 1960s founded by Gonzalo Arango. While the Nadaístas used poetry and manifestos to assault the conservative Catholic status quo, the Ultra Metaleros used amplification and distortion.

They were the bastard children of Arango’s “terrible 13,” stripping the rebellion of its literary pretension and boiling it down to a guttural roar. This places the movement on a spectrum of disruption: it was not a continuation of the Rock and Roll tradition of “rebellion,” but a rupture.

It was the point where music ceased to be a vehicle for pleasure and became a vehicle for trauma—a shift that places it alongside the “Dirty Realism” of Latin American cinema and the raw, unpolished testimonials of war survivors.

Cinema Verité in ‘No Futuro’

The Camera as Witness

If ‘Sacrilegio’ is the audio evidence, the 1990 film ‘Rodrigo D: No Futuro,’ directed by Víctor Gaviria, is the visual evidence. Gaviria, a poet and filmmaker with a forensic eye for the margins, did not hire professional actors. He cast the “real”—the punkeros and metaleros of the “comunas.”

The film tells the story of Rodrigo, a young man who wants to play drums in a punk band but is surrounded by the inescapable gravity of the “sicariato” (the hitman lifestyle). The casting process itself was a navigation of the underworld. Gaviria was advised by scene veterans like Carlos Mario Pérez (Parabellum) and even Mauricio Montoya, who acted as cultural consultants.

The Ethics of the Real

The production of ‘Rodrigo D: No Futuro,’ blurred the lines between fiction and documentary. Several of the actors were active participants in the violence. The punk bands, initially approached, were suspicious. Some refused to participate, wary of the film’s focus on “sicarios,” not wanting to be associated with the “pistolocos” (crazy gunmen).

However, members of the metal scene, including Cipriano Álvarez of Parabellum, appear in the film. Cipriano’s performance—singing ‘Cerdo Policía’ while playing drums—is a moment of cathartic release captured on celluloid. It is a performance of pure rage, unmediated by acting technique.

A Mausoleum of Celluloid

The tragedy of ‘Rodrigo D: No Futuro,’ is that the “No Future” of the title was prophetic. Many of the cast members, who were playing versions of themselves, were killed before the film was even released. They fell victim to the very violence they were portraying.

John Galvis, who played a prominent role, was murdered shortly after filming. This reinforces the thesis that the Ultra Metal and Punk scenes in Medellín were not merely artistic movements; they were survival mechanisms that often failed.

The film stands today not just as a piece of cinema, but as a mausoleum. It captures the faces of the dead, preserved in the amber of the film grain, screaming against a city that was trying to erase them.

From El Guanábano to Luis Emilio’s Oven

The Rehearsal Room as Sanctuary

While the recording of ‘Sacrilegio’ is the artifact, the process of Ultra Metal took place in the rehearsal rooms. These were not the soundproofed, air-conditioned studios of Europe. These were bedrooms, living rooms, and basements in the working-class neighborhoods.

The most famous of these was El Ensayadero de Luis Emilio in the Barrio Castilla. Luis Emilio was a figure of local folklore—a man who opened his home to the “peludos” (long-haired ones) when the rest of society shunned them. The description of this space is harrowing: a small room that became “un infierno de calor” (a hell of heat).

The drummer Edison Morales provided the definitive testimony on the studio’s conditions, noting the fan “had a single blade.” This detail is not a trivial anecdote; it is the material explanation for the frantic tempo of the Ultra Metal sound.

In this kiln, bands like Parabellum, Reencarnación, and Masacre hammered out their sound not out of artistic experimentation, but out of physical desperation. The heat and the noise were inseparable. The musicians played stripped to the waist, sweating onto their instruments, the humidity warping the wood of the guitars and rusting the strings. The music had to be fast because endurance in that room was finite. They were playing to escape the room, to escape the heat, to escape the city.

The Bohemian Resistance of El Guanábano

If Luis Emilio’s house was the factory, El Guanábano was the parliament. Located near the Parque del Periodista in downtown Medellín, El Guanábano was a bar and a meeting place that celebrated “25 years of creative bohemia.” It was a “space of countercultural resistance” nestled in the heart of the city.

Here, the metaleros mingled with poets, writers, and drug dealers. It was a “zone of tolerance” where the social stratifications of Colombian society temporarily dissolved. In the midst of the violence, El Guanábano offered a space for conversation—the “tertulia.” It was here that tapes were traded, fanzines were distributed, and the mythology of the scene was constructed.

The snippet describes it as a place where “music, sporadic exhibitions, or parties” created an ambient for encounter. For the Ultra Metal scene, this was the distribution node. It was where a kid from the slums could meet someone with a new record from Venom or Slayer brought in from the United States, and where the “correo aéreo” packages from Europe were opened like religious relics.

The juxtaposition of “Sandro y Leonardo Fabio” (romantic ballads) with extreme metal speaks to the unique eclecticism of the Latin American experience—the ability to hold contradictory cultural artifacts in the same space.

The Missing Link and the End of the Cycle

The Heritage of the Abyss

As we look back from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the importance of the Ultra Metal movement and the ‘Sacrilegio’ EP becomes clear. Parabellum and their contemporaries were not just imitating the heavy metal of the North; they were mutating it. They were the “missing link” between the speed metal of the early 80s and the black metal of the 90s. But to label them merely as a transition is to diminish their ferocity.

They were the original infection, the patient zero of a sonic virus that would eventually consume the globe. The band Parabellum dissolved in 1988, their career cut short like so many lives in Medellín, but through the efforts of Montoya, the bloodline of their suffering was injected into the veins of the global underground, ensuring that the scream of the comunas would echo long after the city itself had been silenced.

A Warning from the Acetate

To listen to ‘Sacrilegio’ decades later is not an act of musical appreciation, but of archaeological retrieval. It forces us to acknowledge that the most extreme artistic expressions of the twentieth century were not built in the comfort of European art schools, but extracted from the raw ore of Latin American survival.

The “Ultra Metal” of Medellín remains a terrifying anomaly: a sound that did not seek to emulate hell, but simply recorded the ambient noise of the street corner. Mauricio Montoya, Parabellum, and the ghosts of the comunas did not leave behind a commercial legacy; they left a warning.

In the squall of those damaged amplifiers and the frantic click of a typewriter sending desperate letters to Oslo, we find the final evidence to the era: that when a society is stripped of its future, the only rational response is a scream that refuses to be silenced.

The Andean functions as a living archive, and its continued relevance relies on identifying the narratives that have been obscured by the passage of time. We invite our readers to contribute to this ongoing excavation. Whether referencing a seminal yet forgotten album within the spectrum of extreme music, a neglected chapter of art history, or a paranormal event that has imprinted itself upon the local consciousness, we seek to document the stories that official histories have omitted. Which other chapters of Colombia’s shadow history warrant a forensic re-examination?

References:

1. Giovanni Hortúa Vargas, ‘Bullets, Drugs, and Rock and Roll: The Rise of Heavy Metal in Colombia’s Drug War’ (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2013). ↩︎
2. Ginez R. & López, A., ‘Metal Medallo: Música, violencia y resistencias juveniles en Medellín (años 80),’ Revista de Estudios Sociales, no. 45 (2013). ↩︎