Like ‘Bravery, Truth and the Endless Darkness’ (2014) and ‘The Siege’ (2019) before it, ‘Where Gods Live and Men Die’ once again proves that Capilla Ardiente might just be the most interesting doom metal band in the world right now. Bassist and main songwriter Claudio Botarro Neira provides insight into the workings and the history of the Chilean quintet.

While the overall adventurous doom metal sound is consistent throughout releases, ‘Where Gods Live and Men Die’ has a slightly different feel than its predecessors. “Maybe it has to do with the pre-production, recording and production done by Igor Leiva, one of our guitarists”, Botarro thinks aloud. “That gave this album a more raw and natural ‘rehearsal room’ kind of sound.

But other than that, I don’t think our musical approach is different than that on ‘The Siege’. We haven’t brought in any new influences, or tried to explore uncharted territory other than our unorthodox approach to epic doom metal on this album. The way we wrote our lyrics and the topics behind them has been consistent too, I think.”

Botarro’s bass still sounds very grimy. “My bass is distorted all the time, all hail Lemmy!”, he says. “My particular approach is to rely on the mid-range. It’s a challenge to be able to play this kind of ‘third guitar’ with enough low-end to drive the overall sound. You don’t want to get trapped in the drum frequencies, but you also don’t want to compete with the ones of the guitars.

For recording purposes, we have a main distorted track focused on the mid-range and treble, and a second, subtle clean bass track equalized to get the weight of the bottom end.”

Connecting the Dots

Capilla Ardiente’s compositions are somewhat unusual in that their sections almost feel like they are made up of movements like there would be in a classical compositions rather than a conventional verse-chorus structure. “Are you familiar with the work of Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner? We have stolen a lot from him”, Botarro smiles. “Basically, the process goes like this: I sit and write riffs any time I have an idea floating around. I record them, then let them rest for a while.

After a few listens, if I think those riffs have the quality and the mood of those I would like to hear from any of my favorite bands, I start connecting the dots and building sections in a modular way. At the rehearsal room, I show the music to Julio (Borquez, guitarist), Igor and Francisco (Aguirre, drummer), and tell them the way I think the guitars and drums should be. They add their knowledge about harmonization, guitar techniques, effects or drum patterns, and we try different combinations, how often we should repeat the riffs, variations, arrangements, et cetera.

When we have solid, well-rehearsed, and structured songs, I send the recorded rehearsal versions to Felipe (Plaza Kutzbach, singer) to get his input about where and when to add vocal lines, and if we have to simplify some riffs to create space for his voice, or to try more or fewer repetitions to let the voice breathe. Once we have the vocal lines – treated as an instrument, with no actual lyrics – I start writing lyrics that fit the tempo and the space that Felipe has set, based on a pre-existing concept that I usually have even before starting work on the music.

Then, some adjustments here and there, back and forth with Felipe, and we are good to record a fucking good album.”

Achieving a Professional Standard

“We are very disciplined when it comes to rehearsals and pre-production. We rehearse a lot before recording, and I guess that’s the only way a band that makes ten-plus minute songs can achieve a professional standard. Since our second album, we have been rehearsing with a metronome before recording. And for ‘Where Gods Live and Men Die’, we have even had a full pre-production recording session, vocals included.

Felipe is the man. All of the vocal lines come from his head and his good taste in music. I always tell him the concept of the album and what happens in the songs – or the parts of the story, if you will. There has always been a synchronicity between the written music and the vocal lines he comes up with, which are also fitting the canvas of the feelings expressed in the lyrics.

As for how much freedom the rest of the band has… It has to do with how structured or flexible the riffs are. Sometimes all you need is a chugga-chugga riff, and not a virtuoso arpeggio tapping thing, and sometimes you have a slow part that cries for a Lars Johansson or Edgar Rivera type solo, instead of going into the violins and keyboard direction.

I think that since our early recordings, the boys know exactly what Capilla Ardiente is and what it is not. The way I compose and the freedom they have to propose arrangements is directly related to the soul of the riffs that have already been written.”

Epic and Broad

Ever since Capilla Ardiente expanded from two to five members between their debut EP ‘Solve et Coagula’ (2009) and their first full-length ‘Bravery, Truth and the Endless Darkness’, the line-up of the band has remained unchanged. “We are old friends who have met through different stages of our musical journey”, Botarro says. “And who are lucky to be good at the instruments that we play, and who never give up.

I have known Igor since 1995, when I started playing with him in Garbage, which is Poema Arcanvs nowadays. Julio was a roadie for Poema Arcanvs sometime around 1997 or 1998, and then Felipe was a roadie also, sometime during the early 2000’s. We met Francisco when Felipe and I were looking for a drummer for Procession’s debut album ‘Destroyers of the Faith’. Many albums, gigs, tours, and lots of adventures, here we are.

Since the first EP, and due to the limitations brought along by being just two musicians on a quest, we have been moving away from more traditional, in-your-face doom riffing to a more epic or broad sound, which can be noted in the jump from ‘Solve’ to ‘Bravery’. We have become better musicians, I guess, with ‘The Siege’, and as a five-piece band, that also has the privilege to have been friends for decades now.

I think the Capilla Ardiente path is the one we are walking nowadays. And I don’t think future songs will differ too much in terms of heaviness and complexity.”

Proper Artists

Another notable change from the earliest days of the band is that Botarro is no longer creating the album covers for Capilla Ardiente. “For the first two releases, rather than being a control freak, creating the concept, the music, the lyrics, and the artwork too, me drawing the covers was more of a budget issue”, he admits. “You see, I’m a professional graphic designer, and even though I know I can draw decently, I am in no way what you can call a professional artist.

That is why we hired proper artists as soon as we had the budget to do so. Enzo Toledo is a Chilean friend of ours, and he specializes in posters and black-and-white line artworks. He was responsible for the artwork of ‘The Siege’, and he captured the spirit of the album’s concept perfectly.

I found Maciej Kamuda maybe one or two years ago, when he tagged ‘The Siege’ as one of his favorite recent doom metal releases on his Instagram profile. Just then, I realized he was an illustrator. A god damn great illustrator. I contacted him, and we ended up working together. The result is the killer artwork you can see on ‘Where Gods Live and Men Die’.”

The End of a Journey

Botarro frequently mentions the concept of the albums, and ‘Where Gods Live and Men Die’ has been described in press releases as the final chapter of the story that started on ‘Solve et Coagula’. “In deed it is”, Botarro confirms. “This album represents the end of a journey started on ‘Solve et Coagula’, both metaphorical and literal. It deals with dying, facing the end, and how you handle mortality. The way you cheat time and force your way into transcendence… Or not. Beneath this story, personal and hidden truths are buried between the lines, as always.

The main connector between all of these releases has been transmutation. The alchemical act of transformation, in all of the stages of the stories we tell. We have used a nameless protagonist whose actions and adventures are directly linked to the development contained on each opus. So, even before starting work on the lyrics, we already know that we will have a protagonist that will have to carry the weight of the words.”

And then there is the phrase ‘conviction and will’, which appears on all of Capilla Ardiente’s releases. “It’s our ‘born to lose/live to win’”, Botarro states. “The mantra that in the face of adversity, troubles or complications, you must work hard and stay focused to find a way. That way you can make it. It appeared first in the lyrics of our song ‘Coagula’, from the first EP: conviction and will, like red burning wings / defying the sun, with self-light and warmth.”

The Slow and Heavy Path

The Chilean metal scene wasn’t always friendly towards the doom metal of Capilla Ardiente or Procession. “There was this preconception coming from the absolute ignorance towards the style”, Botarro says. “That doom metal is this romantic, gothic thing where this opera girl sings to her death metal boyfriend, and he answers in growls, while the violins and keyboards give you a diabetic coma because of the excess of sugar. ‘Evil Kisses’ and such. Blame it on mid-nineties Century Media.

When we started, the only band that had understood and done something related to the true meaning and spirit of doom metal was Bewitched from the early nineties. They were heavily inspired by Candlemass and Mercyful Fate – check out the track ‘Semitarius’. Many years later, there was also Electrozombies in 2005, who were influenced by Cathedral and Saint Vitus – check out the track ‘Eterno Retorno’.

Besides them, no one seemed to understand or care about the riff, the guitar sound and its spirit. There was some general knowledge about Candlemass, Solitude Aeturnus or Cathedral, but no one was talking about or making music inspired by Count Raven, Sorcerer, Scald, Pentagram, The Obsessed, Trouble, Saint Vitus, or even Black Sabbath.

It might sound arrogant, but when Felipe and I were thinking about starting Capilla Ardiente and Procession, no one was doing that kind of music here in Chile. Some years after our first releases, there have been some bands that have followed that slow and heavy path, like The Black Messiah, Ancient Doom, Heráldica de Mandrake, Mortajas and Blackflow, to name a few.

Still, I don’t think there is a doom metal scene here. But at least a lot of the heavy, thrash, death and black metal people respect, understand and buy albums in this style. And that’s really something.”

Everything That Sounded Heavy

It wasn’t just the local scene that made things difficult. Botarro came of age in the late eighties, when life in Chile was still very much under strict control of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. “Finding rock and metal music was really hard, but not impossible”, Botarro states. “I remember that there were some music tv shows when I was a kid, maybe around 1986 or 1987, that showed video clips of everything that was big in the USA, from the pop of Michael Jackson and Duran Duran, to Quiet Riot and Iron Maiden.

Those shows were the main introduction to ‘the riff’ for me. Watching the promo videos from the new albums of AC/DC, Van Halen, Iron Maiden, Quiet Riot, Guns N’ Roses, or Judas Priest got me hooked on that kind of guitar sound. Then, sometime around the end of 1988, when I was about to finish junior school, I traded my Xeroxed home-taped copy of ‘Appetite for Destruction’ for ‘…And Justice for All’. After that, there was no turning back. I was 13 years old.

From that moment on, I started trading tapes with classmates in high school and buying dubbed tapes with Xeroxed covers on flea markets of everything that sounded heavy and had a killer album cover. There was this legendary metal store called RockShop, close to a place called Paseo las Palmas, near a subway station in uptown Santiago. This is where the serious bangers went to buy their records, tapes, and later cd’s.”

Committed and Brave Enough

“Most of us were kids who saved lunch or bus money to get cash for tapes. And the older ones, who had a little more cash, usually sold or traded copies of their records dubbed to tape. A lot of hand-painted T-shirts and patches too. And lots of bootlegs. What a lovely sight to remember! Oh, and there was the police persecution. Being jailed ‘under suspicion’, getting kicked or beaten by the cops, or being called a faggot, a drug addict or satanist scum: that happened almost every weekend. Yes, dictatorships suck!

There were two main places you could go in Santiago to see underground gigs: Sala Lautaro and Gimnasio Manuel Plaza, where almost all of the bands that are considered classic Chilean underground bands nowadays used to play. My first gig was when I was 16 years old, though at another venue, and I went there with a classmate. It was half death metal, half punk, with Atomic Aggressor, Torturer, Fiskales-ad-Hoc, Lecheros Muertos, and a couple of other bands I can’t remember.

So there was music in some form. There were some venues and there were some bands. If you were committed and brave enough to deal with the consequences, like being prejudiced, arrested or beaten, you’ll have experienced a heavy metal life to tell your grandchildren about. Oh, and again, dictatorships suck!”

Never Looked for Another Bass Player

Those days, Botarro was not a musician yet. “And I didn’t even think I would become one”, he admits. “My idea of being involved in metal back in my early teens was to draw demo covers for bands. Talking to my friends in Atomic Aggressor – who are a few years older than me, and were really active and influential in the late eighties and early nineties – I realized that being in a band was hard. Buying instruments, finding a place to rehearse, finding a studio to record things… Most demos of the bands from that era were recorded at Estudio Rec by José Luis Corral, since there weren’t many people willing or knowing how to record metal.

In my first year of university, I had a bass, and I didn’t even know how to tune the thing. A classmate introduced me to her boyfriend, who was in this band called Garbage – which would later become Poema Arcanvs – and we agreed to meet up to see how I played, to show me their songs, and to meet their singer too.

I sucked at playing. After what was a short try-out, followed by ‘try the songs at home and let’s see what happens’, the guys asked me if I wanted to hang out and drink some beers. So I stayed and started listening to music. At some point, we talked about influences and more obscure bands, when I said something like: there’s this band I love and nobody seems to care about them except me, and they are the best thing ever, they are called Voïvod.

They looked at each other in awe, and were shocked that I knew Voïvod. Long story short: they never looked for another bass player, and Igor chose to teach me how to play, even tuning my bass in the early days, instead of looking for someone who doesn’t know or doesn’t care about Voïvod. Now look at me here, almost thirty years later…”

A True Metal Country

“If you check all of the newer Chilean bands getting signed by international labels, and listen to the quality of their music and their productions, you can tell Chile is a true metal country, with a lot of gigs – sometimes two or more happening the same day – professional bands, promoters, zines, and distros. We rule!

Still, you can see a difference between Santiago and other cities. The main issue, I guess, is the equipment, and in certain cities, the laziness of the so-called metalheads. Venues outside Santiago have enough room, but they mostly don’t have in-house backlines. And the ones provided by companies – by experience – are always ten-plus years out of date compared to the ones in Santiago. The drum seats are sometimes literally chairs!

In some cities, the audiences never show up before 1 AM, and there are never more than thirty or forty people for Chilean bands, making the shows finish sometime around 5 AM when everyone is mostly wasted.

Besides the seven gigs we have had here in Chile – yeah, we have played that little here – we toured Europe in 2015 and we played in Colombia in 2019. We don’t play live very much, due the logistics. Felipe lives in Sweden, after all. We will have a Chilean mini-tour of three dates in November, and after that, we want to tour abroad in 2025. Only time will tell.”

Handcrafting Packages

“Felipe moving to Sweden has helped in terms of promotion and contacts, but the main door to Europe was opened by Felipe in 2009, when he still lived in Chile and went on Procession’s first tour. He forced us to record ‘Solve at Coagula’ before that tour, in order to handcraft around twenty packages consisting of a CD-R of our EP,  a T-shirt, and a pin, and distribute it during his European tour dates.

It worked out well, and since then, we have had a contract with High Roller Records, which has released all of our albums. Without that trip, I don’t think anything would have happened the way it has happened.”