Blood, Guts and Beer

Our segment in Chile is now already finished. The time passed really quickly here… it pretty much slipped by, as we had such great times! Infernal hails to Matias and his family, Fernando, Francisco, Moolyn, Rodrigo, Andres, Juan Pablo, Carlos and his wife, Chris, Panda, Pablo and his wife, and everyone that shared parties and concerts with us. We will forever remember this country as being close to our (metal) hearts!

But you wonder, what have we been doing in the past few days? We haven’t updated our journal since Valdivia, so here is what happened after that chapter:

March 25^th/24^th – Temuco
We were invited in the home of Pablo, who is the promoter of our Temuco show. He is the owner of a metal record shop (Tienda 666 – M. Rodriguez 93, Temuco), and promotes metal concerts every month. A truly dedicated and serious individual, but also a good drinking buddy, Pablo spoke only Spanish so we practiced the hell out of it! By the second day, I was dreaming in Spanish hahaha… to be honest, I think our Spanish improved so much in those days. We were actually able to somewhat understand the Chilean accent!!

So Pablo gave us a culinary tour of Temuco’s seafood scene. We went to the market, and he brought us to a stall – which served us raw, and almost still alive seafood; piure (some kind of mollusc with a strong iodine taste) and sea urchin. I am not a fan of seafood, but I tried them anyway… the sea urchin was salty and ok tasting, but the piure tasted really, really strong, and upon biting it – some kind of weird juice came out, which made me gag… but I did swallow it!! I still have the taste in my memory. I had to eat many things to get rid of it hahaha. But after that, he bought some mussels and some white fish with creepy teeth and tongue, and brought it back home. He also bought some smoked ribs and meat from other stalls in the market.

When we arrived home, he cut some wood while one of his dogs was patiently waiting for something to happen…

Pablo the lumberjack

And he then lit up a barbecue, and placed some kind of big cast iron dish on top of it. Then, he placed some chicken in the middle, as well the mussels, meat, ribs and some water:

After a while, he added the fish and some white wine, and covered everything with newspaper to keep the flavours trapped:

And voilà! It’s ready! He brought the food inside the house, added a bit more white wine, and then served it with some cilantro:

The finished meal!

The taste was really killer; especially the broth, which was a mix of the smoke flavour of the bbq, the juices of all the meat, seafood and the white wine. The chicken, especially, was deadly as it was melting like butter… and the smoked ribs were killer as well! Like I said earlier, I am not a huge fan of seafood, but I have to admit that the black mussels were really good with all that flavour!! We learned afterwards that this special dish is called Asado al disco, or bbq with disc. It is a Chilean specialty mostly made in the South, and perhaps once a month. You cannot order that in the restaurants, it’s strictly made in the backyards of southern Chileans!

So in the evening, we went drinking at a cerveceria, a cool venue with shitty bands, and then a weird bar with Kunstmann beer on tap.

Drinking Kunstmann, again!

The next day was our gig in Temuco! It was at this huge venue, that probably held around 800 people!!! The stage was big, and it sounded like an outdoor festival or something. The other bands were mostly death doom and one was a local heavy/thrash metal band.

Cauchemar and Condenados team, before the gig

Overall, about 160 appeared at the show! That’s quite alot for us, almost the two first shows put together! It seems like the entire metal/punk scene was out:

François with the crowd behind him

Condenados played a heavy set, with songs from their full length, the upcoming split with The Temple, and some older material. Their distortion was so heavy that it created some kind of wall of sound, which I think, stunned alot of people!

Then it was our turn to go on the stage… I think that performance-wise, this was our best show on this tour! And the crowd too, reacted extremely well to our songs. I saw tons of people headbanging and even saw a small mosh during La Valse Funèbre, haha! I just find their support completely surreal…!! We are apparently the first Canadian band that played there, and on top of it, all we did was release a 5-song EP that is written in French… and the crowd knew our songs!! It’s really out of this world! Some people thanked us to have stopped in Temuco… I guess they really appreciate it when out of country bands come and play there. Cool!

March 25^th – Concepcion
We arrived at around 6:30 in the morning, in Concepcion – hometown of Condenados. We were welcomed by Matias (Condenados bassist)’ parents with a nice breakfast and hot herbal teas. It was extremely welcomed, because traveling by bus in the Southern Chilean night is really cold! (5 degrees celcius?)  We had a siesta, and then ate again – this time, some homemade Chinese food, carefully prepared by Matias’ mother:

Home-made chinese food

Coconut flan! This was so good! It’s like fancy French restaurant food!

Fresh raspberry juice, held by Matias.

We stayed in Matias’ home for 4 nights, and were treated like a royalty. Matias’ mother made us extremely tasty meals from scratch EVERYDAY (she cooks with pure magic) and we always ate until we couldn’t walk anymore… haha. We had also another Chilean specialty at their place, CHORIPAN! They are basically small chorizo sausages on the BBQ with bread, mayonnaise and tomato salsa:

Chorizo asado

Choripan!

Anyway, in Concepcion, in the same evening, we  played our last gig of the tour. It was in a small cafe-bar, and we played second – alongside some Death Metal band (which we stupidly missed), Condenados and some black metal band called Pervertor (not Perversor). There was about 30 people that attended, which made the bar looked completely full! Haha! The sound there was really cool, because it was like a rehearsal… and we were really close to the crowd too.

Fernando and Matias of Condenados

Fernando's foot with wall of sound effects

Francisco Poderoso

For our part of the show, we borrowed a really shitty guitar that was in tune near the head, and out of tune near the body… which resulted in an overall pretty bad sound. It’s not the end of the world though, as it became a bit better after a few adjustments. We weren’t really satisfied of our performance, but I think it still came out good under the circumstances!

Cauchemar! Photo by chick with black hair and red lips. Thanks girl!

So like I mentioned earlier, we stayed in Concepcion for a few days. To those who don’t remember, Concepcion was the epicenter of the great Chilean earthquake of last year – which reached an impressive 8.8 on the scale of Richter, killing more than 500 people. Most of the buildings were recovered, but you could still see some ruins of buildings:

This one is split into three!! 8 people died, and 100 people were not found until weeks later... really crazy!

We walked around alot in the downtown area, and stumbled upon an interesting pub…

A Quebec pub?? In Concepcion??

And YES! They had poutine!! Almost real poutine, with home-made brown sauce! Oh, we were so excited.

The menu - Notice the Elvis Poutine!

The Poutine! The sauce was a bit too cold, the fries a bit too salty, but overall the taste was there! It was such a pleasure eating it, haha.

After, we kept on walking around, and stumbled upon a wall of magazines, with a funny old zine of some totally forgotten Kiss member, the ANKH, Vinnie Vincent:

The magician: Vinnie!

And we saw more dogs, doing what seems to be a lazy doggy style position..

On the last day of our stay in Concepcion, Matias’ car broke down, so the guys had to push it in order to make it start or something. I don’t know. I took this funny photo to remember the moment:

Pushing car in Concepcion neighborhood

And then we thanked everyone for a great time with some home-made Poutine Italienne! It was very much appreciated, just by seeing the fiery look in their eyes. Perhaps in a few years, it will be more Chileans’ kitchens!! Haha. Spreading the poutine love around the world.

Italian poutine madness! Pictured here are François, Matias, Valeria and Fernando

April 1^st
We arrived at our friend JP (vocalist of Battle Axe)’s home in Santiago, which welcomed us with a nice BBQ. Don’t have too much photos, we were too busy headbanging, eating and drinking wine! Thank you for your hospitality, JP!!!

April 2^nd
We spent the day in Templo, the excellent record shop of Deathmessiah and Hellavenger. As promised, here are some photos of the shop… it is not to be missed when visiting Santiago!!

La puerta del inferno!

TEMPLO - Ave Providencia #2528, Local #57

TEMPLO - Ave Providencia #2528, Local #57

TEMPLO - Ave Providencia #2528, Local #57

TEMPLO - Ave Providencia #2528, Local #57

TEMPLO - Ave Providencia #2528, Local #57

Hellavenger and Deathmessiah in TEMPLO

Ok, that is all for today. Thanks for everything, Chile! We will be back one day!

A wineyard with a Los Andes mountain in the background... Now, we are off to the other side of the mountains to Argentina!