Beyond the Void
I started to listen to Metal when I was a teenager. It was thanks to Rogelio, my closest cousin – he had moved to a bigger city, but every weekend he came back to my town he would bring new cassettes or CD’s of Nu Metal, bands like Deftones, Disturbed and Static X. It was the late ‘90s, and getting this kind of music was really complicated for us – especially living in a small town in the north of State of México.
My cousin and I used to discover new bands by reading the thank you notes of all the bootlegs of the CD’s we had. In those notes they would mention a lot of bands that we didn’t know. So we used to make huge lists of bands that we had never heard before, and when our parents travelled to the USA, we gave them this list and asked them to bring as many a CD’s as they could. When they arrived back, we were too anxious to know how many CD’s our parents brought and what bands we were going to discover. I remember that most of the time we liked all the bands that we discovered this way. This is how I started to hear more “underground” bands like Factory 81, Relative Ash, Nothingface, Primer 55 and many more. My search for underground bands is still with me to this day.
We didn’t have anyone around us to influence us in this genre, so we didn’t get to listen to the classic metal bands like Black Sabbath, Metallica, Iron Maiden until later, we were also looking for the “unknown” bands. Nu Metal was our entry point and from there we didn't stop. We learned about other subgenres like Trash Metal, Folk Metal, Viking Metal, Melodic Death Metal, Metalcore and so many more. Over time I was listening to heavier and more extreme bands, this is how I got into Brutal Death Metal, Grindcore, Powerviolence and Black Metal.
Alongside all this effort for discovering new bands, I also tried to go to as many concerts and festivals as I could. I can consider going to Metal shows as one of my biggest passions in my life. I just love being there – there's a big comradeship and good vibes between the fans, especially in the mosh pit. There’s a great energy flowing, a time of release for the soul. Sometimes it is a violent flow of bodies dancing around But always friendly: if someone falls, everybody helps them get back up; if someone gets injured there’s always someone who will assist them. I personally don’t go into mosh pit anymore, but I love being next to them because I can listen and feel the energy of the band and the energy of the fans and crowd surfers.
With my photography, I capture portraits of fans in the pit -I go inside of it to try to capture their bodies being free and flowing through the music. In this project, I try to isolate the individual from the chaos that's happening in the mosh pit. I want to isolate him from this orbit of bodies, dancing in chaos.
I remember reading a tweet from Gama Bomb that said, “As an adult, it's important to occasionally run in circles while a band plays heavy metal.” I couldn’t agree more. For me, it’s essential to capture these adults dancing within the Orbit Void — because through my work, I can show the world how extreme metal liberates us and allows us to truly enjoy life.
