BLACK COBRA "We started doing takes of 'El Doce De Octubre' and my left index finger had started to swell. I thought that I might have fractured it from hitting the snare drum so hard. The pain was unbearable and at one point I thought I wasnt't going to be able to finish the song for the album. After 'El Doce...' I couldn't play drums for over a month." Black Cobra formed in 2001 after the decline of Miami-based feedback addicts Cavity. Longtime friends Jason Landrian [Cavity guitarist] and Rafael Martinez teamed up to bring forth a new form of aural assault They spent the following years corresponding cross country [with Martinez living in Los Angeles and Landrian residing in New York City] as they chiseled the sound of Black Cobra. The band's progress was further hindered by Martinez pulling double duty playing bass and touring with the bands -16- and Acid King. However, persisitence prevailed and in 2004 Black Cobra put out their first EP, which they self released on cd and later released on vinyl by Black Flash Records. Black Cobra toured in the spring of 2005 playing festivals and shows in America. Later that year, the Landrian & Martinez recorded their first full-length album "Bestial" which was released in the spring of 2006 by Ataloss Recordings in America and Delboy Records in Europe. Eventually Jason relocated to Los Angeles as the band faced a very rigorous touring schedule. Having already toured with Torche and Akimbo in the spring of 2006, this summer the band will be touring with label mates Unpersons plus a fall tour with Acid King and Eternal Elysium from Japan in America. Black Cobra is also scheduled to embark on their first European tour with Belgian label mates Blutch in October of 2006. Words | Rafa After having released our first EP in 2004, we really didn't have a set schedule to begin work on a full elngth. Jason was still living in New York City and I was living in Los Angeles. Due to the fact that I was still touring -playing bass with Acid King we had limited time to work out ideas, but in between tours we used our time efficiently sending each other tapes and demos through the mail of songs we were working on. This process had been going on for years. We would records drum beats, riffs , formulate ideas and brain storm what we both had through the telephone. Slowly the songs came together and after what we thought was enough material to have a full album we decided to schedule time to record it around the last week of November 2006. I immediately called my long time friend Dan Escauriza with whom I had attended high school and part of college in Miami where we both studied recording engineering. He was and still is one of the best sound engineers I know. I had just begun work on setting up a recording studio in North Hollywood so we still had a lot of work to do to get everything up and running. Dan arrived in Los Angeles 4 days prior to Jason's arrival. I had just gotten back from touring Europe with Acid King only a few days before Dan met up with me. After dealing with all the obstacles you face when setting up a studio [hardware / software instalations, additional accoustic treatments of the rooms, carpentry, etc] we managed to get the place set up by the time Jason showed up on November 18. Seeing as we only had 8 days to get everything recorded and mixed, we really needed to focus on working as efficiently as possible. All the drum tracks were recorded first which took about two days to finish. Jason did his guitar tracks next. The vocals were last along with special effects. The first couple of songs we worked on were 'Broken On the Wheel', 'Sombra De Bestia', and 'Kay Dur Twenty'. There were a lot of tempo shifts on some of these songs so we went trough a couple of different takes where songs were faster or slower than the original tempos we had planned on. Next we worked on 'One Nine', 'Thrown From Great Heights', and 'Omniscient'. We decided to work on these songs at the same times since they were all high octane. There were some special effects that we had in mind for 'Sugar Water' so that song took a little bit longer to finish. 'El Equis' and 'Beneath' came together pretty quickly. The guitar intro for 'Beneath' was actually a thirty minute piece that Jason had been working on three years prior. I still had the original tape and we thought it would be cool to have something on the album that had been recorded years before. In fact, the heavy part of that song was one of the first songs that we wrote when we were visiting family in Maimi in the winter of 2002 during one of our sporadic yearly meetings. At this point we only had two more songs to go. We could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Or so we thought. 'The Cry Of Melora' was one of the more complex songs we faced due to all its rhytmic shifts. The same was true for 'El Doce De Octubre'. After a couple of takes of 'Melora' we faced the final track but from playing drums for almost 10 hours each day at full blast volumes my hands had taken quite the beating. We started doing takes of 'El Doce De Octubre' and my left index finger had started to swell. I thought that I might have fractured it from hitting the snare drum so hard. The pain was unbearable and at one point I thought I wasnt't going to be able to finish the song for the album. But I forced myself through and was able to finish it. After that song I couldn't play drums for over a month. I could barely move my finger. I went to see a doctor and after X rays and tests it was concluded that I had tore a ligament in my finger. The doctors consequently explained to me that since I hadn't played drums for about a month before starting work on the album playing so hard, my hands weren't ready for such abuse. Lesson learned. The last 3 days were all spent on mixing. We tried every combination possible in mixing techniques with all the tracks we had done. We mixed about four songs a day and on November 27, 'Bestial' was finished. Jason flew back to New York that night and clocked in to work at 9:30 AM the next morning. The album was later mastered by John Golden [Sonic Youth, OM, High On Fire] in Ventura , California in the second week of January 2006. Black Cobra on myspace.