{"id":12843,"date":"2020-01-13T00:00:38","date_gmt":"2020-01-12T15:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/music\/2020\/jan\/12\/nepal-metal-silence-festival-kathmandu"},"modified":"2020-01-13T00:00:38","modified_gmt":"2020-01-12T15:00:38","slug":"himalayan-headbangers-in-the-moshpit-with-the-metalheads-of-kathmandu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=12843","title":{"rendered":"Himalayan headbangers: in the moshpit with the metalheads of Kathmandu"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nepal\u2019s police used to pick up metal fans and cut their hair or jail them. The country now has its own festival \u2013 but it\u2019s fighting to survive. Our writer hits the rarefied air of Kathmandu<\/p>\n<p>When <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=8uJ8HNjLjVk\">Ugra Karma<\/a> made the first-ever Nepali metal recording, they didn\u2019t intend to start a subculture. They just wanted to make life easier for themselves. \u201cWhen we started to do shows,\u201d says guitarist Prateek Raj Neupane, \u201cour playing skills were at an amateur level. And the instruments we had were amateurish. And the sound didn\u2019t come out good. We couldn\u2019t explain what we wanted to sound engineers at shows, so we thought maybe we should do a record and give it to them so they could fix our sound. And that\u2019s how we ended up recording the first-ever metal record in Nepal.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That was in 2000 and the recording \u2013 the magnificently titled demo Himalayan Metal of Death, featuring a song called Perversion or Cutting Up of a Human Body &amp; Eating Some of It \u2013 wasn\u2019t made for general release. \u201cWe were thinking about bringing out three copies only, for the three people who recorded it. We would lend one to sound engineers at gigs. But our friends were adamant on us at least making 100 copies. We brought one of our friends\u2019 father\u2019s office printers to my home, made our own design and printed it.\u201d The Nepali metal underground was born.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/music\/2020\/jan\/12\/nepal-metal-silence-festival-kathmandu\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nepal\u2019s police used to pick up metal fans and cut their hair or jail them. The country now has its own festival \u2013 but it\u2019s fighting to survive. Our writer hits the rarefied air of KathmanduWhen Ugra Karma made the first-ever Nepali metal recording, the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":839,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[458,71,429,678,1048,425,1049,241,1032,79,61,42,1050],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-censorship","category-culture","category-experimental-music","category-festivals","category-metal","category-music","category-music-festivals","category-nepal","category-pop-and-rock","category-society","category-south-and-central-asia","category-world-news","category-young-people"],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/839"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12843"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12844,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12843\/revisions\/12844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}