Theo Vieira

Theo Vieira — Brazilian bassist — was part of Delpht, a power metal band active between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s. Delpht left two records, Screams of Ice (2000) and Living in Fantasy (2005), recorded independently. It is a portrait of a specific period in Brazilian metal: there were bands, there was an audience and there were shows, but no label able to fund a career — each record came out on the musicians' own money and circulated through direct sales and trades within the scene. Bass in power metal has a thankless function: following the double bass drum at high speed through entire songs, with little margin for melodic variation. It is work of physical endurance and precision, and what is heard as a band's "weight" depends directly on how tightly bass and drums are locked. The band ended in 2007. It belongs to the layer of groups that sustained the genre in Brazil beneath the bigger names, and without which there would have been no scene for the bigger names to exist in.