Pic courtesy of: Mummified "When I left Pseudo, I was a little hungry for something else. From 1997 to 2003 I was looking for people to join me in this new “campaign”; so you can say Mummified as a concept was borne back in 1997"

CR: Why don’t we begin with an introduction?
Ronald Jiménez: Ok…so I’m Ronald Jiménez, I started Pseudostratiffied Epithelium, I left Pseudo in 1997 after three productions with that band; after that in 2003 I got in touch with Christian, and Mummified was born; you can say Mummified is something like Pseudo, but with a bigger focus on gore.
Christian Calderon: Well, I’m Christian; I was in some other bands before Mummified; Eternal Torment, Golgotha, Mantra; but now I’m pretty much just focusing on Mummified.

CR: When did you stop playing for Mantra?
Christian Calderon: Like mid December last year.

CR: Is Mummified the only and most important project you guys have?
Christian Calderon: Well yeah, it’s my only project, as well as for Ronald.

CR: Tell us about the history of the band?
Ronald Jiménez: When I left Pseudo, I was a little hungry for something else. From 1997 to 2003 I was looking for people to join me in this new “campaign”; so you can say Mummified as a concept was borne back in 1997; but it was until I got in touch with Christian that the idea started to develop. With him and two other guys, we recorded our first material “Protocol Of Mummification” in the middle of the recordings those two other guys, a drummer and a guitar player left the band.

CR: In this moment we got interrupted by a waiter, Christian and Ronald got a beer and me a coke…I was working otherwise I will have join them with a beer

Ronald Jiménez: Ok, so to continue; those two guys left the band in the middle of the recording sessions to start their own band, I don’t think their project is up and running yet; that was in 2004 if I’m not mistaken. So after they left Christian and I continue with the art work, the mixing of the album, finishing a couple of lyrics; so since 2004 until like a month ago, we have been working with the whole promotion of the album, looking for a label that can help us distribute it, making t-shirts, you know trying to let people know that we have actually recorded an album. A month ago we finally started to work on the new material; now we have a guy helping us with the drums.

CR: So when did you guys actually wrote the music for Protocol Of Mummification?
Ronald Jiménez: 2004, the whole album was written and recorded that same year; in 2005 we finished the art work and the distribution of it; the album was released late 2005, like in November, October.
Christian Calderon: You have to understand that is not the same having a band of four people than having a two man “setting” when we were four, we could actually work a little faster and distribute the tasks among four people; so with only two it took a little more time to finish everything; still when they left the essence of Mummified was untouched so musically there was really not a change.
I think this album has its achievements other than the promotion part, we actually manage to send it outside Costa Rica; we got in touch with Goregiastic Records (www.goregiasticrecords.com) in U.S.A, they ask us for a certain amount of records so that they can distribute it over there, in exchange they send us some bands they produce; right now they are waiting for our new album “God Mortification” a record we are currently working on.

CR: How does that work, with Goregiastic Records?
Christian Calderon: An exchange mainly, we send him our record, he likes it, and asks us to send in a certain amount of copies, and in return he sents us some records of bands they produce. He is like I said, very interested in our next album, so if things go well and he likes our next album maybe in the future that label could produce one of our records.

CR: The beers…and my coke arrived!

CR: Is mummified only a studio project?
Christian Calderon: I wouldn’t call it a project, it's a band. Because a project is something more like a side band, like a band you work with only when you are not working with your main band. Right now because of the whole line up changes and our actual situation, we decided not to play live; when we were four in the band, we decided not to play live because we wanted to focus more in the production of the albums; I mean you could play 20 gigs and sound really fucking cool live, but then what? What do you have? We believe that is better to focus right now in the production of albums, we want to be able to look back at our work, we want to be able to have a “material” symbol of what we have accomplished. Off course we don’t discard the idea of playing maybe one gig a year.

CR: I think is pretty smart to have just a studio band right now, taking our current situation, you know I have seen many great bands in this country give their hearts out to play live and maybe nobody shows up, or the people that actually go to the concerts are really few…
Christian Calderon: That really depends on the way you want to look at it; in my experience, after been in some bands that actually manage to get more than let’s say 50 people in a concert; at the end of the day you end up loosing a lot of money, and it pisses you off, because nobody really supports the metal bands; not only a few people go to the shows but some of the ones that actually go, want things for free, I mean some people complain because they have to pay 1000 colones!(2 US dollars) So you can look at it as my personal revenge to those that don’t deserve the effort (laughs) yet I still want to record and launch albums, so that people can see that we can actually make music; but hey I don’t really want to be that bitter all my life so we are thinking about playing a couple of gigs every year, but we want to play when we want to play and when the situation fits us better, because if we wanted to play more often, we could do so in places like Sand (San José Metal Bar) or El Yos. The idea is to be able to record albums with out having many losses; this second record we are working on is been pay by the sales of the first one, so we are not really making money, but at least we are not loosing money.
Ronald Jiménez: Yeah, go ahead ask me how many beers have I bough or hookers with the sales from the first album…none (laughs) I’m paying for these beers with my own money. We are very strict in that way, the money that comes from the band, stays for the band; that, you can say is our band commandment, to use the money made by the band in paying studio time, paying for album art works, you know all those little details that are so important. If for example Christian needs money desperately, he always has male prostitution available to him (laughs) he can’t touch the bands money for personal issues.
Christian Calderon: Ronald actually had to do that (laughs)
Ronald Jiménez: Something that I’ve seen happened to some bands in this country is that they kill themselves playing live, and they do it great really, but after all their concerts and big efforts they end up splitting and our scene is not enriched by a record. I think that’s one of the reasons we like to keep this band in studio, we want to leave something for the local scene. Also I think that someone that hears our record and if he likes it, the whole “I have never seen this guys” issue creates some morbid curiosity per say; personally I think that Protocol Of Mummification is a good album, if I didn’t think it was a cool record then I wouldn't have been a part of it, the main issue is that I like it, if people like it then great.

CR: Something like a promotional tool
Christian Calderon: Yeah, just like when the government or an institution prohibits something, or when you see a sign “don’t touch” that’s when many people want to touch it the most.

CR: Let’s get into the album Protocol Of Mummification, where did you guys record it?
Ronald Jiménez: We recorded in a studio here in Tibas, Christian has a friend, this guy has a nice set up there and because his a “friend” he gave us a nice price per hour; I mean the place has pretty much everything we could ask for in a studio in Costa Rica.

	Pic courtesy of: Mummified "I do believe that after we release all of that “energy” all of that frustration into the record we came to realize that we also wanted it to have some darkness some obscurantism to say at least. When we were writing the album, we wanted people to also relate the music with horror films; with violent crude scenes and also dark moments to create some violent expectations"

CR: I heard that in Costa Rica the studios are getting better and better, I mean in equipment, but that there aren’t a lot of metal qualified technicians to help out
Ronald Jiménez: Yeah that’s why most of the times the band members are the ones doing the mixing, at least that was the way we did it in Pseudo, and I think Mantra did that to, nevertheless December’s Cold Winter is a different example.
Christian Calderon: That’s really a problem; I personally think that for each and every single one of the stages of creating a record, there should be a professional to do it. With Mantra we recorded at this studio “Audio Arte” at 80 dollars an hour, in this studio many “popular” bands record, but you know bands like Expreso something more like Costa Rica pop music or something, so even though the studio is very well equip there isn’t a qualify technician for metal music.
Now in the studio where we recorded Protocol Of Mummification, we have been working with my friend to get him to learn a little bit more about metal music, so right now he knows a lot more of the different sounds we want to achieve, and that really helps.

CR: Protocol Of Mummification is definitely a brutal album, but it has some segments that bring some nice groove to the songs, still the album is brutal and there is no question about it, what was you goal regarding the sound aspect of this record?
Ronald Jiménez: You know that each song reflects a particular moment on the bands “feelings” so at least for me, I was very exited about the fact of actually coming back to music, six years that I was waiting to make a come back, so I really wanted this album to have that strength that desire, to have all those gore feelings that I was keeping to my self for all those years, I wanted it to have rotten wounds, pimples, infected ass holes, you know the usual (laughs). The first track we recorded was brutality at every instant. The album reflects all of our hunger to make something brutal, because we all own it to our selves; we were very influenced by bands like Nile for example.
Christian Calderon: Cryptopsy also
Ronald Jiménez: So we kind of placed all of that frustration in the album, that’s why you can hear a very heavy very dense placement of all the instruments. We didn’t plan it; it was just the way that we were feeling at the time we wrote and recorded that record.
Christian Calderon: I do believe that after we release all of that “energy” all of that frustration into the record we came to realize that we also wanted it to have some darkness some obscurantism to say at least. When we were writing the album, we wanted people to also relate the music with horror films; with violent crude scenes and also dark moments to create some violent expectations.
Ronald Jiménez: There is also a funny story; there was this forum in Zona Underground (www.zonaunderground.com) that compared Linfogranulomatosis Inguinalis and Mummified, you know to see which band people though was more “gore”; and even though we are a brutal, gore metal band, we don’t want just to do that, just to sound gore, we want to place some groove into our songs, you could say that we want to focus more in brutality than gore, and brutality is not always fast and heavy; so Mummified is gore/grind and some death metal, not just grindcore all the time.
Christian Calderon: We were actually talking about that a couple of days ago, and we came up with this weird term, we are a technical gore band.

CR: How do you feel the album has been received by the critics, by the media, by the local scene?
Ronald Jiménez: Well the outside reviews have been good really; I’m talking about web sites from Holland, South Africa and the United States; they have actually liked the record, off course they have said that is just a demo tape, that it needs more production and that the sound is not very good, but they said that it is quite well done; over here I feel that the people that are really into a more brutal kind of metal like it a lot, I heard someone said that he didn’t listen to good brutal material since Pseudo, and that sounded really good to me. You know we haven’t sell a lot of copies, but we are use to that in this country; the people that actually bought the album really like it, or at least that’s what they told us. I feel that the reaction to the album has been a positive one, not good in sales but good in the comments from the people that took some time to listen to it.

CR: Your lyrics are always very “polemic” to say the least, have you guys ever received some sort of negative comments about that side of Mummified?
Christian Calderon: Personally I like when the record insults or affects someone, you know I like it when someone grabs the album, reads the names of the songs, and he or she gets outrage by it, to me that says that we did a good job, I mean in the album, in the music we support bad feelings, dark sick feelings, so when a “normal” human being gets a hold of the album, he has to be outrage, if he doesn’t then we did a crappy job.
Ronald Jiménez: I have never have any problems because of the lyrics, maybe the only incident was when I was back with Pseudo, and I think Fernando told you that story. We had some problems with our postal office because they saw the cover of one of our albums and they though that it was too indecent, hey the cover was very explicit and yes a little sick. I don’t write lyrics just for the sake of grousing people out, I actually study a little the topics that I want to write about, like with the topic on Albert Fish, I read a lot of biographies to finally sit down and write those lyrics, with the mummification process the same, now I’m researching about human psychosis for the new album…

CR: Suddenly a very…voluptuous girl comes by our table and Ronald gets a little distracted

Ronald Jiménez: Shit, nice rack…do you have a pen to write some lyrics about it! (Laughs) Ok so yeah that’s pretty much how I work on the lyrics, I research the topics first.

CR: What those it takes to write and play this kind of metal?
Ronald Jiménez: You have to like it; I mean you can’t play metal if you are into salsa music. You know; I don’t remember where but I saw these Swedish musicians working on a school project, I mean all this guys were professional musicians from a music school and their project was to have a salsa band, I heard them and it sounded perfect, but fake at the same time, with out that spirit salsa is suppose to have, you know is hard since they live in a very cold country over there (laughs) yeah like if we try to make Norwegian folk music, it will sound fake, because we don’t live in that culture.

CR: What kind of influences do you guys have?
Christian Calderon: We all have very different influences, in the personal side, Ronald knows a lot more bands than I, but I will say that Mummified is influence by bands like Nile, Cryptopsy, Dying Fetus.
Ronald Jiménez: Lee Dorrian, when he was in Napal Death, Jan-Chris De Koeijer of Gorefest, basically those in what vocals mean.

CR: Let’s talk a little about the promotion of the record, since you guys did pretty much everything in this album, how do you see the reaction of the metalheads in Costa Rica, towards a national band?
Ronald Jiménez: By experience, and it has pretty much stay the same since 1993 since I started in metal music; when you first begin a project the support is 0 I mean no body really helps you out, you have to get everything together and put money out of your own pocket; after a while, after the people actually knows that you exist maybe then you begin to see some support from the local scene. For example we pay for the promotion side of the album, and thanks to the sells of this first album we manage to get the money to make the T-shirts, from the money we make selling this T-shirts we are paying for the studio and the art of the new album; this haven’t changed a bit since 1993 and that’s what…13 years. Today is just like “in the old days” you still go to the record stores and you have to leave your album in consignation, I mean that haven’t change since I remember, is like an unwritten rule.

CR: What do you mean by consignation?
Ronald Jiménez: Well, that works the following way, you get to the record store and you give them for example 20 copies of the album, as they sell those copies they begin to pay you your share, the ideal “deal” will be for you to get to the record store and sell them the 20 copies, but their argument is that they don’t know if the album is going to sell, so you have to leave it there in consignation. Out side it works a bit different, I mean is more of a trade with outsiders, like with Goregiastic Records, we send them 20 copies of your album, and they in return gave us 20 copies of some of their albums.
Christian Calderon: Well I think that way you actually get to see some money a little faster, because you leave your 20 copies in the store as well as the 20 copies the record label you traded with send you, so those 20 albums the record label send you have maybe a better chance of getting sold, because of the variety of the material.
Ronald Jiménez: Yeah because people actually like to buy more “foreign” albums than national ones.
Christian Calderon: True, but it’s very understandable; mainly because of the quality of the production, it doesn’t matter if the music is good or bad, the main issue is that is a good recording, that the sound has a clean great quality. For example we can see it here, have you seen the latest Alastor album, D.E.M.O.N? ok so the art work on that album is amazing, I mean is great it can compete with anybody in the world, but the music it self, the production of the album doesn’t have that great “international” quality, so it can be “all that it could be” if the production and the recording of that album had been made in for example U.S.A in a good studio, that album would have been perfect.

CR: What about the new album?
Ronald Jiménez: We are working on it, we want to take advantage of the good reaction some people had towards the first album; you know this days is very hard to get a good “review” from people, since times have change so much and the variety of the market is far greater that it use to be; I mean now there are so many genres to pick from, black, gothic, melodic stuff, you know a lot more genres now than 10 years ago.
Right now we are recording the next album, when people are still talking about the previous one; we want people to know that the band is still alive and kicking, and we also want people to hear a progression in our music, not a progression like Carcass did that they began to mellow their sound with time, no, a progression on the same path, we are just looking for other ways to incorporate new elements to our music and still make it brutal and heavy. We are hoping that the next album will be heavier than Protocol.
Christian Calderon: And more technical
Ronald Jiménez: Exactly, we are thinking on a Mini Cd, four, five tracks and a cover from Napalm Death.

CR: And are you guys planning to do again all the promotion side of the album?
Cristian Calderon: Yeah, but we are hoping that the guys of Goregiastic Records will like to help out this time around; I mean if a label doesn’t help us the album will come out anyway, the same way Protocol did. We want to aim outside Costa Rica, we will really like for someone to say “here are 500 dollars for the studio” that way will be easier and faster to finish a record, not like we are right now that we have to wait for our pay check from our “day job” to be able to pay for the studio. We want to keep growing as a band.

	Pic courtesy of: Mummified "I feel a lot of support from the record stores; with us they have always been nice; also a lot of people involved in the let’s call it “media” like Victor Mora, Arturo Azofeifa. I don’t feel the same support from the local bands, there is some sort of bad competition, at least that’s the way I feel"

CR: In the creative process, how do you guys work, who writes what?
Ronald Jiménez: Well I have always been of the philosophy that the ones that should write the music are the string guys, you know the guitarist basically. In Protocol Fabian and Cristian wrote all the songs, after that we place the drums; later when the song is pretty much complete we place the vocal part, and that’s when I begin to work; first I write the lyrics before any song is complete, and when they bring me the final cut of the song I have to find a way to make my lyrics fit. For this new album, I’m actually going to wait until the songs are finished to start writing lyrics for it, to find a better placement for them, to find a better groove. If you hear Protocol, you can pretty much hear that sometimes I’m just reading the lyrics, and this time I want to make the songs a bit catchier.

CR: So we can say you guys are now trying a more “usual” approach to the song structure
Ronald Jiménez: Yeah a more traditional approach
Christian Calderon: Exactly, if you pay enough attention to Protocol, you can hear that we placed three different vocals, all of them from Ronald, and we are thinking that maybe this time around we can place the same amount of different vocal approaches but with someone else doing them, in this case I could contribute in that area also.
Ronald Jiménez: We want to keep the same “spirit” in this new record but we want to add a couple of things, for example we don’t just want to talk about mummification process in this new album, we want to add something like porno and satanic stuff into it. If you sit to think about it, there is nothing good in school kids listening to this kind of music (laughs). You can say the new album is mummified, porno and satanic.
Christian Calderon: The best thing about releasing a second album is that you have to compete with your first one. It forces you to do a better job, and for me Protocol is a great album, so it’s gonna be very difficult to defeat. To defeat in every angle, production, writing, mixing, vocals, general sound; as musicians I think we have to be better than what we use to be three years ago.

CR: What do you think has been the biggest most positive thing that the local scene has given Mummified, and what’s the worst?
Ronald Jiménez: I feel a lot of support from the record stores; with us they have always been nice; also a lot of people involved in the let’s call it “media” like Victor Mora, Arturo Azofeifa. I don’t feel the same support from the local bands, there is some sort of bad competition, at least that’s the way I feel. Lets say you have a gig and I’m talking for my experience in Pseudo, if the event is been put together by another band, sometimes they fuck up your sound and things like that.
Christian Calderon: Yeah, Ronald is right in that aspect, but I can see another big problem, and that’s the people that buys this kind of music…they want it for free! I mean we all have burn cds, or download full albums, personally I don’t care if someone downloads an album from a band like Iron Maiden, I mean those guys have millions, they probably wipe their asses with one hundred dollar bills. Here, if everybody only knew how hard is it for the underground acts to actually record an album, they wouldn’t have the nerve to ask me for a free copy of our cd; and if they actually ask me “how much is your album” and I answer that it is cheaper for 1000 or 2000 colones than an international album, they give you this look of discontent. For me that’s the biggest problem we have as a scene, we want everything for free. The support has to be real, and money is real.

CR: Funny thing, speaking of piracy and music sharing, I have friends that only download music, I mean this guys actually get surprise by the fact that I have original records, Can we really called this kind of people metalheads?
Christian Calderon: Well, we will have to actually analyzed what been a metalhead means, you know for some people been metal is just getting drunk in a bar like Sand, having long hair and maybe owning three original albums; but hey for some people that’s what been a metal means.
For me been a metalhead is having a normal life and enjoy metal music, you know if you like an album you buy it, if you have the chance to go to a concert you go an you analyze the bands playing, in as close as you can to an objective perspective. There was once a “friend” that actually told me that my band was crap, ok his opinion, but I ask him, did you actually listen to our music? He said he only listened to 10 seconds of the album, and this guy is a colleague, a singer in a metal band; he doesn’t even own a copy of our album. You know and I don’t really want to remember the whole thing because it will be like putting salt on an open wound, but I always supported this guy, and by supported I mean I spend my money on his work. Ok so I will say that one of biggest problems as metalheads is that we have to realize that we are Costarrican metalheads, not metalheads; it’s something like what I have heard some people say, that they will support Germany in this upcoming world cup, they will support Germany against Costa Rica, their own country. This happens when international bands come to the country, everybody goes and they sometimes even try to get the opener acts, the national bands to stop playing so that they can hear the international band they came to see, they don’t like their own scene, they don’t even like themselves.

CR: Yeah many people confuse honest criticism with putting a band down
Ronald Jiménez: Yeah, for example and I have just listen to one track, the new album from December’s Cold Winter, that’s a great album, and you know it doesn’t hurt when I say it, or like Días de Agonía another very good album by those guys, or this new guys Agressor they have done a very good job, I don’t personally like that kind of music Agressor plays but I can recognize the good work that they have done, the same with bands like Deznuke, I don’t really like that kind of music either, but you can really tell that those guys are professionals.
Christian Calderon: You know you can see that there is a problem inside our metal community, and I saw it when playing live for another band; we where playing after a theater company, you know there is a huge difference between theater fans and metal fans, and this guys from the theater company helped us out like nobody, you know they will get you anything that you needed when you needed, they were there to support you. Something that doesn’t happen in a full metal concert, you have to be a metalhead from the heart, you know to wear the black T-shirt under the skin.

CR: Is the Costarrican metal scene better than before or is it decaying?
Ronald Jiménez: Well, we are better now in studios, in professional bands, but we are worst in support. I wouldn’t say is bad, I would say the scene is different now.
Christian Calderon: Yeah, I mean you can’t stop the development of this scene, some things are going to get better with time and some are just going to get worst.

CR: Fernando Baltodano (Ronald’s ex-band mate in Pseudo) said something that really caught my attention, and he said that it was amazing how the country has begun to produce a big number of great bands, but at the same time the support from the people is fading away.
Ronald Jiménez: I can remember a band form Heredia, a band of this guy Fabian former guitar player of Paganus Doctrina and Colemesis, it was call Muerte; you can ask him if you want; ok so that was like in 1991 or 1992…now that band was really a piece of crap, but they were the only ones at that time playing that style of music, so they got a little name; a little time later Massacre came into play they got this album “Dying in the cemetery” out, and again that was another piece of crap, production wise that is, because the singer of Massacre was quite good actually, at least playing live. Ok so again they were the only ones or one of the three or four bands playing that type of music in Costa Rica so their demo sold out fast as hell.
Now days we have bands like Alastor, December’s, Mummified, Dias de Agonía, is like now people are use to have good bands, well at least good bands compare to what we use to have. Before we had bands like Profanum death grind from Guanacaste, they recorded their demo at a INA (Costa Rica’s Learning Institute) class room; man was that demo crap, they didn’t have any drums, they recorded the drum part using pots from a local high school, and what happened with that demo, sold out one more time (laughs).
Christian Calderon: (laughs) the metal movement in Costa Rica will continue, it is true that the support now days is quite mediocre. I think that the most important thing that many of the good bands that we have now is that they have to begin to realize that their success doesn’t depend on the likings of the local fans, of those 200 guys that from them only 5 actually buy cds, but that there are markets outside our borders; I think that Costarrican bands actually sell more albums in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador; so our bands have to realize that maybe if they go out, they could do better, you know more people could actually get to know them and they will support them.

CR: Let’s talk about the new album God Mortification; do you have a release date?
Ronald Jiménez: Right now we have one song almost finished, and a couple of ideas for the rest, and we also have to start working on the Napalm Death cover that we want to place on the new album.
Christian Calderon: We are trying to develop our own method, and this first track that we are working on will be our first children, it will suffer the most. We have like two months just working in this one track, maybe for the last one of the album we could just use two weeks, but who knows; it’s hard to say a specific date right now, all I can say is that it will be done this year.
Ronald Jiménez: Yeah, definitely, I would say six more months.
Christian Calderon: We are working really hard on this one song, because we want to use it as a “presentation” of the new album, you know we want to finish it and sent it to as many wed as we can. We are kind of thinking in making something like a single with a track from our previous record and this new one, maybe adding a video.

CR: Are you maybe thinking on playing live to introduce this new album?
Ronald Jiménez: I don’t know really, maybe just a listening party.
Christian Calderon: I would like to say; well I will like to comment on something that people never ask me, who sells more records in Costa Rica, the music stores or the bands? I think that if the band organizes it self accordingly to the situation, we could sell way more albums than the stores. I personally go to every gig I can and sell my records; if Postmortem is playing, I go pay my ticket and begin to sell the records, and if the guys from Postmortem start to complain, I’ll kick their ass (laughs)
Ronald Jiménez: You better edit that comment (laughs)
Christian Calderon: No, no they are old friends. I don’t mind if another band comes to my show and starts selling their albums; you have to be humble and part of that is to allow others to work along side you.

CR: In your opinion what Costarrican band is at a very good position, right now what band do you guys see as the most solid one in the country?
Ronald Jiménez: I had to say the most solid one, because if you ask me for the best band I wouldn’t be able to tell you since that is a very subjective answer; but the most solid band, it will have to be December’s Cold Winter. Because of their new album, I mean the production and the band technicality is just very nicely done. I would have also mention Alastor, but I don’t know what they are going to do with a new drummer so just for that I didn’t mention them as well.
Christian Calderon: December’s Cold Winter

CR: I have seen that some people on the underground scene actually haven’t been very nice to December’s…
Ronald Jiménez: Yeah but that’s just that fucking Costarrican philosophy of putting our bands down, I mean in this country you can’t be a remarkable subject because people will start to talk shit about you.

CR: Let me rephrase that, how much do you think the way people perceives you as a person affects your band?
Ronald Jiménez: Not a lot
Christian Calderon: Nothing, the majority of the people that talks shit about the bands are the ones that only download albums and that never go to the shows, so nothing. The future of our bands is not in our country; our future is outside, in gigs and in records sales.

CR: What about local places to play, I mean there use to be a time where many places had metal concerts, now is pretty much just focused on two bars, at least over here in San José.
Christian Calderon: One of those places is Sand, and honestly Sand is a whore house (laughs) is a place where the bands go and sell themselves. I have played there like 50 times…
Ronald Jiménez: Mummified one and only gig was there (laughs)
Christian Calderon: Playing in Sand is to prostitute yourself. There is not really a decent place to play here in San José.

CR: Ok guys, this was definitely fun, but we have to rapid up, if you have something else to say, please do…
Ronald Jiménez: Thank you for your time, we hope people actually read this. And off course we want the people to know that we are working in our next album, and that it’s going to have a few extra “ingredients” this time around, thank you!
Christian Calderon: OK, not everything is bad with our metal scene (laughs) I think we actually end up talking more about the local scene than the band, but hey that’s cool too; just to let everybody know that we Mummified will be coming back soon with a new album, thank you!