Today’s stop: Guatemala. Nova Epica.

No darlings, Nova Epica is not the capital, keep reading... If you haven’t skipped Geography classes in school, you know Guatemala is in South America, south of Mexico. The name means "land of the trees", or "between the trees", depending on the source. Nevertheless, they (still) have more trees than the rest of us residing in the "civilized" world and spending our lives browsing the internet. For the time being, anyway… Guatemala is a poor country and wood is a valued commodity. Mother Nature doesn’t really care where in the world the trees are being cut, she’s gonna fart in our face, regardless of where we live. Not a fart? Well, then huffing and puffing and tear our houses down. But not today, and tomorrow doesn’t exist, so we might as well crawl under our comfy blanket of ignorance and pretend if we doesn’t see it, it will go away. And then surf MySpace searching for new music and tonz of friends we’re never going to meet. Nor find their real names.

I digress, big time. Pretty much like any poor country, including my own, Guatemala is a land of striking contradictions. It has an amazing history, it holds traces of the Mayan culture, half of the population is Maya, but it also has a long history of violence and civil war.

If you’re not in a hurry and reading every other second word, take the time to launch the gallery. Besides astonishing pictures, there are a couple of short movies put together by Darius Devas for Lonely Planet.

If you don’t have the time and you just want to find out about Nova Epica, here it is:

Nova Epica is a Melodic Power Metal band from Guatemala. They started out in early 1999 as a project of Otto Morales (vocal) and Allan Culajay (Drums). The word Nova means New and Epic comes from the epic genre. Their musical influences are from the likes of Iron Maiden, Stratovarius, Labyrinth, Edguy, Yngwie Malsteen, Dream Theater, Symphony X, Rata Blanca and Angra.

The band’s lyrics cover stories about magic, heroes and fantasy, and subjects such as love, hate and life in general. I know the description is at least impaired, that’s why I’m pointing you to their MySpace account where the music can take over.

And if you like it, they made a selection of songs available for download at this location. Even if you don’t speak Spanish, they can still rock your socks off.

NOVA EPICA is:

• Demis Hernández (vocals)
• Allan Culajay Corona (Drums)
• Byran Flores (keyboards)
• Cristian Arévalo (Lead guitar)
• Daniel González (Bass Guitar)
• Henry Reyes (Lead guitar)

Manager: Ing. Otto Morales Tel. (502) 5202-9490
NOVA EPICA MySpace account