NAZI-LINKED BLACK METAL BAND SET TO PLAY LOS ANGELES SATURDAY

Another day, another Nazi band trying to have a show in L.A.

Maquahuitl, a Nazi-linked black metal band whose logo has a stylized swastika, is set to play Catch One in Los Angeles on Saturday, May 7th.

For those who aren’t history buffs, “Nazi” was the German acronym for “National Socialist.” But the Nazi metal subgenre Maquahuitl belongs to isn’t always about being white nationalists, per sé. There are Nazi subcultures in parts of the Americas. Metal Archives, which exhaustively documents the genre, says Maquahuitl’s lyrical themes are about “Indigenous Nationalism.” For an example of that, here’s a 2015 post on the band’s frontman’s Facebook page, trying to recruit a new bassist for another project.

Bassist wanted: Nokturnal Warfare/Blood Division. Must have your own gear, must have your own transportation, must be reliable and responsible, and most importantly, you must be of the brown/bronze race. Mixed or pure blood descendant of Ixachitlan.

The word maquahuitl itself, sometimes spelled macuahuitl, is the name of the wooden club embedded with stone flake obsidian blades in Mesoamerican civilizations. But while the band’s lyrics and aesthetics are tinged with Aztec and other Mesoamerican imagery, the substance is the same kind of blood-and-soil fodder one finds with pretty much any NSBM band. For example, their song “The Age of Bronze Resistance” appeared on a Mexican NSBM label’s compilation called Ixachitlan: Frente Pagano Nacional Socialista, which in English more or less means “Pagan Front National Socialist.”

Maquahuitl is helmed by Martín Morales Tudón, formerly of Los Angeles and now of Hendersonville, Tennessee. Tudón, like many black metal frontmen, seems to use a different stage name for every band he’s on—and like most NSBM musicians, he almost compulsively tells people he’s a Nazi every chance he gets.

Metal Archives lists Tudón’s main alias as “SS Sanderkommando,” likely an intentional misspelling of “sonderkommando.” The “SS” or Schutzstaffel, for those who aren’t history buffs, was Hitler’s paramilitary organization. “Sonderkommandos,” according to the Jewish Virtual Library, were “groups of Jewish male prisoners picked for their youth and relative good health whose job was to dispose of corpses from the gas chambers or crematoria.” If Tudón’s affinity for Nazi imagery wasn’t obvious enough already, his Metal Archives photo clearly shows the tattoo of a stylized swastika armband around his left arm.

In addition to Maquahuitl, Tudón is—or maybe was—the drummer in the so-Nazi-it’s-corny band Blood Division, where he used the alias “Rottenführer,” a rank several Nazi groups. Tudón claimed in 2021 he left the band, but Metal Archives lists him as the active drummer. Tudón claims this information is dated.

Metal Archives lists Blood Division’s lyrical themes as “Blasphemy, Anti-religion, Antisemitism, National Socialism.” Their album “Death Shards of Obsidian Hate” includes tracks like “S.S.,” “Islam (Pedophilia),” Christianity (Slave Mentality),” and “Judaism (Subhuman Slave Doctrine.)” They also had a split record with a band called ‘Gas Chambers.’ One of their shows in Tempe, Arizona, got cancelled after a campaign by antifascists and community outrage in 2015.

Tudón has tried to distance himself from the Nazier side of his work in recent years with all the grace and sincerity of a middle school pervert caught sneaking into the girls’ locker room.

In a Reddit thread in January 2021, Tudón essentially did the same kind of denial:

Maquahuitl guy here. It’s always the people who don’t know me or whom have never spoken to me or asked me simply about why I use the Mexican swastika or my past that have the most to say. Many of you can’t or refuse to grasp the concept of Maquahuitl or indigenous nationalism and pride. What you liberals preach about the US territory belonging to the indigenous and how the land was stolen and SHOULD be given back. Those are the principles I’ve been preaching in Maquahuitl since the beginning. The only difference is I don’t do it under the sentiment of inclusiveness and a pseudo unity that’s aren’t principles of indigenous peoples.Good luck finding any Hitler or Third Reich worship in my music because it’s virtually non existent.

Horna, whose attempted 2019 tour LCRW covered, made most of the same kind of excuses—they were previously associated with NSBM acts but people don’t get them or don’t understand them. LCRW previously found one single Horna song calling for “the death and destruction of the Jewish people,” but admittedly we weren’t able to do the same for Maquahuitl.

However, saying “try to find any Nazi lyrics in my music” is a disingenuous attempt to deflect from Tudón’s associations. It doesn’t matter if his current music isn’t explicitly Nazi. Tudón played in Nazi bands, used a swastika for his current band’s logo and spent years signing his Facebook posts with ‘88,’ which he claims stands for ‘Heil Huitzilopotchli,’ but is also a neo-Nazi code for ‘Heil Hitler.’ As late as 2020, he was using gag pictures of the Pokémon Polywhirl with a Nazi sonnenrad on its belly as a profile pic and posting photos of albums he bought with Hitler’s portrait on the cover.

There is, to be fair, some credibility to Tudon’s claims that he’s distanced himself from open NSBM. On January 28th, 2015, he claimed on Facebook he was leaving the Mexican NSBM label ONSP. He claimed the label plagiarized the phrase “Hail Huitzilopotchli” from another band and credited it to him and alluded to other interpersonal disputes.

“Fight the TRUE fight, brother. Remember the greatest virtue of the Jew is the “theft” of ones culture and keeping up constant set of lies,,” Francois J Van Bibber replied on the post.

Two days later, he posted that he was on a split with other Nazi bands called “Anti-ZOG Supremacia Bronce.” He’d later claim in 2021 that he quit/left “Nokturnal Warfare, ONSP, Odio Bronce, and Blood Division…due to not agree[sic] 100% with the propaganda,” though he never specified what he actually disagreed with.

As an aside, Tudón also claimed he was in a “very antifa” band called “Green Terror,” which lists him by his first name as the drummer. The Metal Archives profile lists his 2013 Facebook page (filled predictably with Nazi imagery) where he went by ‘SonderKommando88.’ It shows Tudón was associated with the Nazi label ONSP since 2012.

Going from Nazi bands to playing Aztec-flavored black metal with clichéd fascist ‘blood, soil and honor’-style lyrics doesn’t cut it. As LCRW’s coverage of the Proud Boys shows, you don’t have to be an explicit Nazi to have barely concealed connections to them or advance their agenda and there’s countless shades of hard-right exterminationist belief tailored to letting the promoter say “oh no, I’m not a Nazi, I’m something else you’ve never heard of” while continuing to recruit and spread hate. But people who do this can’t help but tell on themselves.

“If you say you are not a nazi, then can I ask why you are in Blood Division, which is explicitly NSBM?,” Reddit user treewolf7 asked in the same thread posted above.

Tudón gave a bizarre answer.

“I never called myself a nazi,” he said, continuing, “That term is very loosely thrown around so I’m not sure what you mean by the definition since even liking ww2 history or third reich memorabilia will get you called a nazi.”

Tudón then started saying one of his band’s songs weren’t NSBM, they just happened to be about “…battles between Germany and Russia. National socialism versus Communism,” he said before talking about how the songs were written from the point of view of Nazi soldiers.

“But I’m sure song titles like “Anti-Zog,” making splits with bands such as “Gas Chambers” and “Terror 88,” having such sweet lyrics as “SSoldiers of the SSun” (SUBTLE) is outdated metal archives info too, right? Holy shit you’re BAD at this,” a Twitter user told Tudón in another exchange.

“I didn’t write those lyrics and im[sic] not in those bands anymore. The fact I left should be an indicator my views aren’t like theirs lol. I won’t get into it because I won’t get into it but how I present Maquahuitl speaks for itself. It’s not nsbm,” Tudón replied.

But Tudón’s feelings about antifascists are pretty clear. Here’s what he told El Misantropo in 2020 when asked a broad question about how he feels about the state of the black metal scene:

Black Metal overall has been fine. Recent campaigns by antifa and lefties have been a big pain in the ass. This is nothing to worry about since Black Metal will always prevail. Those who falter or choose to be luke-warm make themselves easy prey for antifa, and are more so the culprits in most recent years in attracting these groups into the realm of Black Metal.

Tudón is likely miffed at “antifa” in part because his projects keep getting banned from music forums and online catalogs.

But even if Tudón “left” NSBM himself, Maquahuitl still played a Nazi music fest called ‘Hot Shower’ in Italy in 2019. The name is a reference to a South Park episode where klansmen chant “White power! White power!” and then chant “Hot shower! Hot shower!” The flyer for the event, complete with Maquahuitl’s logo (minus the swastika) front and center, is the festival’s Telegram channel’s avatar as of this writing.

Antifascists who alerted LCRW to this show said they reached out a few weeks ago to Catch One, the venue Maquahuitl is set to play, and have received no response. LCRW reached out via email to the venue and we’ll update the story when we hear back.