Mario Duplantier

Mario François Duplantier (born 19 June 1981) is a French and American musician and artist best known as the drummer for heavy metal band Gojira. He established himself as a powerful, technically precise drummer, using polyrhythmic patterns and distinctive jazzy fills and drum breaks. He has been practising painting and drawing since 2009.

Duplantier developed an early interest in music and started drumming at the age of eleven. In 1996, he co-founded the death metal band Godzilla with his older brother Joe. After a period of self-study, he enrolled at Agostini 's drum school and co-founded Empalot in 1998. Godzilla changed its name to Gojira due to legal issues in 2001 and released its debut album, Terra Incognita. His side project, Empalot, was placed on hiatus in 2004 during the rise of Gojira. Duplantier acquired varied experiences through a range of musical styles from extreme metal, jazz, rock, and funk drumming. He exhibited his paintings in France in 2010. He holds dual French and US citizenship.

After constant touring and recording, Duplantier has gained international recognition. He has been described as "one of metal's most creative rhythmic and technical drummers". He has been listed as one of the "world's best metal drummers" by professional music journalists, magazines, and reader polls. He was voted No. 1 four times.

Early life Mario Duplantier was born in Bayonne, France on 19 June 1981. He grew up in Ondres, southwest coast of France, near the Basque country. He was raised there in a family where arts played a significant role in creativity. His mother, Patricia (née Rosa; 6 October 1950 – 5 July 2015), an American with Azorean roots, and grew up in Los Angeles. His father, Dominique Duplantier, is a French painter and architectural drafter. Patricia, a student in the US, was 23 years old when she met "and fell in love" with Dominique during a trip to Europe in the early 70s. The couple married and settled in Ondres. His father has published books and made art exhibitions in France.

Career Early career Growing up in an environment where his mother brought rock music, the Beatles, Tina Turner, and Michael Jackson into the house profoundly influenced him. At the age of twelve,

At thirteen, Duplantier began practicing in earnest the double bass drums He commented: "In the rehearsal room, I was already a real perfectionist tyrant at thirteen. I wanted everything to be perfect." his friend Alexandre Cornillon joined them soon after. Duplantier recalled, "we immediately began to play in an extremely rigorous, almost obsessive way".

In 1996, Godzilla released the first demo on cassette tape, Victim. Despite its amateur production "but above average", the demo displayed "an art of syncopated groove"; the band would begin performing on the underground circuit.

In 1998, Cornillon left the band to be replaced by the Basque, Jean-Michel Labadie. He then undertook a "brutal practice regime". and represented the early years of Gojira in France. The band, which included nine musicians on stage, toured between 1999 and 2004 in France. There was almost no involvement of double bass drums in music. Their debut album, Terra Incognita, was released the same year and already contained their trademark; "ultra-heavy, rhythmically precise crunching".

In 2003, Gojira released the follow-up album, The Link, showing more versatility and an emphasis on melody, with "a quasi-industrial aesthetic and near-atonal brutality".

At that time, Duplantier knew he had "to pass a new level" and created a double-bass drum exercise to increase speed and control.

In December 2006, he embarked on his first North America tour with Gojira as one of the support bands for Children of Bodom.

Their fourth album, The Way of All Flesh, was released in 2008. which presented them as the leading band of the French metal scene. Duplantier's approach to the drums was more raw energy focused on this album while maintaining a "live" atmosphere. The band had toned down their complexity on Magma. AllMusic's John D. Buchanan stated that "the music is still incredibly heavy". In late 2016, he had made seventeen tours around the United States with Gojira.

Duplantier emphasised the groove on Fortitude while keeping some polyrhythm patterns, saying that the songwriting was more about band cohesion than drum performance. The drum recording method was similar to L'Enfant Sauvage. In 2021, his daily routine exercise on the double bass was still practised. He also mentioned a "return of the drums to the forefront" on the eighth album with more technical and experimental drum patterns. Duplantier appeared on NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers to play drums as part of his residency with the 8G Band throughout the first week of May 2021.

The majority of Gojira's songs were created from Duplantier's drum patterns, such as "Remembrance", "The Art of Dying", "Explosia", "Liquid Fire", Laurent Bendahan of Batteur Magazine praised his "sense of experimentation, his constant questioning" as well as "his timing" and "explosive strike".

Through the music of Gojira, Duplantier plays drums in different musical styles including technical death metal, thrash metal, progressive metal, groove metal, post-metal, and avant-garde metal.

He warms up more than an hour before each show. Gojira's live shows often feature his drum solos as part of the set. He practices the drums in solitude four to five hours a day. He is franco-américain (French-American) based primarily on the principle of jus sanguinis (right of blood), applied through attribution à la naissance (attribution at birth), because born outside the US but obtained its nationality as he fulfilled the condition stipulating that "at least one of his parents is American". He has two passports, one from each country. He is married to French videographer Anne Deguehegny (responsible for Gojira's live visuals),

In February 2022, Duplantier said he lived in Biarritz, in southwestern France. His mother, a yoga teacher, encouraged him to draw, paint, and do theatre. He began practicing painting on the road between two concerts in America; he said that it was "a way of staying creative during the many dead times between dates, sound settings, etc".

In 2018, Duplantier also collaborated with Los Angeles-based art team SceneFour. This art publisher created the Art of Drums, a medium of crafting visual art using long-exposure photography capturing drum performances with LED-lit drumsticks—combining color, motion, and lighting. A year of work was necessary to obtain Duplantier's collection named Vers le Cosmos (Towards the Cosmos), including ten canvases in limited edition and signed. Drums Tama Superstar Custom- Black Hardware And Yellow Shell 22"x18" Bass Drum 22"x18" Bass Drum 14"x6.5" Snare Drum 12"x9" Tom Tom 13"x10" Tom Tom 16"x16" Floor Tom

Hardware – 13" A Custom Hi-Hats 21" Z Custom Mega Bell Ride 18" A Custom Projection Crash 19" A Custom Projection Crash 20" A Custom Projection Crash 10" A Custom Splash 20" A Custom China (x2) Other Mario Duplantier Signature Sticks

Discography

Gojira

Demos Victim (as Godzilla) (1996) Possessed (as Godzilla) (1997) Saturate (as Godzilla) (1999) Wisdom Comes (as Godzilla) (2000)

EPs Maciste All'Inferno (Gojira) (2003) End of Time (Gojira) (2012)

Studio albums Terra Incognita (2001) The Link (2003) From Mars to Sirius (2005) The Way of All Flesh (2008) L'Enfant Sauvage (2012) Magma (2016) Fortitude (2021)

Empalot Brout (demo, 1999) Tous aux Cèpes (full-length, 2002) Empalot en Concert (live, 2004)

Awards and nominations Award Year Recipient(s) and nominee(s) Category Result Epiphone Revolver Golden Gods Music Awards 2013 Himself Best Drummer Loudwire Music Awards 2012 Drummer of the Year 2017 Best Drummer 2016 Best Drummer of the Year Rhythm/MusicRadar Awards Best Metal Drummer 2020 2021

Bernhard Castiglioni of Drummerworld (the "website No. 1 in the world as reference for drummers"), has included Duplantier on his list of 24 names titled "The Metal Drummers" (in alphabetical order). 2012: He won the "Best Drummer of Modern Metal" by MetalSucks. 2020: Duplantier was awarded the No. 5 ranking on the Revolvers list of the "5 Greatest Metal Drummers of All Time". He was ranked No. 21 on Loudwires list of "The 66 Best Metal + Hard Rock Drummers of All Time".