Drummer Eloy Casagrande of Brazilian/American metallers SEPULTURA was injured yesterday while performing with the band in Bourg-en-Bresse, France and will be forced to sit out SEPULTURA’s next four shows in order to recover. His roadie Dedé will sit behind the drum kit for SEPULTURA during this period. Casagrande will rejoin SEPULTURA on stage May 7 in Poitiers, France.
Eloy is a 21-year-old drum prodigy from São Paulo, Brazil who won the Modern Drummer “Undiscovered Drummer” contest as a teenager in 2006. Casagrande joined the ranks of SEPULTURA as the replacement for Jean Dolabella, who left the band because he could no longer commit to lengthy touring. SEPULTURA played its first show with Casagrande on November 25, 2011 in Lichtenfels, Germany.
When asked what Casagrande has added to the band, vocalist Derrick Green answered: “Definitely the fact that he’s young and that energy helps a lot. He’s a very disciplined drummer — he’s been playing since he was seven. And he’s been doing a lot of things by himself and playing with different people, and that’s really, really impressive. He had a lot of things put together before we even met him; he’s already done so much. And I think with us, a combination us together, it’s a great learning process for him to grow and at the same time, we’re learning a lot from him, so we can do this together. And this is something extremely important when you’re doing a band that’s been together for so long, to have this connection. And we felt this connection with him immediately. And we could tell that he was very focused and very committed to doing extremely good music.”