About: General Blaspheme

Hello everyone. I’m General Blaspheme. Some of my friends call me General, some call me Blaspheme. My wife calls me Dustin. Or Shut-Up, depending on how much (how little?) coffee I’ve had in the day.

My birthday is April 18, which means I’m an Aries. I’ve lived in Alberta my entire life, with brief forays (summer holidays) into British Columbia, but I’ve moved around a fair amount. Right now I live in Edmonton with my wife, our cats Stryker and Mary, and our hamster Grumm, and I don’t see us moving out of the City of Champions any time soon.

I’m a metalholic, but I love most music styles in general. Naturally, there are some things I don’t like, and some I outright hate. Favorite bands for me are Darkthrone, Cannibal Corpse, Dimmu Borgir, Behemoth, Lilyum, Hank III, Morbid Angel, Naglfar, The Cure, Joy Division, Combichrist, iVardensphere, and tons tons tons more. I could go on forever.

From grade 8 to 12 I was in Devon schools, with some upgrading in Leduc. Went into the work force out of high school wanting to be a welder. It wasn’t for a couple years when I discovered sandblasting, and that I did for three years. Then February of 2009 came along. I was laid off, and without having become a welder or pipefitter (tried to get that apprenticeship too) I had nothing to really fall back on, and even if I did there wasn’t anything out there. The Great Recession of 2009 had begun to take its toll.

At this time, Funeral Rain Records was a month old. I had released WON, the first demo from Pogrom, my black metal project. It wasn’t for another month that I started Funeral Rain Zine.

FRR started as a CDR label, and now it’s growing out of that area into CDs. A planned huge effort with Guerra Total was going to be the first foray into factory pressed CDs, and a limited CD run with Peru’s Torment came shortly after. Changes in the Guerra Total CD came, and it became a split between them and Eternal Drak. Torment’s CD even got changed from the projected Satanis Penis, which is still being held up in the recording process, to Hircus Emissarius, a recording that has not seen physical release yet. Right now, both are out and there’s only two copies of the Torment CD available.

FRZ, like I said, was born about a month, maybe two, after FRR. I read a couple MySpace zines (E-MetalSpace, Death’s Design, and Winter Torment mostly), and decided I wanted to do something cool too, something in that vein but hopefully more. My first interviews were Genocide Winter, Plecto Aliquem Capite, Five Will Die, and 13th Sky. Then Fenriz from Darkthrone agreed to answer some questions.

Fastforward a couple months. I’ve gotten a fair amount of reviews done for indie bands and labels, and a couple interviews too. I made a step forward with an Angelfire site, and then Tristan got me my own URL and set me up with an FTP program. I had funeralrain.net finally, which was a goal from the start. A site to house both Funeral Rain Records and Funeral Rain Zine, without the lameness of Angelfire. Seriously folks, if you can do it, just jump into getting your own website rather than a free one.

Since then the site has gone through some big changes, and now this one here is the biggest one of all, and I think it will be the most permanent. Like I’ve said on Twitter, WordPress FTW.

Now, through the months of doing Funeral Rain and being jobless, and somehow still living a real life, or trying to, I’m back in a welding shop. This one seems a little better, and hopefully I can make this a career. Or at least as much of a career as it can be until Funeral Rain starts to make enough money to pay my bills.

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