Welcome to “The Right Talk”, The Online Talk Show where The Right Hand Path speaks to Celebrities from the world of Metal music. Our Celebrity Guest today is Evan Busch, the Co-Founder of Gay Christ Records, the Niché Underground Metal Record Label based in the city of Minneapolis in the American state of Minnesota in this Exclusive Interview to an “Indian Metal Music Magazine’’.
The Right Hand Path: Metalik Heils From The Right Hand Path!!! How are things with you at the Gay Christ Records Headquarters?
Evan Busch: Greetings to The Right Hand Path (TRHP)! Things are great for us, just a busy day ending up here in Maryland USA where I work.
The Right Hand Path: Your record label has an interesting name “Gay Christ Records”. In my view, there are two ways of looking at it, first is “the word “Gay” is of Old English origin and means to be happy, merry and in a way not care much about, if you get what I’m saying + Christ = Happy Christ Records”. The second way of looking it is through astonishment in a modern 21st century sense. Homosexuality and Christ, an unimaginable thought to most people”. Am I right in looking at the label name through two different ways or is this a manifestation against “Judeo-Christian” society that I believe Hessian and mockHim Productions believe in?
Evan Busch: The name originally started with one of our founders, who has a penchant for blasphemy against the Judeo-Christian God and his secular construct, liberalism. He was looking through a list of names one day and saw someone named GAY CHRIST, which turns out to be a very nice lady who lives in Texas. However, the name made him laugh out loud because he imagined a HOMOSEXUAL JESUS CHRIST mincing around and having a gay old time, and knew that such an image would upset many believers, who are so tolerant and loving of their God’s creations that they don’t like the gay ones! I am a brave nihilist and I don’t care if people don’t like gays but it’s stupid to claim your God loves everyone and then say you don’t want gay people loved by your God. For that reason we play around a lot with the imagery of a gay Jesus.
The Right Hand Path: Could you be kind enough to tell the Readers of The Right Hand Path and people into Metal music as to how Gay Christ Records came into existence?
Evan Busch: I (Evan Busch), Vijay Prozak and two others founded a distro back in 2000 called EVIL MUSIC. As part of our business plan we decided we would give back to the community, not for profit, so we started GAY CHRIST records to archive classic metal recordings and make them available. Two years later, broadband exploded and people started swapping MP3s, which made much of what we do moot, but we’ve still been able to create an ORGANIZED storage of old metal recordings, which means they don’t get lost when 666hellhammer666 logs off of Limewire or DC++. We also support file sharing through the NEOCLASSICAL MUSIC HUB which is a DC++ hub that has about 300 visitors a day trading death metal, black metal, classical and other scary music.
The Right Hand Path: Allow me to quote the below-mentioned from Gay Christ Records website
Mission
“We seek to disseminate previously out-of-print or lost recordings of metal music for non-commercial, academic purposes.”
Who is/are the Prime Mover behind this Mission, are they still with Gay Christ Records? Is this Mission set to build some kind of Archive, like Nations have National Archives or to be an Encyclopaedic Repository? In addition, are you influenced by any Metal/Non-Metal record label in this venture?
Evan Busch: The Prime Mover was Vijay Prozak, then passed to Kontinual, now to me. The mission is to build an archive of music that has zero commercial value or is forgotten but is still relevant, so that future generations can find it. We would like to someday be a museum! We also work with our contact at the University of Texas library in archiving classic underground metal for academic study. We are influenced 100% by underground PUNK and METAL labels of the 1970s-1990s who had no intention of becoming commercial, only wanted to spread the music because they knew once something is for sale, it gets corrupted by the demands of its audience!
The Right Hand Path: Allow me to quote the below-mentioned from Gay Christ Records website
“People in America seem to have trouble with the concept that we do not sell anything. We trade exclusively with underground purists. No normals, mainstreamers, regular Joes, humanitarians, humanists, Christians, productive members of society or parental authority surrogates accepted or desired. You have the rest of society; go to your paradise, idiots”
Why the above-mentioned as a Note on your website? Like I asked earlier, does this stem from being against current “Judeo-Christian” society. Alternatively, is this to project and sustain an Élite and Purist image?
Evan Busch: The Judeo-Christian idea is that God loves the individual, and what the individual wants is important, and that taking care of other individuals is important. But that’s short-sighted. What’s important is the whole (community, ecosystem, tribe, data set) and what it has that is important, like culture including music! If we start thinking about individuals only, we can never act as a group to fix problems, and we have to tolerate everyone even if they are insane or stupid. That’s what makes empires fall! Screw that, let’s work for the idea that unites us and push aside the people who are broken! We are purists and elitists, but it’s not image. We are making a serious point. There are seven billion people on this planet and many of them are broken. What is important is not that someone is an individual, but what they contribute. By that I don’t mean going to a job, but helping out in the production of higher things, like culture including music. People think we’re crazy but death metal is important culture, it’s the only real commentary we have on society in the 1990s that isn’t paid-for swill like fast food or television!
Especially people outside the United States, this information is important, because they’re going to go through what USA did in the 1990s, but it’s going to be in the future… the US was ahead of everyone else thanks to WWII, which made it The superpower, and so now the rest of us are catching up!
The Right Hand Path: What kind of association/relation do you have with Hessian and mockHim Productions of the American Nihilist Underground Society?
Evan Busch: We share members and founders with mock Him/Dark Legions Archive, which started way back in the 1980s and got on the web in the early 1990s. Hessian.org shares those same members, and includes friends, as does DeathMetal.org, their newest project.
The Right Hand Path: Gay Christ Records also has a Staff that adds reviews to the record label’s website. Since you have already said “No” to Christians and America, your country of origin and residence is a Christian Nation and Multi-religion, Multi-cultural and Multi-racial and considered to the Land of Capitalism. Does this milieu affect and reflect in your Social, Political, Religious and Musical beliefs and in turn in the composition of your Staff?
Evan Busch: I’d like to say I’m totally hardcore but really, anyone who understands what we’re trying to do with metal is cool by me. I don’t have a problem with capitalism per se, but “too much love of money” is really the root of many evils. Most Christians are idiots but most people are idiots. I’m not cool with diversity as the idea of a society, but that has no bearing on whether I like someone as an individual. It’s just a stupid idea to try to shape a society out of artificial means, like “we believe in democracy” and “God bless the USA.” My people are worldwide.
The Right Hand Path: Allow me to quote the below-mentioned from Gay Christ Records website
“We want demo tapes, rehearsal tracks, 7″ EP or obscure media recordings, live/bootleg recordings, and other media of the music of historically significant metal bands.”
Does the above-mentioned by the use of “obscure media recordings,… other media…” include Vinyl, VHS, DVD, Cassettes, Blu Ray [despite Gay Christ Records website header stating “GAY CHRIST RECORDS: Black and Death Metal CDR Traders/Non-Profit Label”]?
Evan Busch: Yes, totally! I’ve got a Pro-Ject Debut III USB turntable for vinyl, and I have an old VCR hooked up to my stereo and I ran a line out to my soundcard. Cassettes are no problem, I’ve got a NAD stereo tape deck for regular cassettes and I have a recorder for microcassettes with a line out to the stereo too. Blu Ray? Is that like a DVD standard? Sounds like it was before my time… or after it.
The Right Hand Path: Which Metal bands in your opinion are “historically significant” for Gay Christ Records apart from the ones already in your collection?
Evan Busch: There really are too many to list, so I’ll use some examples. First, we all know the canon. You know, like the Morbid Angel, Deicide, Incantation, Suffocation, Obituary, Asphyx, Pestilence, Carnage and Nihilist type bands. There are almost infinite recordings of such bands floating around. Your stoner Uncle Bill may have once been to a backyard party, and has an old videotape of Cryptic Slaughter live or whatever. We want it. We want to take it, make a recording of it that’s pure digital, clean it up as best we can and get it out to the world. Yeah, maybe only 503 people worldwide care. So what? Then there’s also the second and third tier bands that were good but never made it to the big time. Accidental Suicide, Sorcier des Glaces, Belial and Infester are part of that group. They are part of our history. They are part of our culture, which isn’t just metal but that which encloses it, which is the history of humanity striving to get its shit together and transcend its ludicrous limitations. The universe is infinite… so the mind should be too.
The Right Hand Path: You might have your international contacts and correspondences; do you plan to register your Gay Christ Records with the Government so that you don’t face any business/company, tax and other hassles?
Evan Busch: Probably not. We take in no money, pay no salaries, and although we could get rid of sales taxes, our biggest expenses are postal and that wouldn’t change, so there’s no real point. If we ever get to the point of buying over a thousand dollars of shipping materials, CD-Rs and stickers in a year, then I’ll consider it.
The Right Hand Path: It has been great interacting with you. You are the third Entity from the American Nihilist Underground Society network after Vijay Prozak and National Day Of Slayer to be on The Right Hand Path. How does it feel & is there anything that you would like to tell the Readers of The Right Hand Path and people in general?
Evan Busch: I really enjoy what The Right Hand Path is doing. It’s in a similar spirit to the Dark Legions Archive (the metal portion of the American Nihilist Underground Society and the writings of Vijay Prozak), the International Day of Slayer, DeathMetal.org, all old zines, all old labels, and all true underground spirits are doing! We want more out of life than money and television, so we make it! We all work together to have a real underground and to let the vapid people pass on us by. Thank you for the interview, hailz and abort gay Baby Jesus!!!
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Enslaved is a metal band from Bergen, Norway. Their style has changed over the years. Originally being an old-school Black Metal/Viking metal act, they now perform a more experimental and progressive form of black metal. The name was inspired by an Immortal demo track, Enslaved in Rot.
