Canadian fanatics Blasphemy first made their mark upon the international black metal scene in 1989, courtesy of demo tape Blood Upon The Altar. But they began life as far back as 1984, when the band was formed by vocalist and bassist Gerry Joseph Buhl (otherwise known by the lengthy pseudonym “Nocturnal Grave Desecrator and Black Winds”) and drummer Sean Stone (“Three Black Hearts of Damnation and Impurity”). Both were British Columbian teenagers who were rapidly engrossing themselves in both the music and lifestyle of extreme metal.
“We’d known each other since we were ten-year-old kids,” explains Black Winds, a man who despite his formidable appearance and reputation (he famously once punched through a car window to get his hands on a fleeing adversary) proves to be a surprisingly laid-back and down-to-earth interviewee.
“We had a beer stash, we had a weed stash, and we would walk up to this record store that was maybe a mile away from us and buy maybe four cassettes or records and then take them back to his place. School wasn’t really a big thing by the time we hit about fourteen, the girls were always good but, you know, we had many other ways to hook up with them other than school. So we’d listen to Iron Maiden, Motörhead, Kiss was one of them, all that old stuff and we’d kick back in his yard, blast the tunes, drink our beer, smoke our weed, and just fucking have a good time. We were always in search of something heavier though…”
Soon discovering the likes of Sodom, Hellhammer, and Bathory, the two fans formed their own band with the aim of playing similarly rampaging, malevolent metal, recruiting neighbor and friend Geoff Drakes—better known by his “ritual name” of “Caller of the Storms”—as a guitarist. Trying out a number of band names, including Antichrist, Desaster, and Thrash Hammer, the group finally settled on Blasphemy, picking up a fourth member along the way in the form of Blake “Snake” Cromwell (“Black Priest of the Seven Satanic Blood Rituals”), a close friend of Icelandic origin who was “a pretty serious Satanist and demonologist.” Indeed, as the band name suggests, Satanism and demonology were interests held by all members of the group, whose “ritual names” were more than grandiose-sounding pseudonyms, but rather the outcome of secret initiation rituals, many specific to Victoria’s notorious Ross Bay Cemetery, a location the band would help bring to international fame.
“You’ll feel the vibes when you go to that place,” says Black Winds about the iconic graveyard, “you know you’re in a very evil place. It’s very old—at least as far as Canada goes—and has catacombs and stuff, masses of sarcophaguses that have been cracked open and pushed aside. But it’s well-maintained too, it’s got hundreds of trees and bushes and so on. But if you get down in any of those catacombs, I mean that’s where we used to practice our stuff. We always kept [the exact nature of the rituals] private so I can’t say too much, but [each member’s ritual] would be something out of a book along with something we created.”
Heavily wooded and facing out onto the Pacific Ocean and the Ross Bay from which it takes its name, the historic cemetery has become well known for the occult activities that have taken place within it, having even featured in the notorious “Satanic ritual abuse” book Michelle Remembers. It has also gained considerable fame thanks to Blasphemy themselves and interviews such as the one below, taken from Gallery of the Grotesque zine and featuring later guitarist Marco “The Traditional Sodomizer Of The Goddess Of Perversity” Banco.
“Watching naked girls rolling around on the freshly cut grass was always amusing at Ross Bay. Years earlier a massive storm had tore [sic] the front of the cemetery to pieces, sending coffins and bodies floating everywhere, some hundreds of years dead. There is a hidden tombstone of a buried witch there that is under some bushes, quite odd, the writing is hieroglyphic and places the time of death from the early 1900s: when I found this the fellow that had lived near the place his whole life was astonished that he’d never seen it before. This place points to the gates of Hell, Satanists have known this for two hundred years, that explains the fantastic beauty of the area. When I stand at the front of Ross Bay in the time before dawn facing the ocean and close my eyes and listen to the wind you will hear distinctly the sound of the dead.”
“Victoria is one of the Satanic capitals of the world,” explains Black Winds today. “There was this club in this really hard-to-find, back-alley type place, and you’d walk in there and they’d usually be drinking from chalices what would look like blood, but was probably red wine for most. I remember they had their faces painted green, then they had the black war paint. There were also the Satanists we met at Ross Bay itself of course.”
The cemetery would be mentioned by name on Blood Upon the Altar, thanks to the song “Ritual,” which opened with the lines “Ross Bay grave/Black Mass begins.” While one might expect these Satanic activities to be responsible for the delay between the group’s formation and their first recorded output, the reality was somewhat more problematic, as Black Winds explained: “I got seven months I had to go do in jail…. soon as I got out, our guitarist got six months, so that kinda fucked up time for us, all that in between finding places to practice.”
Indeed, in the years prior to their demo—and after that for that matter—the band built something of a reputation for trouble due to their taste for alcohol, drugs, bodybuilding, and fighting. As Black Winds remembers it, however, the band members themselves were never interested in initiating conflict with anyone, even if they weren’t ones for backing down once it occurred.
“Say we go to a gig, a party, anything like that, you always get idiots who get in your face and they give you a problem,” he sighs. “They want to get tough with you, and it’s like, maybe a couple of our bandmates look at each other and go, ‘We gotta fire these guys through the fucking wall, what the fuck?’ You know, shit like that right? We were pretty much always like that. We don’t go looking for trouble, it’s just that trouble tends to follow and when the trouble follows we’re pretty good at dealing with it.”
These conflicts also tended to follow the band to their own notorious live performances, which involved heavy use of barbed wire, candles, bullets, fire-breathing, blood-spitting, war paint, and even stolen tombstones. Blasphemy’s shows were not only chaotic on stage, but also saw frequent violence from the audience, a situation that ultimately led to the band being banned from many local venues.
“Yeah, shit like that would happen,” laughs Black Winds, “The crowd would go a little too crazy, you know, a lot of shit would happen and the cops would show up ’cos bouncers started getting bounced around, windows getting smashed, that kinda thing.”
As well as pulling in fans at their shows, the band’s demo also found a warm reception, its aggressive and exhilarating sound straddling the worlds of death metal and black metal. Ultimately the tape would sell thousands of copies worldwide, and its success convinced the now infamous Wild Rags, a label run out of the Californian record store and clothes shop of the same name, to sign the band. Though they would release their 1990 debut album Fallen Angel of Doom, it was not to be a rewarding relationship from the band’s point of view, due to the label’s notoriously haphazard financial dealings—which saw the company closed down by the authorities some years later.
“Those guys really fucked up, I mean they could fuck up a cup of coffee, those guys,” Black Winds spits, the anger evident in his tone. “I don’t know how they had bands sign, ’cos they were a bunch of lowlife degenerates. The guy was supposed to pay us a dollar per album he sold, per CD, per cassette, per shirt. Money was never a big thing for me, but when he calls up and says, ‘Black Winds, you’ll never believe this, we just sold 4,500 copies of the CD alone just in Europe, imagine how much we’ve sold—especially in other countries!’ And I was like, ‘Yeah must be fucking over hundreds of thousands.’ And he was like, ‘Yeah for sure!’ I’m like, ‘Well that’s cool,’ you know, ‘That’s nice,’ so I said, ‘You making lots of money on it?’ and he goes, ‘Oh yeah’ and I’m like, ‘So you think we’re gonna see our share?’ ‘Oh
well, well, we’re gonna have to fucking reinvest er’…. You mean you’re not making enough money off of it to reinvest? You know, sure we’ve seen a few checks over the years, but nothing too large, I don’t think we’ve seen more than 4,500 dollars and when he says he sold that in less than a month in CDs alone … I mean he’s kinda telling me…. And whenever we called to say, ‘Fire us up some dollars,’ he would just ramble on. He was such a fucking fast-talking guy that we couldn’t … you know, you just couldn’t get a question in with the fucking guy. It’s a good thing he wasn’t based up here. We’d have had to go in and break some bones and shit like that.”
1990’s barbaric debut album Fallen Angel of Doom….
While it might not have made them a great deal of money, Fallen Angel of Doom did earn the band an enviable reputation, establishing them as heirs to a throne that had long been vacated by the early-eighties pioneers that inspired them. Primal and aggressive, the album’s short songs are almost unrelenting bombardments that focus on a ferocious percussive blitzkrieg and deep reverberating vocals, the lightning-fast atonal riffs buried somewhere within the primitive production. Interestingly, despite its timeless quality the band were actually somewhat disappointed with the finished opus, due to a shift in sound that occurred—for reasons unknown—between the recording (which took part at Fiasco Bros. Studio, the same location used for the demo) and the mastering.
“When we did the mixdown in the studio it sounded awesome,” sighs Black Winds, “we could hear the bass, the guitar, the lead guitar, the drums, the vocals—everything was perfect. Then when we get it all pressed it was a complete different sound and you couldn’t hear the guitars very well. We were maybe eighty percent happy, I know we could have done a lot better. It’s a fucking really nice studio, I really don’t know how it fucked up. But when boxes of albums are ending up on the doorstep and distributed over the world, it’s a bit late to change anything.”
Though its sound remains about as flat as the records it’s pressed on, the album is nonetheless a genre milestone. It also exposed the band to an even wider audience, introducing the Ross Bay Cult to an international fan base. Another tagline included on the sleeve was “Black Metal Skinheads,” a concept that was new to many, but reflected the culture that the band were a part of in British Columbia.
A flyer for 1993’s legendary Fuck Christ tour. The first tour of black metal’s ‘second wave,’ it saw the Canadians appearing alongside Norway’s Immortal and Greece’s Rotting Christ.
“The black metal skinheads, it really was a big thing,” Black Winds remembers. “A lot of black metal skinheads from the other side of Canada, like Toronto and Montreal, would bounce over here. I remember one guy having Venom’s ‘Black Metal’ tattooed on his head and there was another guy called Dale who had ‘Black Metal Skins’ tattooed on his forehead. You could go to a party just about seven days a week. We didn’t hang out with white power skinheads, but there were some Oi! skinheads who wanted to hang out with us, and we would let them as long as they didn’t get into any political bullshit. We always tried to steer away from that. Politics just ain’t our bag.”
Despite that, in a scene predominantly consisting of Caucasians, the very fact that Blasphemy featured a black member was something of a political point in itself. While people of color are fairly rare in metal generally, in black metal bands they are still almost all but completely absent (with notable exceptions including the Brazilian pioneers Mystifier). This drew attention to Blasphemy, particularly since racial concerns had begun to creep into some quarters of the scene.
“I know it was very different, since there are only a couple of black dudes in metal bands. For me…. you know, skin color just doesn’t matter to me, it’s the personality, and one thing I can say about Geoff, our black guitarist, is he’s fucking cooler than ninety-five percent of the white people I meet. He is as black metal as they come, the guy plays guitar better than anybody I know, he can blast away on the drums better than just about anybody I know, he’s got stacks and stacks of black metal photos, he’s got every black metal T-shirt you can imagine, that dude just is black metal. Nobody would ever give him problems though” …he pauses before laughing at the thought. “That guy would bounce heads off walls, down stairs, everything. He’s a pretty big guy.”
Blasphemy’s second album Gods of War. Released in 1993, it’s been re-released times with a variety of different covers, all of which seem to have failed to capture the band’s intended concept.
It would be three years before the next Blasphemy recordings were released in the shape of Gods of War, a slightly less chaotic but similarly possessed-sounding release that also includes the Blood Upon the Altar demo due to its short twenty-minute running time. By this point Traditional Sodomizer had departed, leaving all guitars to Caller of the Storms. The album also featured a new bass player, the memorably named “Ace Gustapo Necrosleezer and Vaginal Commands.” Released by French label Osmose (of whom the band still have good things to say) and benefiting from a less murky sound, the album was an improvement in some respects, though Black Winds maintains its predecessor was closer to the band’s vision.
“As far as I’m concerned it just wasn’t as good as Fallen Angel of Doom. It wasn’t as crushing, it wasn’t as Satanic … I’m kind of upset at it. You can hear the guitars better, the sound was better but I was kind of disappointed. Someone also fucked up the cover—it was supposed to be four goats pulling what looks like a woman, but it was like a skull-faced woman on the original picture we had, and the only colors were supposed to be black, red and white, so things kinda got changed on us here and there along the way.”
Nevertheless, fan response was positive and the same year saw the band embarking on the legendary Fuck Christ tour—often described as the first second-wave black metal tour—with Osmose labelmates Rotting Christ and Immortal. While the jaunt enabled European fans to finally see the group, it would also result in drummer and co-founder Three Black Hearts being thrown into jail after “flipping out” on the plane back from Europe and then assaulting several police. By this point the band was in some disarray generally and Black Winds himself was no longer a part of the band due to an earlier tour-related disagreement involving Ace Gustapo.
“I didn’t even go on [the Fuck Christ] tour,” he explains, “I was really pissed off about the first tour, how I let this bass player play for us … and I must have said to him ten times, ‘You got the box with all the bullets, all the hardware for the stage?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, I got it all, don’t worry,’ and while we’re flying over the Atlantic to Europe, sure enough he didn’t have them. And you know when I’m playing on stage without that stuff I feel like I’m fucking naked, I felt I couldn’t carry on with it. The look was as important as the music, so it was like, ‘I’m just fucking ending this for myself, if you want to go on and embarrass yourselves carry on,’ that was the end for me.”
A more modern incarnation of Blasphemy. Even their official photoshoots encapsulate the unpolished and chaotic nature of this timeless band.
Eventually Ace and the band would go their separate ways, with Blasphemy receiving what Black Winds describes as a “rebirth” at the beginning of the millennium. Since then the band have maintained their presence within the scene, headlining events such as Nuclear War Now festival with the aid of guitarist Ryan “Deathlord Of Abomination and War Apocalypse” Foster, also known for his work with fellow Ross Bay Cultists Conqueror. This, along with the proliferation of bands playing a similarly barbaric form of black metal—for example Spain’s Proclamation, who stay true to the band’s sound and aesthetic and are signed to the Ross Bay Cult label—keep the band from being forgotten, something that Black Winds has been kept acutely aware of, sometimes in surprising circumstances.
“My daughter just graduated from high school, like maybe three years ago, and everybody at her school, they couldn’t believe I was her dad. I mean she’s not into black metal, but all the older kids at the school had Blasphemy T
-shirts and listened to Blasphemy—and of course other black metal bands—so when she would come over to my place and tell me stuff like this of course I was pretty surprised. And then I’d go to the gigs and they’d recognize me. And I’m like, ‘Holy fuck, these guys are seventeen, eighteen years old.’ I’m just happy black metal didn’t die out or nothing, in fact if anything I think it’s gotten a lot bigger.”
For his part, Black Winds has kept true to the cause, and musically—aside from the perhaps surprising inclusion of English sixties outfit The Animals—his listening habits tend to lean toward the bands who inspired Blasphemy and the bands who were, in turn, inspired by Blasphemy.
“Black Witchery from Florida, Archgoat, Proclamation, Revenge, Order From Chaos,” he explains when asked the acts he most favors, “still listen to a lot of Destruction, Hellhammer, Vulcano, Sarcófago, Adorior, Abominator, Venom’s Black Metal album, Sodom—old Sodom that is, Sadistik Execution and Gospel of the Horns, Mortuary Drape, Discharge, and Warfare from England.”
Having helped put the wheels in motion for the rebirth of barbaric black metal, Blasphemy’s place in the genre’s history is assured and it seems only fitting to let the formidable front man end this chapter in the same manner he ended the interview:
“As I always say, keep up the spirits with the black metal, bitches, barbed wire, bullets, and beer!”
9
SAMAEL
“Samael were one of the bands that were feeding the black metal flame in a period when almost no one else did. Samael had a more occult feeling to it and definitely weren’t in any black thrash tradition and didn’t really have lot of death metal either. I think it’s strange, people took the Mayhem/Darkthrone/Burzum road, I wonder why didn’t more bands take the Samael road, because that was definitely interesting.”
Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult Page 10