At the constant urging of a certain person in my life whose opnion I do hold as important, a history of my activity and services to the underground scene will told below. Love or hate it, here is a somewhat detailed history of who I am and where I came from and what I stand behind in the ethics of my label. Your choice to read it or not, makes no difference to me. I'm a god damn Southern storyteller so I can get longwinded and all the jive, you won't be unentertained thats for damn sure...

I won't devulge all the truly unnecessary details of my life, thats what social networking sites are for correct? Well that and cruising for potential sniper targets (credit to mr. blaash for that line, in some WMS zine). I had the true luxury of growing up on 70s/80s hard rock and heavy metal due to various elements in the nuclear family structure we all are apart of at some point in life, so my obsession and utter passion for music in general has been nurtured since I was off the teet. Skipping all the "Wonder Years" type stories of self destruction, self loathing and self discovery. We come to me at the tender yet advanced age of 13/14ish, I don't remember exactly, I did lots of drugs then and still drink. Playing in garage bands with buddies doing our best to butcher every Slayer song we could possibly imagine led us to be a little more serious about this, well at least myself and a mutual friend at the time. We came up on all the US death metal stuff and the second wave of black metal, yah know when the Norwegian scene wasn't trash and full of rockstars, when it was still real and kinda scary but in the good way! We formed our own little niche of ideas and wanted to be a little more serious about supporting bands/music whatever we liked outside the tape trading circles and write and pray methods of getting in contact with people, long before the internet was the heroin of the masses, guilty as charged here so piss off. Went by the name TheDark0, in the old zine and trading circles, cheers if ya traded with me then and such, so many good memories of that time. Back to the story, hope I haven't bored ya to tears yet. The mutual friend of mine and I set about taking the next step, and that was to start our own indie label for releasing our own bands shitty demo tapes and carrying stuff from labels/bands that was at the time super hard to get. We formed Arcadia Productions in the summer of 1997 with our own pocket money and personal love for extreme metal, when we first started the scene was vastly different in the States. No NWN, no HellsHeadbangers, none of the big names ya know about now-a-days; mr odin at moribund was still starting up his nifty little empire hes got going on now, redstream was still in Pennsylvania, and FMP still was a serious label, WildRags/Necropolis and the whole west coast shindig was in its final deaththroes as well, so yeah I'm old.

As previously stated, we started out as nothing more than a bunch of strung out glorified metal kids who just wanted to make it easier for our friends and contacts to pick up killer records from over seas or to discover new bands etc etc, that notion is still very prevelant in the GSR mindset to this day. After some early success at this we decided to expand our reach into actually being a REAL label and releasing other bands outside our garage demos. We had been in contact with various other bands over the years such as Morke from Germany (we distroed the Kristallnacht/Morke tape before anyone Stateside), Summon (right after Winds of the Black Mountains disbanded) to name just two. We had always kept ourselves locally oriented as well, maybe not being buddies with the early NC scene which included Demonic Christ, Dark Moon, and Demoncy (Sylvan Realms demo, yeah thats a town in Western NC) and others I'm sure I'm totally forgetting about, thats what edits are for! We got in touch with a fellow NC black metal outfit just north of our location known as Benighted and reached an agreement to release the debut album from them entitled, "Harbingers of the Victorium Aeternus." We started working on this early 98ish? and finally got it released in 2000, following that was the debut mcd of NYs Abysmal Fall entitled "Borne Against." Both did ok I imagine for us, as we had no way to measure succuess or failure, we had plans to release alums from Lunar Reign from Florida and Fallen Empire from Arkansas as well but never did. My interest in this joint effort by this point had dwindled to nothing as my voice and ideas and tastes in what I considered black metal was not being represented despite I was the sole financer of the entire label from the start up. Clashes with the other partners about the way things should be done and how I feel even to this day about how things started to run clashed with my personal feelings/views on what was the right thing to do, that being taking care of the bands first and foremost, putting in all your blood, sweat and tears into it and wanting nothing back in return. Years of disagreement and infightning led me to leave Arcadia in the summer of 2000, hence forth leading me to take nearly 2 years off before that urge to start up again came back to life but this time with my values and vision being in the forefront of everything.

Below is an excerpt from the GSR facebook, it's random but it fits and I don't wanna retype it, I will expand on areas later on if need be:

GSR formed in the winter of 2001 from the ashes of Arcadia Productions after the failings of that operation from 1997-2000 due to commitment and differences of opinions of others. GSR supports the destruction of the Judeo-Christian ideology and all its retardation it has cast upon the face of the Earth and stagnation towards the growth of the individual as a whole. We support what we want and NEVER have and NEVER will bow down to the demands of whatever pop-star fashion diva trends infiltrate the underground scenes. We march to the beat of our own drummer and only release albums from bands we fully support to the highest degree on more levels than just musically speaking. To those that support what I have been doing now for nearly 10 years with GSR, cheers to you all. To the rest, get use to it, I'm extremely stubborn and will stick to what I have done from the very start as part of my vision for what I wanted to and continue to strive towards accomplishing with this. Nearly 30 releases into it and still much more to come! We have distribution in nearly 40 countries worldwide all without the help of commercial distribution networks, all done in the old DIY way, no compromises! GSR also stocks well over 400 titles of black/death/doom/thrash metal with more and more coming everyday of the week, for some of the best underground metal at dirt cheap prices, please visit are distro at www.gsr666.com. Any other information one would seek about us, write to us.

So to pretty much sum up GSR, I don't wanna be famous, my bands come first, most are super close friends to the degree of family closeness. I prefer to stick to the obscure nature of it all and keep to myself. I'm not a businessman and never proclaim to be, I don't make one red cent off this label, everything I make goes right back into putting more stuff out or taking care of bands. I live and breath for this shit and could care less about the trendy messageboard diva drama faggotry and scenester r-tards. Black metal and extreme underground are NOT dead, being an "elitist" douchebag makes about as much sense as a fucking for virginity.

Bleed...
Jason/GSR Obersturmfuhrer