When Toronto-based filmmaker Doug Brown finished up work on his first documentary, Never Enough (about collectors), he knew he had some unfinished business to attend to, and he knew it needed to take the form of another documentary. Brown, a massive record collector himself, had been pumping tons of money into grindcore records for years, and the fact that this seemed to puzzle a lot of people made him realize he needed to tell grindcore's story. So Slave To The Grind was born.

"There's something really special and intimate about the grind community," says Brown, who, when not talking about obscure grindcore bands works as a school teacher, teaching World Religions and film studies. "And it's not just my love for the music, it's my love for how they're approaching the ethos of grindcore, the DIY ethic. So as I've been telling people about this, everyone is always very fascinated: 'How do you trust these people, that the record is going to arrive?' I say, 'It does. It just does.' It's a hard thing to explain. Based on all the interest people had with my spending habits in grindcore, I thought, you know what? There's something that needs to be said here."

So he got a small crew together (five people total) and tried to set up an interview with Carcass when they rolled through town. He said if he got the interview, he'd start the documentary. He didn't get the interview, but started the documentary anyway. Brown has lots to say about grindcore, and it was too late: the idea was in him, and the movie was going to be made (he's currently trying to get another Carcass interview set up).

"There's nothing more that I have found that human beings can do to push a boundary as far as grindcore has," says Brown. "And as a record collector, I have pushing 6000 albums, 1000 45s, and a couple thousand CDs. All I do is research music and human boundaries. I have minimalist Ethiopian funk from the 70s, and not just one album of it, but a crate full. I truly dig deep and try to find, what is the boundaries of thought. Same with literature I read and whatnot. And to me the most extreme musical boundary of any genre I have found so far is grindcore."

Brown says that he doesn't only listen to extreme music, either: he has just as many jazz albums as metal albums in that collection. He says grindcore is "pushing an intellectual boundary that no one else has done so far, and it's coupled with an ethos and a lot of things that people would be very disgusted by, and it's also coupled with humour."

"It's the package deal," he continues, his enthusiasm for the genre truly remarkable (and much appreciated by a fellow grindcore enthusiast like myself), "and to me that's what's very exciting: it's all of these things at once yet it's very unassuming. These bands are not going out and making millions of dollars being the forerunners of pushing human boundaries. No, they're choosing to play basements and obscure clubs and they're doing it for nothing because they're slaves to this music. That to me is why grindcore is so important."

One of the bands that has been interviewed so far for Slave To The Grind is Canadian left-field grinders Fuck The Facts. Guitarist Topon Das says that Brown's movie will explore peoples' personal paths to grindcore, which he finds interesting.

"One thing that struck me recently was when Doug mentioned how the vocalist of Soilent Green, [Discordance Axis/Human Remains drummer] Dave Witte, and myself all mentioned that we started getting into music with Metallica," says Das. "I never really thought about it before, because it was just my own personal journey, but it's neat to see many other guys my age had a similar path to grindcore. We didn't wake up one day and say, 'Yeah, grindcore, argh!' There's a different journey that we all take in music and we discover a lot of different things along the way, and some of them have more of an effect on us then others. Like, there was a point that all I wanted to listen to was Bela Fleck and the Flecktones or Uzeb, and another period where all I listened to was harsh noise. I still really enjoy those things, but when I discovered grindcore something just sort of clicked a little bit more than with all the other things I had found on my musical journey. I think that's what his movie is about."

Brown will be launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the three film shoots he can't afford (one of which is travelling to film drum-machine grinders Agoraphobic Nosebleed's first-ever full live set) on February 8. His hopes for the movie are modest; he's not aiming to make money or get famous off it.

"I just want the world to know this is a very authentic experience," he says. "I'm making this film because I truly believe it needs to be made. I might not be the perfect person to make it, but nobody has stepped forward and I'm just going to do it and this is all I'm going to think about for the next three years. I really just want to be an advocate for a scene that has given me so much. I truly want to give back to the community by leaving them with an archival piece on, to me, one of the most important music movements in the history of music."