Monte Conner reveals why Gorguts was dropped from Roadrunner Records!
Roadrunner Record’s Monte Conner has released a lengthy statement regarding Gorguts’ Considered Dead 30-year anniversary via his Facebook page in which he describes why Gorguts was dropped from Roadrunner Records. You can read the whole here:
„At the time of release, some critics were quick to point out that it was somewhat derivative of the band Death. But those critics were quickly silenced two years later when the band's second album "The Erosion of Sanity" saw the band making a massive creative leap. A leap that was still just a drop in the bucket compared to where they would head later.
Sadly, Roadrunner’s owner Cees Wessels forced me to drop almost of our death metal bands in an unfortunate purge from 1994-1995. He felt the genre's sales potential had hit a brick wall by then. Everything I signed and did at Roadrunner was run through the gauntlet of Cees. He made the rules and I operated within them. Some mistakes aside, he was and still is a totally brilliant businessman and his passion, commitment and drive is why Roadrunner became the massive powerhouse and success story it is.
After we parted ways, Gorguts mastermind Luc Lemay and I remained friends, and I have always considered him one of the nicest and sweetest guys I ever worked with. Gorguts' most successful period would happen after their Roadrunner days with 1998's groundbreaking "Obscura." Amazingly, their star would rise even further, with the band hitting a commercial peak in 2013 when their fifth album "Colored Sands" reached a whole new hipster generation and made them cooler than they had ever been. It was even nominated for a Juno Award in Canada. That's right, 22 years after I signed Gorguts in 1991 off of their "…And Then Comes Lividity" 1990 demo, Luc made me look like a total genius!
Now let’s have a look a high-quality scan of Dan Seagrave's cover art. In 2014, Dan updated it for the box set "...And Then Comes Lividity - A Demo Anthology," and I have a scan of that as well. Explaining the new concept at the time, Dan said, “We are now looking at the same location some hundred or so years later. The place is a ruin, roof caved in and a strange fossilization process has entered the vicinity. With that, the encroachment of the boxed figures from the other album cover I made for the band ('The Erosion of Sanity'). These boxes hold discarded evolutional possibilities. Such as seen in another one of my works 'Descendant.' Their DNA infusing all around it and growing a new breed of rejected life forms."
Gorguts released 2 of their albums via Roadrunner Records, Considered Dead (1991) and The Erosion of Sanity (1993). They were at the time replaced by Fear Factory. Dan Seagrave did artworks for 3 Gorguts releases, Considered Dead, The Erosion of Sanity and ...And then Comes Lividity. The Erosion of Sanity was ranked #10 on our list of top 50 Dan Seagrave album covers!
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