Interviews

Interviews: Gorguts and Withered Earth

Jeremy shines the harsh light of inquisition on Gorguts’ Luc Lemay and Withered Earth’s Adam Bonacci after the two bands torched the audience at Jaxx in Springfield, VA on their recent tour with Deicide and Marduk.

Jeremy: Gorguts’ sound changed to something even more amazing between Roadrunner and Olympic. What happened in those five years?

Luc Lemay: Obscura was written since 1994. It was written in regular tempo. Between the albums, we did this European tour in 1993 and when we got back from the tour we had a letter saying that we got dropped and everything, so we started writing material for Obscura. It’s very different because there was a completely new line-up besides me. After we recorded “Erosion [of Sanity]”, we got rid of the bass player, then we got Steve. Steve got in the band, he learned all the music, we jammed together as a band maybe for a month, and after we got all the songs together, the drummer and the guitar player quit the band within a week for whatever reason. So, I got Steeve Hurdle, which plays on Obscura and wrote a lot of the stuff in there. He’s one of the ones responsible for this sound. He’s very creative, very curious about his instrument. We wanted to get rid of all the ingredient we had on “Erosion…” and “Considered Dead”. We didn’t want to have the Slayer beat anymore.! It’s not because we didn’t like it, we just wanted to get a different sound. We got the blast beat more, like we didn’t have on the first two albums. Steve, the drummer, joined the band. He did a tour in Europe. He stayed in the band until ’95 and in January ’96 he quit the band. He was out of the band about two years and during this two years we were like a year without a drummer. So, the other year we spent rehearsing with a new drummer which learned all the stuff from pre-production tapes. We were sending tapes and no label really wanted to sign this music. So, then we hooked up with Marty at Olympic. We did the record with Pat the drummer and we did a couple shows with him and he wasn’t really working out in the live situation, so then Steve the drummer came back in the band. We had three Steves in the band. Then, in July ’99 Steeve Hurdle, the guitar player, quit the band after two tours. We did a tour with Nile in ’98 and we did a tour with Vader in ’99 and ! a couple months after that, he quit the band. Then we got Dan, the lead singer and guitar player from Martyr. He’d been in the band for a year and a half and we just did a tour with Dying Fetus. He’s an awesome guitar player, but things personally didn’t really work out. That’s why we ended up as a three-piece and I think we’ll stay like this now. It’s going to influence the writing. We’re going to think music differently being a three-piece.

Jeremy: Luc, you don’t physically play your guitar like most other guitarists. Sometimes you beat the strings or scrape them or take other approaches besides just picking, like heavy passages with lots of hammering and pull-offs. Where did all of that come from?

Luc: That’s just came out this way while writing stuff. You’re trying a bunch of stuff with your instrument, looking for new sounds. “From Wisdom to Hate” is not as weird as “Obscura”. The fact that Steeve Hurdle left the band—he wrote all the intricate shit and so fucked up riffs. Even we wrote a song or two after “Obscura” that was like far. I don’t know if it would have worked out live, but it was very ambient—very fast, but nobody played the same thing.

Jeremy: What happened to those songs?

Luc: Well, Steeve, the guitar player, left the band. “Inverted” is the first song I wrote for [“From Wisdom…]”. I mainly wrote like “Erosion…”, so maybe that’s why people think of it as a comeback to the old style, but it’s still different. It has fast picking and there’s a lot of open strings.

Jeremy: I overheard you talking about some composition schooling you took in.

Luc: Yeah, I studied composition for four years at a music conservatory, but before that when “Erosion…” came out, I started playing violin. I played violin from ’93 to ’95 then I switched to viola and played viola for about two years and then I went to composition class from ’96 to ‘99/2000. I quit school in winter 2000 because we were too busy with the band. Touring, working, and jamming with the band—it’s too much. Now it’s time for Metal and school will always be there whenever I want to go back and finish the diploma. When I was there, I wrote a couple pieces. I wrote a flute concerto with orchestra and there’s some riffs from “Erosion of Sanity” in there. I wrote a violin sonata. I had plenty of arrangements for orchestra and choir. Since then I kind of quit violin, but I just got a new instrument and I’m going to start taking lessons again.

Jeremy: Do you think that influenced or shaped your approach to guitar?

Luc: Not really. Guitar is by itself. But, music is a way of thinking—to conceive sound. It’s like drawing and all kind of art. Maybe studying it and touching different musical speech, without noticing, you end up thinking music differently and you incorporate it different tools. By doing analysis and studying these works, there is a lot to do with structure. I think it helped me structure music. I don’t like the word better, it’s just differently. I think when you write music, you always do the best with the knowledge that you have at the time that you’re doing it. Sometimes a band will have some songs and drop them and write a better one for a demo. You need to have a starting point somewhere, a reference. You conceive music in your head differently by being able to understand. I did it for myself; I didn’t really do it for the band.

Jeremy: Adam, I heard a demo of Withered Earth a few years ago and you’ve progressed a lot.

Adam Bonacci: We were in Disgorge from ’90 to ’95 and that was Chris, the guitar player, and myself. When we started getting together with other people, we wanted to do something different. We did the Disgorge thing which was grind, brutal, straightforward. At that time, we were thinking more like Doom, or European. I actually just remastered that demo with a new song. From the demo up until now, we’ve had a few bass player changes, a couple guitar player changes. Everybody that’s in the band right now is coming from a different background. It all comes together into one. From then until now, it’s been an evolution.

Jeremy: [referring to the relatively small van both bands are in] How’s riding in this van together?

Adam: It’s wonderful.

Luc: It’s funny.

Adam: It’s funny at 4:30 in the morning driving through the desert and you can’t see anything ahead of you and there’s nothing behind you and we’re all loaded on coffee and busting balls. It’s been great.

Luc: They’re learning some French, too.

Adam: Yeah, we’re learning as many French swear words as possible.

Jeremy: What’s the tour like so far?

Adam: The tour is Withered Earth, Gorguts, Marduk, and Deicide. It was kind of a last minute thing. We got a call “All Out War is off, can you do the tour?” Absolutely, no question. So, we got it together.

Luc: We knew each other before.

Adam: They’ve come to Rochester and Diane, our manager, used to do some work with them.

Luc: That was fun, knowing that we would get together.

Adam: It’s cool because we have to share this van and there’s eight people in here.

Jeremy: How much longer is on this tour?

Adam: About 10 days.

Jeremy: So, there’s not much sense it telling people to go check it out because this won’t go up in time.

Adam: No, but you could put in there that we’re going on the Vader tour at the end of June.

Jeremy: Who else is on that?

Adam: The line-up I know right now is Impaler, Garden of Shadows, Withered Earth, Origin, Skinless, and Vader. It’s a six-band bill and it should be pretty killer.

Jeremy: What’s in the future?

Luc: There’s some plans going on for us to go in Europe in August or September. I just can’t wait to write a new album with the three-piece.

Adam: We got that Vader tour coming up, and that’s pretty much it. There was a mention of something in Europe, but I don’t know if that’ll happen on this record. If that doesn’t happen, we’ll spend the winter writing. We already have like four songs written for a new album. We spoke with Erik Rutan about producing the new album and he was all into it. He’s very good, man and he’s a good dude, too. Hopefully, we can work with him, but if not, we’ll find someplace cool.