CELLADOR - Heartland Heavies Page 3
by Martin Popoff

"Brian has actually been pretty heavily involved in our band from the beginning," says Chris, on the rare hands-on involvement from Metal Blade founder Brian Slagel. "He was the one who signed us. He was the one to contact us from the beginning when they got our demo, which had got to them upon the recommendation of the Black Dahlia Murder guys, who we had played with. Pretty much for this whole last year, he's been keeping pretty close contact with us, aside from a couple of months when things were really slow and we were just writing songs and getting ready to record our album. But especially since we've finished recording our album, he's been in heavy contact with us. Plus he kept close contact when we made our record. He came by several times and checked out how things were going, and listened to tracks. He was heavily involved in the mixing and the mastering of the record too, with Erik Rutan, our producer. Rutan would be there, and he would be there advising on different sounds, what sounds good, different levels to try. And he did the mastering of the record too. Still, to this day, he's heavily in contact with us. He really believes in us as a band, and we really appreciate it. We're very happy to have this kind of support from the CEO of the label - obviously it's really good for us."

Erik Rutan, moving well beyond his torrid death metal pedigree, is quick becoming a hot production commodity. Muses Chris, "Rutan... the thing about him is, he's pretty much a self-proclaimed perfectionist, which is good for us. He's a very demanding producer. He really brings out the absolute best in your performance, in terms of, you know, if it's got one small flaw or any flaw at all, it's like, 'Re-do it.'. He's a firm believer in not really using effects or a lot of studio magic. He likes very natural production, real honest sound production. So that was one good thing about why we wanted to work with him. We thought it would be interesting to kind of take that perspective and have that attitude toward making power metal. Because normally a lot of power metal bands in the past - European bands - have been known to use a lot of effects and studio editing and all that type of stuff, and we wanted to take a different route. Especially for our first record, to create something that was really intense and natural sounding. And Rutan was one of the top contenders we wanted to get to after some of the records we had heard him do."

CELLADOR - Heartland Heavies Page 4