Yeah, high profile guys are out of reach for too many reasons.
I can dream all day of getting Terry Bozzio, Chad Wackerman, Neil Peart, Matt McDonough (Mudvayne), etc... but realistically and unfortunately, that's not going to happen. I really appreciate all of the names that you guys are mentioning. I've got a list of about 20 drummers who I think are possibilities.
Also, I am downloading mp3 of these guys and lots of them are doing blastbeats 90% of the time. Yes, there are some sections in Machinations songs that require somewhat of a blastbeat, but the majority of the songs require fast, heavy "grooves". That's why I asked Chris Adler to do the project. He has an incredible groove, yet throws in wacky "off" things here and there. I can't even tell which blastbeat is better than the other. My assumption is that for these drummers to play blastbeats that fast and clean, they must be capable of playing grooves that wusses (!!) like me "get". The main problem is I can't tell how these guys groove by listening to constant snare, bass, snare, bass, snare, bass, sixteenth notes at 225 BPM.
And so I think what I'm getting at is the drummer for this project should probably come from a different genre other than death metal, maybe extreme metal, thrash metal, technical metal, math metal, etc...
Ron