APRIL 2005 - Karyn Crisis is fascinating. Of all the artists we've interviewed over the past few years, she may be the most creative, interesting, and genuine. Unfortunately, a few months after this interview, the band's status was put on hold indefinitely. It stands to reason that Karyn and the rest of the band would rather suspend activity rather than take any action that would compromise their music. At any rate, the interview that follows is an excellent glimpse into the world of a true underground artist, working non-stop to deliver pure, original, aggressive music to her true fans.

Marchman: Before we start, I heard you were checking over the site recently.

Karyn Crisis: We liked it. We were laughing at a lot of the stuff. Really funny.

Marchman: Besides listening to the CDs, I've fallen a little behind following the band, so forgive me. Wasn't there a time that you were considering putting out a radio-friendly album or toying with creating an FM kind of song?

KC: That was all in the past. The idea that we could maybe be a little subversive and take our message to the masses was something that we explored when we first moved to L.A.. We had lost our drummer and we were just kind of jamming in our digital studio in our apartment. We were asking ourselves, "Is it just us, or is the world really that backward?" And we thought that maybe it was us and we need to examine ourselves, since no one was really taking an interest in us or seeing us as something that the world needed to hear about. So we did experiment under the name of SKULLSICK NATION with more simplified song structures that weren't as challenging as your normal CRISIS fare. But we ended up finding out that CRISIS trying to be anything other than CRISIS is utterly...I mean, some of the songs are interesting, but overall they're a lot more boring and unexplorative. But we did learn a lot about our songwriting, both past and present, through that experience.

Marchman: Truthfully, I never expected CRISIS to put out anything like that, even when I read that years ago.

KC: I'd say we're perfectionists when it comes to writing our songs, but we have a process that's different than most metal bands that are out there which is that we're a jam band. Not in the hippie sense, but we don't come into rehearsal with a lot of preconceived ideas. Like one guy doesn't write the whole song and then say, "Okay everyone, come chant around me." It's the kind of thing where we may bring in some ideas, but it's all about communicating without words a lot of times. Just jamming and jamming and jamming until we find that magic. So if you try to take that jamming concept and turn it into a more commercial sound, you end up killing the magic, and the whole idea of exploring to find something new and learn to grow that way. So that doesn't work for us. And with the new album, we definitely won't be trying to be the next nu-metal band, or the next whatever. I think the trend is moving into thrash right now, away from emo/screamo. You won't find any of those trends on the next CRISIS album. You'll find us exploring our extremes of light and darkness.

Marchman: Do you ever pick up the violin these days?

KC: Yeah, actually lately it's been happening a lot. I've been working on an experimental project with an Italian musician friend of ours, playing violin on that, and my friend has a band called SON OF THE SOIL, and I just played violin on one of his tracks too. It'll be popping up next year, I think, in some of our recordings.

Marchman: See now, I was expecting you to say you hadn't touched it for 15 years or something.

KC: (Laughs) It's been about that long since I touched it, until recently.

Marchman: You've always done all of the cover art for CRISIS albums over the years yourself.

KC: All of our artwork, yeah.

Marchman: Can you tell us a little about the sculpture you created for the "Like Sheep Led To Slaughter" album, and the relationship of the songs to the artwork?

KC: Well, I like to deal with a lot of symbolism and for me, I focused on the spine as the 'control center' of the body, in a way. If you think of stuff on character, you can use the phrase, in a negative way, "Oh, he's so spineless." You tend to think that if you have a broken back or you're paralyzed, you really can't move freely with your spine being in that kind of shape. So I used that imagery to set up the title, "Like Sheep Led to Slaughter". The sheep that I were referring to were the people of this world , being led to slaughter by our leaders. So the image for the cover was to represent the spine being ripped out of one of those people, to show lack of power.

Marchman: Now lyrically, I've always found your expression very powerful and genuine, going all the way back to "Deathshead..." album.

KC: Thank you!

Marchman: During the time you were living in New York, were you influenced by any artists you encountered, playing around locally?

KC: A lot of bands that influenced me around that time were a mishmash of stuff that I listened to in the past, like SKINNY PUPPY, early SUGAR CUBES, and COCTEAU TWINS and CRANES, Z'EV, and German industrial stuff like H.N.A.S., stuff like that.

Marchman: No SWANS?

KC: At the time that I was in New York, I didn't listen to a lot of SWANS, although now I do! See, as CRISIS started playing out, which was just after we joined pretty much, I started learning about the bands in the scene. But none of it was really a huge influence on me at that time.

Marchman: I think its interesting that you've personally been based in Chicago, New York, and L.A., but still seem rooted in the original experimental rock that you listened to growing up.

KC: The thing is, I grew up on piano and violin, and then got into rock on the radio. Then as I got into my early teens, we'd go record shopping in Chicago, and there's a lot of great music there whether it's the Wax Trax! scene or really avant garde, arty, noisy more rock-oriented bands. But the thing is, you had such a presence of women, in practically every genre but metal and hardcore. I mean you had SIOUXSIE and SUZANNE VEGA, and BJORK, you know. People in a variety of bands that did a lot of different types of music that were women. But once I went to NY and started learning about these bands, there weren't any women really. I was always looking for heavier and heavier music and eventually I found it in metal, but my influences up until then were maybe more dreamy or experimental in the modern sense.

Marchman: So, how is Karyn Crisis in 2005 different than Karyn Crisis ten or fifteen years ago?

KC: (Laughs) Well, in a lot of ways, things are different. When we started out in 1993, I think on one hand I had a lot of idealism in my brain. I was much younger then, and I thought I would go out and be a voice for women. But as you grow up you learn that not all women have the same goals in life. So you just have to be a voice for yourself and at the same time you can be a voice for people who don't have a voice, y'know, people who are oppressed and much worse off in life than you are. I also thing that when I was first starting out, I was really just expressing who I was, I wasn't really analyzing the way that I was singing or my voice. I wasn't really analyzing my strengths and weaknesses. Now, it's more than a decade later. I've always been in touch with who I am, but now I really know more about what I'm made of. I mean, we were the only female-fronted band out there touring the nation and Europe doing the kind of music we were doing, and I had to develop really thick skin and a strong sense of defiance to operate in that genre of music, being the only one out there. It was such a different thing for people back then. Now, it's pretty cool, but back then it wasn't cool. We didn't have a lot of industry support at all. It was just about going out there and winning the fans, and I learned a lot more about my own voice, and it's pretty indestructible now. Just a lot more self-analyzing.

Marchman: More perspective.

KC: Yeah, of course you have a lot more perspective with age and going out there and proving yourself. I mean, CRISIS wasn't a band that got picked up by a major label, so we never got pampered or had things taken care of for ourselves like some bands today (including female-fronted bands) which is a nice position to be in, but we had to literally be our own business people, our own press people, our own tour managers, our own booking agents at times, that kind of thing. We really had to do everything all on our own. And that experience over the years has become invaluable. Understanding the way the industry is, understanding many of the things that fans and bands don't know about how the industry works, how to harness your own power as a band, and how to operate freely from A&R people and business people who would like to tell you how to do your art so that they can make more money for themselves. There's a lot of powerful lessons in there.

Marchman: That's really the only true way to build it. If you think about it, while all the perks for the major label bands may be nice, not being directly in touch with your fans is a lot of what killed the 80s stars as the early 90s came around. Then, when a lot of these L.A. rock bands and other popular bands changed their image and tried to adapt and befriend the fans suddenly, it just all seemed like bullshit. It's not like you would see Blackie or Nikki staying for hours after shows to make sure he greeted every fan and sign every autograph in 1988!

KC: (laughs). Sure, but I mean a lot of that for us comes from the fact that we are music fans of more what you'd consider underground music. From 70s, 90s, or whatever. I never really followed RATT or stuff like that. I mean, it didn't appeal to me stylistically, but also the whole commercial aspect of it. I like bands that you can see in small clubs and sort of have a relationship with. I mean, I never wrote fan letters or anything like that, but it was music you could go and see in an intimate setting and really fell like you're experiencing the music. Bands like NEUBAUTEN and things like that. Definitely outside of the commercial " advertising campaigns." (laughs)

Marchman: It's funny how that glossy stuff can just push you away if you're seeking something more genuine.

KC: Yeah, back even in the early days, we used to get hundreds of letters from people. We didn't even have a computer then, and people weren't hooked into the internet yet like they are now. Fans would be telling us how much our music meant to them, and how it got them through this or that. Y' know we get a lot of interesting emails now, and we enjoy people opening themselves up like that. On the other hand now, things are a little bit different because of the fan base. Because heavy music has become a little more commercial, you have this thing that we've experienced on some of the last tours we did that were bigger tours and much more commercial; you have a different type of fan. We're used to doing underground tours where you sit and hang out with the fans until you close the bar down and have interesting discussions on politics or comic books or what have you. But I've seen with these bigger and more commercial tours, this type of fan that's just all about getting your autograph, or they may get really drunk and not know how to handle themselves. I had one guy grab my ass, so I grabbed his balls and almost twisted them off and I've had girls kind of stalk me. There's a difference between the types of fans, and there's an ugly side to the whole fan thing, which we never realized but have kind of been experiencing lately. It kind of puts a damper on just being available to hang out all the time. But it is important for us to stay in touch with your fans, and many of our fans have become close friends over the years like Jackie who does our Crisisfan.com site and she's now the manager of our street team. She's someone we've known for years just from shows when we'd play out east and she became like a friend and we have a lot of friends that started off as fans and have stayed with us over the years. Actually the guy that does the CRISIS site was a fan that became a friend, and he's another hugely talented person that we met through the music.

Marchman: It's like anything else. You're going to run into great people and assholes in anything you do. Whenever we encounter somebody in an interview or something like that who's got inflated ego issues or is just a pain in general, it's obvious that they'd be that way whether they were fronting a band or running an accounting department in a business or whatever.

KC: Yeah, of course.

Marchman: You've always found a great outlet for your anger in developing CRISIS. Do you think some bands just run out of things to be angry about over time?

KC: I'm sure it can happen. You see it happen. I think it depends on the personality of the person. Everyone in this band, we're just innately angry, y'know. I think it does color the way we see the world, how we see things we don't like...forms of oppression like sexism and racism and makes us want to fight back. But that never really goes away. We all have personal anger and and anger at the world in general. I don't see the world getting any better as the years go on, so I don't think that will ever change. It really depends on the people. Our music has healed a lot of our anger, its healed a lot of my issues over the years. It depends on your life experiences I guess. If you're someone who is having a great life and has no problems and isn't touched by many of the problems that the rest of us, then your experience isn't going to "help you be an angry musician'. It depends on that largely.

Marchman: Some of the newer heavy bands we encounter seem to be attempting to synthesize anger from inflated cell phone bills, or having a school bus stop in front of them.

KC: I think there's a lot of musicians out there now that are playing heavy music but they're really not telling you anything of substance, they're not really telling you anything about themselves, you can tell it's really stylized, y'know...for show. And I think that's a majority of the bands now, and that's why there's not a lot of music coming out that's shaking things up or that feels very raw or dangerous. There's a lot of people that are very preconceived about their anger.

Marchman: Would you agree that some of the band name choices today have reached an all-time low?

KC: (laughs). They all have "dead" or "dying' or "blood" or "bleed" or "bleeding".

Marchman: Yeah, sometimes I even long for names like ASIA. At least then, there wasn't a need for a gerund or adverb in a band's name.

KC: (laughs). Yeah, the names are so trendy. It's hilarious.

Marchman: Well, I'm so glad we 've had this time together.

KC: Really cool. Thanks for the time and the support PD. Keep up the good humor. And thanks for all your support.

CRISIS are Karyn Crisis (voc), Afzaal Nasirudeen (g), Gia Chuan Wang (b), Jwyanza Hobson (g), and Justin Arman (d). Their official page is myspace.com/crisis. Visit Karyn Crisis' leatherworks page at www.karyncrisis.com.

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Karyn pics courtesy of Returntothepit.com