Interview & photo by Rachel Jablonski
Not feeling very well prior to the show and recovering from a fever, the lovely and talented Karyn Crisis made time to speak with me after the Metal Movement show with Kittie in Davenport, IA. Having witnessed a great performance from Crisis in my first time seeing them live, I was pleased to be able to speak with Karyn about a number of things such as for not feeling well, and even for feeling well, just how does she maneuver such an energetic stage presence? Throughout the course of our conversation it quickly became evident that Karyn is a most intriguing, insightful, positive, and artist person.
Rachel: Well, they told me you weren’t feeling well prior to the show. You would never know it from your performance.
Karyn: Ah, that’s cool. Good.
Rachel: You have so much energy. How do you keep it up night after night? You have to be in the best shape.
Karyn: It’s true. I don’t know really where the energy came from originally, but when I first auditioned for Crisis which was in 1993 I had never been in this type of a band before. I was in more like industrial performance, a little art house kind of stuff, so it was really an emotional blood laying for me. What happen was I had met with Afzaal first, he had given me a rehearsal tape of him, Gia, and Fred jamming and at like two in the morning I wrote some lyrics to the song “Drilling me” which is on our first album 8 Convulsions. A day or two later I went into the rehearsal space and I just said, “Before we jam just play the song,” cause I didn’t know if they would think I was a total freak. The music started and before I knew it… I was extremely introverted at that point in my life, my whole life, and a couple of months earlier I had let go and had experimented with my voice and found my scream, my serial voice, and it all came out in the rehearsal space. The best way to describe it is feeling like being plugged into an electrical socket or being part of a living painting. You just feel this connection with the people around you in the room and you’re not talking to each other you just feel this connection, somehow it’s intrinsic. That’s how it was the first time in rehearsal and that’s how it is all of the time now. There’s just this energy coming out and I think overtime I’ve tried to develop a discipline of focusing all of the negative energy of my life, all my anger and hopes and joys and dreams, focus it into the music so that I don’t treat people around me like shit. I have a lot of anger and Afzaal encouraged me in the early days to try to focus it into the music. So now it is pretty much – it is like a therapy. When the music starts we’re being plugged into an electrical socket and it just spurts forth. Every night it’s a little bit different depending on the crowd and the set, but it’s just a real joyful thing. It’s amazing.
Rachel: I noticed you had your feet taped on stage. Do you have an injury or is it just precautionary?
Karyn: I always end up cutting myself. I like to be barefoot on stage, I feel off balance if I have shoes on. Just over the years I’ve cut myself continually and so I don’t remember how... oh actually one night I cut myself really bad on stage and I had a big hunk of flesh sticking out so I duct taped it down and now I use it as a precautionary thing. So I do that from now on. [laugh]
Rachel: I see. Dave from EarsplitPR told me that you had some things stolen from your van in Ohio.
Karyn: Yeah.
Rachel: Did you recover it?
Karyn: It looks like we’re probably going to get it back. We had about two grand worth of stuff stolen. It was a lot of drum hardware, a lot of CDs to sell, belt buckles, and then a lot of personal items. What happened was this tattoo artist in Toledo heard us talking about it, he was at the show, and he happened to know… it was like his cousin’s cousin or something, someone he didn’t like, but someone he knew tried to sell him the stuff back.
Rachel: Whoa!
Karyn: So he has it he says in his possession now. We’re trying to figure out how to get it back. So hopefully it will come back. That’s pretty weird that that connection even existed so…
Rachel: Yeah, lucky.
Karyn: But yeah it was a real bummer. We were out a lot of money and, ya know, it sucked.
Rachel: Well good. I’m glad you’re getting it back.
Karyn: Thanks.
Rachel: How do you protect your voice from strain? Does your voice ever get strained?
Karyn: You know, I’ve sung like 36 shows in a row and never lost my voice. In the early days I didn’t do anything. I didn’t know a whole lot about different herbs. I was too poor to afford those things and I think I just got lucky. Maybe my whole emotional constitution was in the right place. I’ve had opera singers tell me I am breathing right not really knowing it. It was just instinct. And I got really lucky all those years. I never really did a lot to protect it and now I know a lot more about my body and how to take care of it. Like I know I have a gazillion allergies, I know what to do to take care of those allergies, so now my focus is on taking care of my body and my health. And that keeps the voice in shape. I do vocal warm-ups if I’m not feeling well like scales, but generally I don’t do anything. I just try to eat right, stay healthy, and that’s the best preventative thing for me. If you’re going to sing a certain way and it’s not right your voice will tell you, ya know? Days like today when I’m not feeling well, I’m getting over a fever, I’ll just try to stay warm, do my vocal warm-ups and save all my energy for the show.
Rachel: And then crash?
Karyn: Yeah, and then chill out.
Rachel: I love the new album.
Karyn: Oh, thanks.
Rachel: You’ve been described as experimental hardcore. How do you think this applies to Like Sheep Led to Slaughter?
Karyn: You know we’re really hard to describe. People ask me how to describe us and I really don’t know. It would be easier to describe us in terms of colors or feelings. We’re definitely a band that crosses a lot of lines. We have elements of hardcore, we have elements of metal, and we have elements of Middle Eastern rhythms and melodies…
Rachel: “Nomad” right?
Karyn: Yeah, like in the song “Nomad.” I think vocally I incorporate both the male and female sides of myself. So, we tend to delve into a lot of areas emotionally that maybe hardcore metal bands don’t. So that’s the best way I can figure out how to describe us. And with the new album I think we brought that to a new level. If you’ve heard any of our other stuff you can hear a lot of the Crisis vibe in the new album, but we’ve taken it even further. Part of that happened from our years of experience. One of the exciting things is that for six years now Jwyanza has been an additional guitar player in the band and this is his first recording with us. His playing has added a new dynamic to the band. Afzaal wanted to work with a second guitar player for a long time to free himself up so sometimes he could just play atmospheric notes, sometimes he could play different rhythms. The way Afzaal and Gia used to weave around each other, now they have a little more space to let go. Jwyanza comes in and they all take turns kind of weaving in and out and can focus on their playing skills, so that has definitely brought a new dynamic there.
Rachel: Who did you say is missing from the tour?
Karyn: Oh, our drummer?
Rachel: Yeah, who stepped in?
Karyn: Actually our original drummer Fred. He played on 8 Convulsions, Deathshead, and some of The Hollowing. Yeah right before this tour started Josh had - literally the night before we got a call. We were all in New York, we had a few days off getting ready to start the Kittie tour and he was in the hospital for appendicitis. He had to have emergency surgery. And so we had to miss the first four shows of the tour. We tried to teach another drummer the new stuff and it’s really complicated timing-wise. We didn’t really think about it so much. You don’t think about what language you’re speaking until you teach it to someone else. And so we were kind of up shit’s creek so to speak. We called Fred because we had scheduled a CBGB’s show on a day off from the tour and he was scheduled to play that show anyway. We called him and were like hey can you do the whole tour? He’s like yep, so he rescued us and we’re able to do the whole tour.
Rachel: He doesn’t know much new stuff from the new album then?
Karyn: He doesn’t know any of the new stuff really because he didn’t think he would need to play any of it. So we’ve just been playing the old school set. I have to give it to Fred, we haven’t played with Fred in five years and even then it was just a couple of shows. It’s been awhile. So he’s really been trying to up his ante and totally give it his all for us. It’s kind of like a reunion in a way.
Rachel: Is that hard for you not being able to play the new material live?
Karyn: We miss it for sure because we did the Soulfly tour for two months and we were playing the new songs and we felt really honed in on them because we were playing them every night. It’s just “the new stuff” so you’re excited to play it. We felt a little bummed at first that we couldn’t play songs from Like Sheep Led to Slaughter on this tour, but we’re just happy that we can at least do the tour. It was either do the tour or not. So…
[AND THEN UNBEKOWNST TO ME THE FREAKING TAPE IN MY TAPE RECORDER RAN OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]
I’m so mad about the tape recorder issue and I apologize sincerely to readers and to Karyn for my negligence. Karyn and I continued our conversation for awhile after that, some of which I can paraphrase from memory, as she shared some coherent and insightful words concerning:
Women in Metal
Karyn talked about being one of the first female vocalists in metal. In 1993 Crisis’ label did not see the band as marketable, so their album then did not receive much support. Now women in metal is on the rise, but there is still too poor of a ratio of men to women she said.
Crisis’ Eastern Influence
“Nomad” on the new album Like Sheep Led to Slaughter is a great track with noticeable influence.
The State of the Band
The band wants to keep their underground fans and roots, but being exposed to mainstream fans is cool too, Karyn explained. Having been on the Soulfly tour and now the Kittie tour, the band is being exposed to more mainstream crowds as a result.
Future Plans
To keep touring and a new video is coming out “though you can’t ever know what the future holds,” she said.