Crisis Interview with Afzaal Nasiruddeen Karyn Crisis Jwyanza Hobson Part I

Interview Attendees: Afzaal Nasiruddeen - Crisis Guitar (right) Karyn Crisis - Vocalist (middle) Jwyanza Hobson - Crisis Guitar (Left) Sharita Lumpkin - FourteenG Karma E. Omowale - FourteenG

Soulfly Ill Niño Crisis Twelve Tribes HOB 9/4/04

Our interview with Crisis was an educational experience. There were so many quotes from the members of the band that it was very hard for us to pick one. What most people don't know is that CRISIS is not a new band. They have been around for 11+ years and have changed drummers quite a few times before they settled on Josh Florian. Afzaal is one of the original band members, who along with the band's original drummer Fred Waring, decided on wanting a female singer. Not a Lita Ford or Vixen type but a strong woman who could write and sing. Enters Karyn Crisis, who is that woman: strong, fearless and as hard as they come. Jwyanza and Gia are the band's guitarist and bassist respectively as they supply the foundation for the band's signature sound bringing it to a new level.

Read on to find out more from a band who gives 110% every night regardless of: the crowds response, takes no shit off anyone, and a band that loves a challenge. The interview opens with us discussing bands we liked at the moment...

Afzaal: We just met the guys in Mastodon and they are great.

Karyn: I wore a Mastodon shirt tonight.

Sharita: You did? Oh cool I love that band!

Karyn: I love that band.

Sharita: Yeah we just saw them a few weeks ago.  We also hung out after a show.  It really was a great show and they are…

Karma: Yeah, at the Metro.

Afzaal: They’re a fun bunch of guys.

Sharita: Yeah, they were very candid

Karyn and Afzaal: Oh, great awesome.

Sharita: Ok, why don’t you introduce yourselves?

Karyn: Alright, I'm Karyn Crisis vocalist.

Afzaal: Afzaal guitar.

Jwyanza: Jwyanza guitar.

Sharita: So I did a little research on your website about the band and tried to find interesting facts about Crisis, I found out about your original drummer Fred Waring who seemed to be instrumental in starting the band. Afazaal you also were involved, tell me about that?

Afzaal: Yeah there has been quite a few drummers between Fred and Josh, (chuckles) typical Spinal Tap stuff but Fred really was the originator of the band and some of the weird jazzy stuff that we do. Then after we got signed his girlfriend got pregnant, he had a farm he just had a lot of responsibility and he couldn’t do the road work and the touring that we had to do. So he ended up quitting right after our first Metal Blade release, then we started playing with a lot of different drummers Roy [Mayorga] who is in Soulfly, Jason Bittner who is now in Shadows Fall played with us quite a while, Tony Costanza who ended up going to Crowbar after us…

Karyn: Scott Bates did the tour with us.

Afzaal: Yeah Scott Bates did the Dead Set Tour with us so we been through a lot of drummers. Josh is probably the first stable drummer we’ve had since Fred.  Fred was in the band eleven years ago so we have gone through a slew of drummers since then.

Sharita: Yeah I’ve noticed that the band has been around for quite some time. I’m new to the band and here I am thinking that you guys have only been around a few years but then I look at the site and I’m like God these guys have been around a few years. It’s interesting what you said in one interview about changing the name of the band because of the inconsistency of the drummers tell us about that?

Karyn: It all kinda’ lead into another [thing] before the millennium when Tony [Castanza] joined the band he was here about two years and when you work with a new drummer you find that their style doesn’t mesh and it sort of changes your music a little because maybe limitations on their style is a little closed up or there’s just a lot of different reasons. Tony’s playing style is real heavy and simple than what we’re used to doing so we couldn’t play certain songs with his music and certain songs he’d give a lot of “umph” to but we found our music sort of changing and I know Afzaal felt the need to change his style of guitar playing at that time because we’d gone through a lot, we fired Metal Blade because of no support, we thought we just rather be on our own. Career wise we were at a point where fans wanted to see us but it was places we couldn’t get to because of lack of label support, it was all these different factors that just brought everything to a head, in order to survive we needed to change and so we moved to LA, the reason we chose LA because it was a place we never saw ourselves living [chuckles] but the belly of the beast is there, the industry is there, they’re accessible everyone’s goin' at it. We thought if we’re gonna find a label this would be the place because on the east coast they were saying “oh you’re too extreme”, “you’ll never sell”, “you have a woman [singer]”, “ you’re not gonna have a target audience but 13 year old boys” [laughs], you know all this bullshit. So we were like we need some help so we went to LA and not long after Tony quit he just said he hated LA, he couldn’t deal with it and went off to join Crowbar so you moved down to New Orleans.  So we were in this new town, full of new beginnings because it came to a halt but we couldn’t stop what we were doing because we’re musicians because this is what we do. Then actually Jwyanza went out and got a digital recording studio because he’s a drummer to so he started programming drum machines and these guys would go get a bunch of wine and [laughs] and start jamming on solos and because it was a drum machine not another human being naturally the songs started sounding a lot different,

Afzaal: A lot more repetitive

Karyn: It was structured a lot more stripped down than Crisis has ever sounded but we felt we had to dive into that journey, so what happen was we found another drummer for a very, very brief time and we’d play just a few live shows and since we were recording and playing we decided to change the name because it didn’t sound like Crisis. We couldn’t play any songs like Crisis so we changed the name for the sake of the integrity of that music and Crisis. That whole journey ground down to an end where we wanted to go back home [laughs] we wanted to go back to playing Crisis music but we had the whole drummer obstacle.

Sharita: Yeah I read from the (Crisis) site that Josh was actually a fan of Crisis and answered a posting for drummer needed I suppose that was pretty exciting for him.

Afzaal: Yeah.
  
Karyn: Yeah it’s a very cool story I guess he had moved to LA not long after we did, I think, and he has a masters in engineering and he had graduated and he went to work at the Mastering Lab and I guess he told us his thought was oh I heard Crisis moved I wonder if I’ll run into them out there [laughs] so he looked on our website and saw our posting for a drummer and then the next day we thought we’d found a guy so we put a post up that we found him and he thought oh I missed it [but] then a couple of weeks later he looked again and he called, then we interviewed him, he showed up knowing more songs than we required, Jwyanza actually went to meet him in person first. [laughs]

Sharita: Great story.

Karyn: Yeah an interesting coincidence.

Afzaal: Actually Jwyanza was a Crisis fan too he has a story.

Karyn: Tell them the story.

Sharita: Oh ok.

Jwyanza: Oh, it’s a long story but I had been a Crisis fan since the first record, they had played with Disassociate and Cattle Press and a bunch of bands that I’d knew and liked so I went to see them and I had bought the eight convulsions record and I used to listen to it all the time, it was in regular rotation in my CD player. Then I go see them and I’d just be like holy Christ this band is phenomenal I should be in this band, I wish I was in this band. [everyone laughs]

Sharita: and now you are!

Jwyanza: Yeah, and I don’t think that about a lot of bands but I really felt that kind of connection with Crisis music and I had met Afzaal because we had a mutual friend Greg who’s in Wet Nurse a band out of New York…

Sharita: Wet Nurse interesting [laughs]

Jwyanza: Yeah, so I was actually jammin’ with Greg and Nilo who is in Bottom now we had a little thing that we were trying to put together and Crisis happened to not only be friends with Greg because Greg was Afzaal’s roommate, we also used to rehearse in the same music building on Stan Street on the lower east side [in New York]. So I had met Afzaal outside CBGB’s and we talked music for a little bit and then a few years later I was rehearsing with Greg and Nilo and I walked downstairs to go smoke a cigarette or something and ran into Fred who’s the old drummer Crisis and I was like dude I know you’re in Crisis and he’s like how did you know and I said because I’m a fuckin’ huge fan [laughs] and he said well the bands in here would you like to meet them so I went and that was really cool. A couple of years after that I was workin’ on some other projects and then I read in the Village Voice [an ad] for a band that had influences including Black Sabbath, The Melvins and Acid Bath seeks second guitar player and I was like wow that’s right up my alley.

I hadn’t know Acid Bath at the time but I’ve become really acquainted with their music since knowing these guys and Black Sabbath and the Melvins are two of my favorite bands so I was like oh great. So I call up the number that’s in the paper and the message is like “leave all messages for Crisis” and I’m like [imitates the sound of a phone hanging up] [everyone laughs] NO way and I had got my shit together and called back again thank God (everyone is still laughing) and left information and my age and what not. We exchanged music diaries on Crisis music and I gave them a tape and then we hung out and jammed and then they told me that I was in. 

Sharita: Oh great.

Karma: Wow!

Jwyanza: That was like my Christmas present for 1998.

Karyn: Woohoo

Karma: And everyone else's from that point on.

[Everyone laughs]

Sharita: Talk about all the different bands that everyone has been and the major differences between those bands and Crisis. I mean Afzaal you were in Stalwart, Karyn you were in Thistle and recorded under the name Mangle Dorothy and Jwyanza you were in Voodoo Piglets of War, Liquid Trip and Wayne Foundation, Toadeater, Mevins and Winter and Ultimatum

Jwyanza: What was that?

Sharita: The Mevins and Winter?

Jwyanza: Oh no that was something I did with Craig, from Incantation, a band called Necron Cyst it kinda sounded like the Melvins.

Sharita: Oh ok. [laughs]

Karyn: [Laughs]

Jwyanza: That’s ok.

Sharita: Talk about the similarities and the differences with the bands you were in versus Crisis.

Afzaal: Well for me, the stuff before Crisis was like a formula to the days where I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do musically I was really a knowing musician, I was self-taught so my whole reason for getting into music was trying to make a difference in the music scene or to do something that was original not repeat what had already been done. I used to be a DJ before I became a musician so I was well versed in different genres of music and music in general. I was just doing the music in terms of what the hell was out there and what I liked and some of the cutting edge of different genres.  Like industrial, punk rock, gothic, metal, classic rock, I mean I been studying music all my life in terms of just buying stuff.  What I found was I wanted to do something new those were days, like the late the late 80’s when people were like in hair bands or there was thrash going on but I really wasn’t concerned with any of those things as much as me wanting to do something new, different and original and I was looking for people to do that with. Stalwart was a band that I had a vision to do something different with in the sense we were using samplers, sequencers, and live drums. Everything you can imagine was in that band, but that made it almost impossible to make it a working band. So Crisis was a band we wanted to strip down and turn it into a rock ‘n’ roll format band but still use experimentation. Fred Waring and I actually came up with the idea in 1993 of forming a really heavy band with a female singer and we felt like that hadn’t been done before and I don’t mean like Lita Ford or Vixen [Karma and I chuckle] or whatever I wanted something really heavy you know?

Karma: Not like they’re not singers anyway!

Sharita: Yeah, exactly!

Afzaal: But what I’m saying is we weren’t looking for a singer like that, we wanted a singer that could perform and write in a very heavy context more emotional and in that heavy context. So that’s what we wanted in 1993 and that’s what we been doing ever since then. We never really changed that attitude we wanted to explore that territory and we thought it was a new territory back then. As you notice 11 years later it still seems pretty new. [Everyone agrees]

Sharita: Yeah it’s a shame. Karyn, your bands?

Karyn: I grew up playing piano and violin but I was trying to…[pauses] I had a synthesizer and I had friends that would lend me guitars and I would just make my own music on 4 tracks, totally uneducated in the world of rock and I when I moved to New York City to go to art college I had some friends in there, I brought my amp and my guitar, [they were] real musicians and we would do performance art, music stuff at the this place the Gargoyle Mechanique it was a performance space in like alphabet city, you’d have to go and sign up, it was musicians around the lower east side playing like really wild and out there music with instruments they made on their own, super underground you know a little arty.  I played guitar and sang, my friend played bass and this other guy did percussion and we’d have backing tapes. I guess was like industrial, like Cocteau Twins means Neubauten I guess those were two of my really favorite bands something really weird in there, but it was a lot of performance involved. Sometimes I would have six jam boxes going with different cassettes and then live music over the top. Thistle was another version of that, some it was kinda like performance art music all wrapped into one you know really kind of primal more instrumental, it really wasn’t structured like a band in anyway, shape, or form, the songs were more like a sonic landscape kind of thing so I didn’t use any big words or anything. (laughs) It was a completely different experience same vocal style just really experimental and have to add words to it but it’s a different experience for me. 

Sharita: Jwyanza, your experiences with your many bands?

Karyn: [Chuckles]

Jwyanza: Well most of those especially in the beginning with Piglets of War, Liquid Trip and Wayne Foundation, which also being a self-taught guitar player and musician it was just me finding my own voice and learning to work with other musicians and sort of find our own middle ground. In the first couple of bands it was very much like a push and pull, I was really young and so were they it was like my first couple of years of college so the bands ended up sounding really diverse but only because we couldn’t find some kind of common ground like what we were trying to express at least. Then with Toadeater I got together with a couple of friends and we had the same musical vision, which was like trying to create a sort of psychedelic metalcore band. A mix between like metal and hardcore with a psychedelic edge and real trippy stuff and that was pretty solid. Then later on I met with Craig, from Incantation, who actually was playing drums for this band Disease who I knew through Dave in Toadeater. They were more like straight squatter punks they all lived in Squat in the lower east side of Manhattan and we all used to rehearse there, and that was probably like the heaviest thing I had done at that point and they sort of introduced me into this different culture, this different way of life and thinking which I delved into. But I always had an apartment I never lived in a squat or anything, but that whole world just sort of opened up for me and this whole different way of thinking. Then I jammed with Craig, of Incantation, for a while and that was just like a new level of heaviness we were just trying to break new ground and sort of delve into slowness and heaviness in music, sort of changing the perception of time by playing really slow by throwing out the convention of like speed and structure.  All these things I did were sort of like little pieces pf a puzzle, which I’m still trying to complete writing music with Crisis now.  All those things and all the lessons learned in those groups pertain to what’s happening now you because everybody is a piece of how they have been and you try to reflect all those things you learned in the present. It’s like the music too, it’s a piece to the puzzle.

Sharita: All of you are well educated in music and other things in general, is there a big difference with being self-taught as opposed to actually learning how to play instruments?


Afzaal: I think there is a very big difference [everyone agrees] we’ve come across a lot of schooled musicians none of whom have ever been allowed into this band cause we’d never allow that. [everyone laughs] But there is a huge difference [and that] is I know it sounds pretentious but we look at ourselves as artists primarily. I mean the tools of the trade if I’m a guitar player, bass player, or drummer whatever I could be or choose to be I personally feel like if you look at it from a conceptual standpoint if you want to do something honest and original you need to find yourself in what you’re doing. Schooling in that sense, college helps because it teaches you discipline. The discipline that you learn through education you can apply to almost anything that you do. If you have a musical bone in your body I think you can just apply that and I consider myself to be a non-guitar player, I don’t play leads, Jwyanza doesn’t play leads, we don’t do standard rock ‘n’ roll things on purpose because we feel like that’s like copying something that has been done before. If you have a part where there is a lead solo, a bass solo, drum solo, an a cappella if that was the case it would be something that’s been done a zillion times by many traditional musicians and we’re not traditional musicians.

Jwyanza: Yeah, it’s contrived.

Afzaal: It’s contrived, it doesn’t come naturally to us so what we do, I try to completely not become a guitar player when we write the music and I just look at it as being one other person adding to the collective sound and energy that we create because all our stuff, most people don’t realize this and most metal bands don’t do this, but we write everything musically in the rehearsal space. We don’t come to rehearsal with songs already written and say like here’s a song, I come in and I have 10 parts and we just write it. We come in with ideas some of them are strong together, some of them are totally loose and then we jam on it for hours on end, days on end, weeks on end, some songs take months to develop.

Jwyanza: Years. [everyone chuckles]

Afzaal: "Exit Catacomb", song from Like Sheep Led to Slaughter, took about 5 years to develop.

Karyn:  Sometimes with what we do you really have to do the scary thing and let go and let the music happen. I know when I took piano lessons for example, which sort of applies to this, your teacher teaches music or musical programs based on your year of learning, the first year you learn these pieces, the second year you learn these pieces, the third year, and I like to experiment at home all the time on my own, not just play the music that out there. You know this is a boring song; there’s different moods in music. I had a friend who was a lot more advanced than I was and she would give me her sonata’s and I’d go all over the place and I’d listen to Andreas Vollenweider,  which is sort of a new age piano player, real emotional you know?  I would try to get my piano teacher, I would go win awards at competitions and ok I’m behaving, let’s experiment. [Laughs] I’d try to get her to go through these other pieces with me and she’d be like no it’s not in the program. Schooling can be so afraid to step outside of the rules and let loose that I quit piano lessons after that, because she was like no we need to work on these pieces and I wanted to let myself free and try something new and experiment with my tool which is the skills and I found that in violin too.

I took violin in school very regimented and simple and I quit taking violin at school and I found this Russian woman that had escaped from Russia, she had a rock ‘n’ roll son, and I took lessons from her and I didn’t even know the music I was learning because it was all in Russian, but she was really about you don’t learn, I mean like they would put tape on the strings for notes, but she’d be like you have to feel your notes. You have to hear your notes before you play it and then you’ll be able to play your notes which led into singing later because violin became into like a cerebral, emotional thing, she taught me a lot about just letting go musically. That always stuck with me and I played violin and it taught me to sing in a way ‘cause I would hear the notes in my head and sing them, it’s like a very vocal and musical instrument anyway. I had a photography teacher who said you just need to know the basics, just take a picture, develop your film and print the photo other that that once you know the basics you can do whatever you want. That’s the way I look at music, I know how to sing I just have to open my voice. For all of us there are no rules.

Afzaal: Yeah, we really don’t follow rules on purpose because it will stops you from going into territories and areas where you need to be going to search and find your inner voice. Crisis rhythms are weird to people because they can’t just jump up and down and go yo, yo, yo to it [Laughs] because we try to uncover our subconscious subliminal rhythms that are in each of us. Like Jwyanza has his rhythmic feelings, I have mine, Karyn has hers, Gia and Josh when we jam for hours, weeks, months and years, the reason why we do that is to uncover what deep inside of you from years and years of growing up and listening to music.

Jwyanza: It helps not to know the rules because it’s one thing if you’re a taught musician you actually take that journey with unlearning but fortunately most of us have not been through that in order to do that.

Sharita: Talk about tonight’s show, which kicked ass by the way, Karyn you responded accordingly to a heckler by telling him where to go, how do you guys feel when the audience is not responding and/or you get heckled.

Karyn: [Hiding her face, then smiles] It happens very rarely, but it’s happened before when you fight back they usually shut the fuck up.  I would never do that to a band even if I didn’t like them, I mean you’re allowed to hate us but shut the fuck up.

Jwyanza: Or leave and don’t come back.

Karyn: Yeah sometimes when were being heckled we have to take care of business. I like to say something really extreme [Karma and I giggle] because it would shock people.

Sharita: That was extreme.

Karma: Yeah, it was great [laughs] I was like wait, I gotta write that down.

Afzaal and Jwyanza: [Laugh]

Sharita: When things like that happen does that add fuel to your performance?

Karyn: Ultimately we do what we do for our own need and we need to be making this music. Second part of it is art and communication with people and we go into these tours knowing that the crowds are not in touch with underground music. We are dealing with crowds who don’t know who we are, in addition they really don’t know that type of music that explores different territories like a Mastodon or Burnt By The Sun or anything like that. So we have went into it knowing that and we went through our career that we don’t fit in anywhere so it is our job to make people think. So we go into that knowing that and loving the challenge of a crowd like sometimes when things happen like this tonight sometimes it pisses me off and I react to it but it didn’t ruin the vibe for me I still had an awesome time. Even after the show when we were still being heckled I was just enjoying the light, I really felt awesome. I know I feel like [we have to defend ourselves] but our circle’s fire and it can’t be broken, it’s not gonna stop us no matter what.

Afzaal: Ill Niño fans aren’t gonna stop Crisis!

Karyn: We don’t need that acceptance, we know that we will make a few fans here, few there. Some shows we’ve had the crowd in the palm of our hands but regardless we do the same show every night.

Jwyanza: We also know that people are really threatened by what we do it so against everything they understand especially in metal.  Metal fans can be some of the most close-minded fans that there are. [Karma and I chuckle] I still don’t understand the compulsion if you don’t understand something then try to tear it down but that’s something that’s been going on for thousands and thousands of years which I hope I never understand. We actually expect these kinds of things because we are students of music and culture we know people are going to have these kind of reactions but, we also know that when we strike that nerve that were hitting something and there is some kind of conflict that’s going on within that person that needs to happen. That’s our role as artists to challenge those kind of people. That’s our challenge and we feed of it. [Karyn chuckles]

Afzaal: We like confusing people, those kids who are seeing Ill Niño they don’t like being confused [Everyone chuckles] cause they like jumping up and down 1, 2, 3, 4!

Sharita: They’re not ready for a strong front woman.

Karyn: Yeah you look at it there is plenty of people who are, we’re proof of that because we been around 11 years and we do have fans [laughs] a lot of them. It’s funny cause labels were saying you’re too extreme but were selling out shows. If you look at the music industry they control a lot of what gets heard, especially in the mainstream kids don’t have an underground scene in their town or they don’t have zines or access to underground information that challenges the norm.

Afzaal: They only have MTV.

Karyn: If you don’t know where to look, you’re getting spoon-fed a standard of music and the rules are the girls who are out there, they’re hot and sing pop music and the guys have more freedom. When the media doesn’t let in new leaders or possibilities people aren’t challenged with anything but a guy fronting a metal band. If people are never confronted with change why should they change?

Afzaal: Well it’s the same with [races of band members]. They want to sign 5 clones of each other that look like they’re fuckin’ brothers, that’s they want to see, so the dumb ass kids that gets MTV will get it right away, he doesn’t have to work for it, he doesn’t have to think really beyond what he is seeing. It’s really not about listening to music as much as what it looks like. This tour is a good example of that; there are two Roadrunner bands on this bill and they hire image consultants for every band on their label. I not shit talking because the guy that signed Ill Niño is a guy we’ve known for 10 years and he used to work in the underground scene. So they coordinate how there hair looks, give them the right clothes and make them loose weight, make them strut their stuff…

Jwyanza: Synchronized jumps too. [Everyone laughs]

Afzaal: I’m talking facts, I’ve sat in a Roadrunner office with the guy who signed these bands. He told me what he does with these bands on a daily basis.

Jwyanza: In fairness to the audience though there has been shows where we’re playing a game of tennis with ourselves, hitting the ball and not getting anything back but after the show people would come up to us and say hey I really enjoyed your show, you guys are fuckin’ awesome, and they buy the merchandise. A lot of times people are just soaking it in, we’ve just come to the realization that were playing for ourselves and not for the energy that they are giving back. We don’t take that lack of reaction as being a negative response.

Karyn: We just done a show that was organized at the last minute and they’re was like 70 people there and we had a great time. The amount of people in the crowd is not going to change how we do a show. As a band you should have the same passion every night.

Jwyanza: If you’re good at it you’ll give those twenty kids something they’ll never forget.

Karma: What about downloading, what are your thoughts on the subject?

[All agree that it’s a great thing]

Afzaal: 110% love it!

Jwyanza: Bought so many albums in the last three years based on stuff that I’ve just checked out. Oh this person has this song, let me check this out and then actually go out and buy the album that I never would’ve even heard of. It’s done a whole lot for the music industry!

Afzaal: Yeah, I think the whole thing is a fuckin’ sham, what the music industry is talking about, it’s bullshit. Good music is bought, it will always be bought I think that downloading is a something that record labels are using as an excuse to sign shitty bands and they’re not selling and they’re blaming it on downloading.

Jwyanza: Yeah they’re jacking up record prices also.

Afzaal: That’s all it is a fuckin’ scam. It’s a way for an A&R person at a record label to justify signing shitty bands that they have to drop.

Jwyanza: They’ve been raping artists for years [Afzaal agrees], it’s time that they got raped.

Karyn: Yeah it’s what we were talking about earlier with the media holding certain music out, I mean you have a website you can use it for people to download it and it’s a great way to get your music out there without having to rely on a label necessarily or without having someone control it you can get it out there yourself. I think it’s awesome and I’m all for it. [Afzaal agrees]

Afzaal: I mean most people don’t realize that when a record label sign a band they sell their CD’s to a wholesaler for $11-12 and a 5 or 6 piece band makes 75¢ a CD and the record label is making 10-11 dollars on top of that. So who the hell is going to control people on the internet from downloading, I say they should download way more than they do already because the way record labels, especially the major labels, they should be torn down, the entire structure should be torn down and rebuilt.

Sharita: Interesting you mention labels how are the people at The End records treating Crisis?

Afzaal: The End records is a privately owned business.

Jwyanza: It’s a very small label, you have some major labels that have to deal with so much and are so concerned with putting so much product out there whether good or bad it’s like a shotgun blast and you just see what hits. The End records they’re selective about the bands they sign.

Afzaal: They’re high quality.

Karyn: They are all about the art and the music. Anything Andreas says he comes through on. For us we just wanted to find a label big or small that really just believed in what we did and help us however they could. That’s how it is we talk to him everyday on the phone, it’s almost like we have a label at our own disposal and we work together on everything. They really do everything in their power to help us out, it’s like a friendship too. It’s a very artistic label they really are about music and art.

Afzaal: The owner of the label he cares more about the packaging and art than the band. He’s more concerned about quality, integrity of the conceptual artwork and how it comes out in print and on CD than the band. For example, Andreas before Slaughter came out had not been happy with the printing on the CD itself because the colors change a lot, it’s too glossy and it doesn’t relate to the booklet and the rest of the artwork surrounding the actual printing on the disc itself. He searched until he found a font that he was happy with the printing on the CD. If you notice, the printing on the CD is like a flat matt feel without any gloss and any reflection and that’s what he’s been looking for. It’s something that he really, really worked to get and he finally found a place that delivers that. When we were doing the video he brought a sample to us and says this is what your CD will look like.

Karyn: They really care about their reputation, they really care about doing business in a certain way with something kinder and gentler than the music industry way.

Afzaal: It’s not about greed [with them]. A lot of people are down on The End records because they have a massive distribution in terms of carrying other labels CDs. They sell the CDs for a very low profit margin and they have the lowest prices on the internet compared to any metal distributor and a lot metal distributors are down on The End because they felt that they are selling the shit for too cheap. All the kids are buying from Andreas because he is not a money grubbing bastard, he’s actually giving the kids the CD at a good price. That just shows you what the label is about.

Jwyanza: By the fans for the fans.

Afzaal: Andreas is so far sighted he’s looking at the next ten years of the label. I mean he’s not concerned about the next six months he’s built the company from the ground up and he’s a systems genius. The End is the only record label that uses Oracle, it’s like the basic platform for all his websites, his MP3s everything is related to that. Oracle is a very powerful business software company around the world. The London Guardian had an article about Oracle and it mentioned [Andreas company] as being one of it’s leading clients. Andreas has helped Oracle to develop customized platforms within oracle that they can use to help other customers. Andreas is giving back to the company that he works with. Like Oracle didn’t have any Mp3 capabilities or downloading capabilities, Andreas is the one who developed it for them. The shit that he’s doing is amazing shit. (Jwyanza agrees) Andreas was the IT person at Century Media for 7 years, he developed the systems for them. Andreas is a very quiet and humble guy.

Jwyanza: He does things quietly and his actions speak louder.

Afzaal: He has put his heart and soul behind Crisis a band that for 11 years most record labels weren’t prepared to dip into their pockets for us because they were like this band is too weird, but he is was glad that we’re original because everything he puts out only original music. We’ve found a home.

Jwyanza: Unlike a lot of the bands on the label he is excited that our music is our lifestyle and we constantly want to be on the road, a lot of the bands don’t tour so he knows we’re willing to take ourselves and our music to the next level.
 

Click here for part II of the Crisis Interview
with Karyn, Afzaal, & Jwyanza