CRISIS Frontwoman Says Next Album Will Include DIMEBAG-Inspired Jam

Morley Seaver of antiMusic recently conducted an interview with CRISIS frontwoman Karyn Crisis. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

antiMusic: Have any ideas emerged for the next record?

Karyn Crisis: "We've had a couple of jams. One jam we started before we hit the road. It's a really cool, powerful, brooding kind of jam. The other one kind of came out unexpectedly. When we were on tour we played Alrosa Villa which we've played many, many times before and that's where the whole Dimebag tragedy happened. So going there, everybody felt a lot of trepidation about being on that stage again, just because it was such a heavy moment. It was a real tragedy and it just felt really strange. We all went to just give our energies and good vibes upward, towards that whole situation. We were all feeling a little depressed about it and the guys set up to do soundcheck and I actually stayed at the hotel to work on something to say that evening. We were all disconnected and the guys said they felt OK until they stepped on to the stage to do the soundcheck and then a dark mood fell on everyone. So they just started jamming and somehow they jammed for an hour and a really amazing jam piece came out of it. So that's the second piece that we'll be working on and pretty soon we'll start jamming and writing the next record and that's pretty much all we're going to do until the EXODUS tour and then afterwards until the next year….we're going to write and record."

antiMusic: Teenage boys strive to be part of a rock and roll band, mostly for the girls, followed closely by the other stuff. What or who made you first of all want to sing in a band and secondly do it for a career?

Karyn Crisis: "I've a great, great grandfather who was a gypsy from Transylvania. I never met him but he's the reason I got into playing violin. I grew up right around Chicago and there was a great music scene there, so I grew up playing piano and violin. I was into a lot of art and always going into art museums in Chicago and the local record shops and all of that blended into my dark mood. I was a loner. I had some guy friends. But I was a real tom-boy who would get them to lend me their instruments. And we'd jam and record on 4-tracks. That was in middle school and I always had a dark sensibility about the music and the art that I'd like to make. I guess that drove me to find darker kinds of music…you know industrial, gothic and onwards into metal. I didn't really know a lot of metal before I joined CRISIS. I had a limited metal vocabulary. So my influences are different. Chicago was an amazing place to grow up in because they had so much music going on there. So I would buy a lot imported magazines from England because they always had much more cutting-edge music and they would also review the whole indie scene in America. And that's how I found a lot of bands. It's just something that was always calling to me since I was younger. I always wanted to be in a band and couldn't find anybody to work with. So I would work on my own 4-track. I almost got into one band. We had some rehearsals. But it wasn't until I moved to New York City after graduating to go to art school…I started doing performance art and started jamming with other musicians in my college dorm. Then the next year I moved and met Afzaal, the original founding guitar player through a roommate of mine at the time. So it was a long journey but it was a lot of me singing in my bedroom, working on my vocal cords. Just singing towards different male and female singers that I liked. And a lot of record hunting and a lot of live show going."

Read the entire interview at Antimusic.com.