Seige from AKP speaks out... Half these guys doing this shit these days make me sick. I won't mention them unless you mention them first. It's just dumb. You know what it is? There are all these guys incorporating rap into the heavier sound, right? But most of these guys would have said five years ago that rap is fuckin' easy: Rat, bat, cat, I can do that shit. It's a fuckin' joke, 'cause now they are doing that shit. It can be a cool fusion if it sounds tight, but they don't know how to go about it. If they try to be serious, they feel like they're trying to act like something they're are not. So, they do it all stupid and shit to try to get away with it, like they rhyme in stupid voices or use a stupid cadence (delivery). Or, they put tons of effects on their voice.

They make the music heavy but, meanwhile, vocally they come off like a bunch of idiots that don't know what the fuck they're doing. They say if we are going to do this, let's just try to make it sound like a fun record and it just winds up sounding corny and happy time. Such is the solid rap-rock Italian attitude of Seige and Geano, masterminds behind the North Jersey collective known as AKP, a gang that begins with two, expands to three with performing vocalist Don Black, and then explodes to an army of seven on the live stage, the focal point at which this gets all too alive. Given the number of hard-ass New York City hardcore bands, these guys have bravely backed up Murphy's Law, Dog-Eat-Dog, Downset, Madball, as well as KRS-ONE and Mobb Deep. So you know you're getting pure dope. It's been a strange ride.

Seige and Geano actually predicting rock-rap hybrid's ascendance to power through their early work fully nine years ago, winding their way to triumphant shows with just turntables and mics to the aforementioned terror patrol of the magnificent seven, making full-on-rap singles and EPs along the way, and always going independent by choice arriving now at a thick layered crank bomb of a record called All Kinds of Problems.

Toiling for years to perfect their sound, AKP have become mad scientists at their chosen trade. Whether you simply dig the large beats, the Jersey rhymes, or the churn of the band's power chords, those who look deeper will find studio wizardry nutty beyond all reason. Seige lifts the hood and gives us a look inside. On the track "Wrong Time," there is a breakdown where there are two sets of scratching. So there's one melody being cut up, and then there's another melody being scratched over it along with the drum track and bass line. I've never heard no shit like that before and, plus, it works. So what the fuck.

There's a lot of guitar and vocal tracks too. "Confusion" was over 120 tracks total put into 48 tracks. There are a lot of layers for that song there. Some of this stuff we would play and then some of the stuff we would play and sample, sample our own shit, ya know. We would play it, then sample it, then effect and EQ it or some shit we'd just play then just loop it straight. "Respect" was about 71 tracks just going back and forth. That's what I mean. A lot of engineers we worked with didn't know what the fuck we were talking about. Along the way we were working with guys arranging and in pre-production and they would tell us, "You can't do that! That's not right. That's not the right way to do this." We were like, "Fuckin' asshole, we didn't ask you." Then they would get all jerked off, so we'd part ways. We just wanted to know from them if shit was offbeat or out of key. That's it! We didn't want to hear you couldn't use that guitar riff over that drum pattern.

So by the time the record was practically done, we went through a bunch of different guys. There was only one guy we found who could help us with our vision. His name is Larry Philabaum, and once we got with him, we remixed practically the whole record over and we're glad we did. This idea of a vision was as crucial within the lyrical presentation as it was throughout the band's infinitive, but effortless studio magic. These guys are like a combination of Korn, Beastie Boys, and Rage Against the Machine. AKP: All Kinds of Problems. That is the key concept.

But, Geano and Seige also want you to make your own solutions. In a strong way, their record forces you down that path of reckoning. Lyrically, looking at the record overall, it is a description of the name itself, All Kinds of Problems. Each song deals with that concept or issue in one way or anther in some capacity. Some songs are a series of problems. "By All Means" says no matter what I'm gonna get through this, no matter what obstacles are thrown my way. Whatever I've got to do is going to get done.

Then there are songs like "Addiction" where there are problems that last a lifetime, things you can't get out of where you're always getting pulled or drawn back into and must deal with. There's drug problems, gambling problems, sex problems, and stalkers. There are lifestyles that you have to learn to leave where they are and not become outweighed by that Addiction. Our Addiction is getting these thoughts out of our heads and feelings out of our hearts in the form of this music.

We're gonna rip shows no matter what, no matter where there are, no matter how we do it. Like the song "Never Say Never," we will never give up, and when people listen to the record, they should get the same message, that they should never give up. Don't quit on yourself. It's easy to quit, but it is hard to maintain a level of dedication, especially if the odds are stacked against you.

Then there's "Hardlines." I mean, come on. We know how shady this music business is, there is always somebody trying to take something from you. How many bad hands have you been dealt? How much do you have to deal with? You have to be tough in certain situations to look through it and find a way past it.

Then there's songs like "4Get It" when you just don't give a fuck. You don't want any help. You just want to be fucked up, go nuts and wild out. We released that song as an independent single in 1998, pressed up vinyl, the whole nine. Seige got a rhyme in there that goes, "It's a family thing, our thing, and no one else's. I bend for no one and take from the selfish." DJ C-Minus from Power 106 in L.A. who DJs at all the Korn shows and produced all the interlude beats for the first Family Values live CD. He asked us if he could sample "It's a Family Thing" for the intro on the CD. We said, "Go fuck yourself. Nah, I'm only kidding." We said yeah and he is doing a remix for us in return. He's a cool muthafucker. Big-UP to C-Minus. Then there's the band's striking 'Scales of Justice' logo. On the left side the judge's gavel slams down, on the side greased with money, sending the clock (accused and doing time) behind bars upward. Money talks, as we all saw with OJ, in a society plagued with... All Kinds of Problems.

"I think people will really be able to get into this record because every song has it's own life," continues Seige. "It's different, it's diverse. The one thing that Geano and me didn't want was for you to put on this album and have it all sound the same. That's why the shit we meshed together comes from a wide range of influences that made us the way we are musically. You know, people have been overlooking New York and New Jersey for years. In terms of rock bands, everybody big is from somewhere else. We're just one of those bands who has been fighting for the last nine years to get where we want to go. That is why this album has so much feeling."

But Seige can't stress enough that AKP has two faces, two sides of the scale to present to the public perhaps not ready for their forceful views and grooves. "With the record you get this almost industrial, looped-up crunchy sound, and when you see us live it's like BOOM in your face live and fuckin' raw, ya know?" We say some serious shit on this record, but we aren't preaching or jamming' anything down anybody's throat. We're here to do what we do. Metallica said: "We're gonna play longer, louder, and more aggressive than anybody." That's what we want to do. We just want to fuckin' explode everything that's been building inside of us when we get to the stage.

We fused rap and metal and got back to our original formula because we love playing live. "Seriously, everytime we ever did a show with a live band, it turned crazy," Geano reflects (seeing the value of a full band onslaught). "It was just a fuckin' explosion." We were loyal for a long time to the old way. We used to do all our shows with a DJ, but sometimes we go to our friends shows and in the middle of their set, they would pull us onstage and start playing some heavy groove shit and we'd start rhyming, and the fuckin' place would go nuts. So, we figured we should do this for ourselves.

We wanted to put the attitude of metal music and the attitude of rap music together. We like rap because of the attitude. Because rappers speak from the truth of what they feel or see, here we are in this rap group, three guys rhyming with a DJ and we are doing shows with Murphy's Law, Downset, and Madball, and we always felt our writing and our concepts had a lot in common with both the rap crowds and the hardcore crowds. But, when we were doing this with just a DJ, we always felt that we had way more energy than the music had to offer comin' off vinyl. Ya know, live now, it's just......alive.