AMO-lab:
New Days and Road Dogs
featuring Shyrock and Dj Precise

Artistic Music Orchestra Labatory. Just the lab where they make the fattest lyrics and beats that you could pop in your soundsystem armory to cold rock a party sounded doper in my imagination. Independent Dj Precise and Shyrock deliver a fat 12". Once on a label and now back to start from scratch. New Dayz for them and a good chance to see what became of their Road Dogs, the men they hung with back in the days.

Shyrock: Well, New Days. We are heading for new days. It's a song that ends the past and starts the future. All the good things to come in the future. Thats where we are looking at. All that negativity we had in the past we let that behind us. So New Days is an anthem to a new day. I mean like tomorrow.

AQ: You where signed to a label, Dureco/Blue Funk. Now independent?
Shyrock: I was independend back in the days before I signed with Soul Relation and got a record deal with Blue Funk. That went on for two years. And it didn't really work the way we wanted it to work. So me and Precise decided to brake away from the label. Tracks weren't working, the vibe wasn't alright, contracts weren't really professional. They had different visions on what they wanted to do with us. How they wanted to bring us out. Actually they didn't know what to do with us. They were like: "We want to bring Shyrock out, but who the fuck is Shyrock?! And how are we gonna bring Shyrock to the public?" They didn't know none of that. So we said: "Lets brake away from that, from this label bullshit. And let us start from square one. That is what we did. We ended up leaving Soul Relation as well. We really started from scratch an brought this 12" to the surface. And we got hooked by Fried Chicken from Belgium. Fried Chicken supported us financially to release this record. It's working good, we pressed 500 singles and we sold them in two weeks. We had to go back to print another 500. We sell it ourselfs. It's hard but it's working, it's alright. It's independent; not a major company behind you.
AQ: What do you wanna do on a musical level?
Shyrock: I just wanna do what I feel. I might record a song and release it tomorrow under the name AMO-lab and people might say it's not even a HipHop record. But it's still AMO-lab. Because that is what I felt. HipHop is for me more than just rap music or just rappin'. It's a tool. It's pure expression.
Precise: When you listen to New Days you'll hear that it's not a happy song. We want to put our emotions in the music.

Shyrock: That's what it is. Musically I want to go as far as I can. But still doing it that way that it still appeals to the street audiance. The raw, the core crowd will still digg it. You can't expect me to do the same thing ten years from now. I want to expand. I want to do things that people won't expect from me. But when they hear it they say: yes, I'm feeling it." I deal with emotions, that is how I deal with music. If I'm feeling it, I'm feeling it. If not then I'm not feeling it.

AQ: Why are you an artists?
Shyrock: That is a good question… , do you know why I think I'm an artist? Since I was a kid, there was nothing in life that intrested me more then music. More then expression. I can't give a fuck about other stuff. I used to be so caught up in music that I didn't give a fuck about school. It's not a game for me. If HipHop dies tomorrow it doesn't mean that I'm gonna die. I will always do music.

AQ: Why is music so important?
Shyrock: It's freedom. It's a kind of freedom that you don't find anywhere else. It's free… it's free! That is what I try to do: put a little piece of freedom on record. Music can be anything, man. I don't want to get to deep in this. Cause we might end up eating mushrooms and talk bullshit. Music is the ultimate freedom. The business is the ultimate jailhouse. That is the big contrary.

AQ: Road Dogs?
Shyrock: Road Dogs is a song about friends, the crew wich I used to run with back in the early nineties. The song's about how the crew splitted up and everybody went his own way, but we still are road dogs.
We're still connected with one and the other. So when things go bad everybody comes back to eachother. So it's like an old posse. It's for everybody that grew up strugglin'. It's a street anthem. It deals with every day problems and still you gotta face them and get over those problems. Once you get over these problems, it makes you a road dog. The road is a never ending road and that's what life is. Until you get stopped for good. Till you die and than it's still never ending because somebody else will live on. And if you leave kids behind they will live on. They are carring your name. So that's basically what Road Dogs is. It's a street anthem for every B-boy and B-girl out there.
AQ: You're also singing on that track. And proved you can sing.
Shyrock: well that singing part was me bugging out. It fitted into the track.
Dj Precise: It made it more complete.
Shyrock: We didn't go to the studio with the plan we gotta put some singing on it. We were just buggin' in the studio and bugged out. And that is what came out. Just a normal way of working for us. We didn't plan to be like that. It just came out like that.

AQ: What is the Committee Gunmen?:
Shyrock: That is just basically a colaboration of different MC's. We all come together to form this. I wound't say a group, it's more. It's a foundation of different rappers. Once in a while we come out as the Gunmen and do a couple of shows. We're planning to bring records out under the name Gunmen. Gunmen is just a foundation. You have Postmen, E-Life, Sonny Diablo, Unique, Apacolypse and you got a whole other bunch of motherfuckers that are ready to come. That is the second league. We are all part of Gunmen… it's a family thing. A family gathering, the Knights of the Round Table. That's what it is.

AQ