Beardyman [Interview]
Imagine you’re a beatboxer. You’re pretty good, so you enter the UK Beatbox Championships. You win. You eat, breathe, sleep and sweat beatboxing for a solid year before returning. You win again. Things get a bit crazy. A comedy video you made in a kitchen gets uploaded to YouTube (as freshly purchased by Google). In time, it will attract over 5 million views.
Over the next several years, you take solo beatboxing as far as it can possibly be taken. You play underground comedy clubs, TV shows, festivals. Your YouTube presence grows. You begin experimenting with live looping technology, battling not rival MCs but inefficient circuitry and user interfaces in the name of getting the ideas in your head into other people’s earholes. You find yourself in a studio, recording an eclectic collection of tracks that takes in everything from dubstep and hip-hop to almost every international folk music style recorded by history. Your debut album gets released; it sells nicely.
Finally, you hit on a pair of serious problems. Read more…
If you’re looking to have your brain fucked in and enjoy the experience, Beardyman is the artist for you. A restless and relentless musical innovator and virtuoso beatboxing mouth-wizard, Beardyman holds little back on the appropriately-titled Concentrations, which is only a taster of what’s to come on his upcoming album Distractions.