Beardyman Distractions

Tummy Touch, 2014

-  Roy Spencer

Beardyman has always been a walking jukebox of sorts, able to recreate any sound he hears with pinpoint accuracy and flair. As he hit his 20s he turned his talents into his career, cutting his teeth as a beatboxer, winning fans and competitions wherever he went. But, unlike his hip-hop peers, he knew he could take the art form higher, and break out of that niche world.

His eureka moment came when he started to incorporate sophisticated tech into his live setup. He wanted to be part man, part machine – enter the Beardytron: a music-making rig of his own design that enabled him to play, twist, mould and meld any of the live sounds that came from his lips, and loop and layer them into full song arrangements, on the fly. Like him, it was a one-of-a-kind.

“The Beardytron, as it was back then, was this crazy hardcoded looping DAW, basically,” says Beardyman. “I spent three years working on a system where I could perform live improvised music. I had optimised this thing so that when it was running nothing else would interrupt it. It really was pushing the computer within an inch of its life.”

His new music-making system needed a challenge, so work began on his second album, Distractions.

“I’d made this dream system I could jam with,” he says. “The songs on the album were a bunch of experiments into how I could use the rig. It was designed for jamming and snipping out the good bits, and waiting until some kind of structure occurred. Hopefully, you can hear that when you listen back to the album. It’s got a live feel, but you can see where the edits are.”