Beardyman, Distractions
Tummy Touch, 2014
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.”
The album would end up as a jaw-dropping journey into one man’s quest to become the music. A mission Beardyman continues to undertake as we speak.
Needless to say the Beardytron system is infinitely more sophisticated in 2020 – almost sentient. Then again, as Distractions proves, you might never really knew where it ended and he really began, anyway…
A Cheerful And Sunny Disposition
“I thought this was an apt track to start with. The lyrics go, ‘I think I’ve led my life inside a machine/All I wanna do is be real/You know what I mean?’ I thought that could be taken in a bunch of different ways.
“A lot of these lyrics are very personal. They are about me coming out of a shell of something. The feeling of starting anew, and breaking free of things.
“This is all about leaving the novelty behind and just making some fucking music. I felt like I’d trapped myself into a corner. It also sounded like an A.I. gaining consciousness. Wanting to become real.
“The song was edited in Logic, and made in the Beardytron. And it’s hip-hop with a late ’90s alt, chill-out weirdness.”
2^25,000:1 Against And Falling
“The title of this track is a direct quote from Douglas Adams [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy]. It’s something that the computer ends up saying when they’ve used The ‘Infinite Improbability Drive’ and shit’s got weird. I felt like this track was doing that a bit. It was just like me returning to normality.
“In the early 2010s I’d gone from being a completely broke student who was pursuing an unlikely dream – doing beatbox in a world that I didn’t really understand. There were points where I was being stopped everywhere I went. And that was weird.
“Making this music was me expressing that I just wanted to be a musician, nothing else. That return to normality is what that track’s about. Getting away from that persona.”
Getting There
“I wrote this track when I was 15, when I was essentially a child, and it had never gone away. It’d been going round and round my fucking head for years. There’s only one way to get it out and that’s to make it.
“But by the time I made it it had evolved into this thing that had
Track by track with Beardyman
absorbed all the influences that I’d been listening to. So it was quite a dense arrangement of a simple song.
“I recorded it and edited it all around the world when I was touring. And I was obsessively editing it. It has 150 layers in it!
“There were so many versions in my head. From guitar and drum ones, to purely electronic. It got to the point where it had to be all of that.”
Fndege.Gurp
“The title? It’s actually a typo. It’s supposed to be ‘Fnedge.Gurp’ [laughs]. It was just a bit of fun. Some sonic experimentation. After I finished it I was like, ‘That’s tight! I think I’ll leave it exactly as it is’.
“I did a mix job on it, but I didn’t change it at all. Sometimes it’s nice to do something spontaneous. Radiohead have a pre-gig chant which is ‘Warts ’n’ all!’ I’ve heard them say it before they start. That’s important to remember.
“Like the Japanese notion of ‘wabby-sabby’. They say ‘nothing is
“I was hosting lots of instances of Sugar Bytes’ Turnado, which still is my effects engine. And on the front end was Ableton hosting various different VSTs. Then iZotope plugins to do live sidechaining and compressing and EQing. I also had Guitar Rig, a Korg R3, and Alloy. And an audio engine that I had coded that was multi-threading the audio and stitching it back together on real-time.”
ever perfect. Nothing is ever finished. Nothing lasts.’ It’s quite true and well worth remembering.
“I also agree that ‘an album is never finished. It’s only abandoned’. It’s hard to accept. Perfectionism is a disease. Look at George Lucas and Star Wars. Make a different film!”
You Only Like What You Know
“This one was the third attempt at doing this. I had drafted it, and it was OK, but I gave it another proper go.
“Originally it was going to be just beatbox and clapping and a bit of the [Korg] R3. But then I ended up augmenting it with shitloads of stuff like organ parts and proper drums.
“I ended up using EZdrummer, which is not that easy to use, at all, but it’s very good. I only ever used it on this one song.
“It has a really nice drum roll engine, and lovely multi-sampled drums, and you can tweak as much as you want – so, all the room levels and mic placement, stuff like that.
“I recorded two music videos to this that never saw the light [laughs].”
Brain
“This one is silly. It’s a song about me eating your brain, with HP Sauce. Yeah. It’s really deep, this one [laughs]. I wanted to a video for this, with that bit from Hannibal where
Ray Liotta is getting his brain eaten.
“It was just a bit of fun. Nice little sonics. I just made it and thought, ‘I don’t not want to have that on an album. I want that on an album’.
“Most tracks I made, ended up on the album. There’s about four left over, or that I didn’t finish. They might be on Soundcloud, or something like that. It was a productive little period of time.
“The album only ended sounding Balearic and relatively uplifting because those are the ones that hung together. The others were more angsty or nebulous, and just didn’t fit.”
Perfect Waste Of Time
“I was thinking of a James Bond vibe