Beat Off Feb. 6 at Holocene

[February 13th, 2008]

[INSTRUMENTAL HIP-HOP] Walking into the main room of Holocene this past Wednesday, you’d have been hard pressed to realize a concert was about to start. The setting resembled a late-night dorm-room study session rather than a show—instead of the usual assortment of instruments onstage, a mostly empty table was filled with laptops, opened notebooks and half empty bottles of PBR. But that’s the awesome gimmick behind Beat Off, a live, sample-based songwriting contest: It’s like an academic rap battle where the contestants’ medium is electronic hooks instead of witty one-liners .

After a late start, an MC introduced all 12 contestants—including Afro Q Ben, DJ Tan’t and Oakland’s Dirty X-Rated—before stating the rules. Each producer had just one hour to craft the sickest three-minute track out of the same source material: eight samples taken from ’70s movie soundtracks, including the theme from Jaws. Back in the main room, Seoul Bro #1 was spinning soul and hip-hop, including the hook from Ghostface’s “Whip You With a Strap,” and the still-killer instrumental of Madvillain’s “Accordion.”

Though Beat Off claims to illustrate how beats are made live, the hour-long waiting period was less a CliffsNotes session than a bunch of dudes staring at computer screens and MPC samplers (a self-production tool). An overhead camera captured video that was projected behind the stage, giving the audience a closer look at what the producers were doing: pushing buttons, clicking mice and nodding their heads amid the familiar glow of beaming Apple logos.

When the music playback finally started, you could tell each producer came with a different agenda. Lept One looped the line “Why didn’t somebody call?” around a distorted, rolling beat; Quiet Countries’ Leb Borgerson grounded his 808 kick with an almost drum-and-bass background; DJ Tan’t opened with lush cinematic strings before a sampled double bass line and noisy, rattling percussion entered the mix. There were very few duds, and DJ Tan’t, a.k.a. Paul Lynch, took first place by a single audience-generated vote.

“This doesn’t look so hard,” one dude behind me commented as Techno Mike premiered an 808-infused electronic beat. “The difference is he’s up there and you’re not,” his friend replied. In that simple declaration lies the event’s true appeal: Maybe anyone with a little knowledge of Audacity could do this, but not everyone has the stones to share it with the world.