Boxing them beats!

By Rashika Fazali

You know talent when you hear it. One such person is professional beatboxer Julius Mitchell who I heard about through an acquaintance as “a beatboxer who can produce any sound you want him to.”

A couple of days after I heard of Julius, I happened to see him perform as a guest artist at a Voice Print concert held last December and I couldn’t help but believe that he was one of a rare kind. There was such an element of surprise in his performance and I have to say that unwittingly, he stole the concert.

Getting up close and personal with Mitchell, a former member of the a capella group Voice Print, he revealed that he learned the skill of beatboxing through his love for a capella music which started at the age of 11 after watching a performance by an a capella group at school. “I was very fascinated with it because there were no instruments, just voices,” said Mitchell.

He was so fascinated with this new kind of music, he even researched it. He added: “As I grew, I started creating a capella arrangements like four to five part harmonies. When I was between 18 and 19, there came a point where I wanted everything to be with a voice. Nothing, but the voice.”

His love for a capella music brought him to the steps of beatboxing when he happened to tell a friend he was jamming with about wanting to create an a capella arrangement with the use of voices along with a human-generated beat. His friend suggested using a beatboxer.

Not knowing what a beatboxer was, he got his friend to teach him and soon embarked on a journey to learn this new skill with the use of online tutorials. He revealed that at first, he started off with beatboxing three to four sounds – a simple beat with kick drums, snare etc. Eventually, with his fascination of a capella music, his sounds increased from four to seven and then to around 20 sounds.

Having learned the skill by himself, he believes that anyone could beatbox if they only try, adding: “I trained for it – practised unlike most people.”

Mitchell pointed out that his practise sessions could last three to eight hours a day. “Sometimes I would stop and not beatbox for a day,” said Mitchell, explaining that it all depends on getting a particular beat sound perfect.

Having being in a choir, he understood the need for vocal training which he used for his beatboxing. In order to brush up his music skills, he joined the Mary Anne School of Vocal Music after he left school and learned proper vocal techniques. He said: “I got to know that I needed to use the diaphragm in beatboxing and not the throat. I used a technique called the inter-costal diaphragmatic technique which is used in singing.”

Today, he is a beatboxing instructor at the David Academy of Performing Arts and is also a part of an Indian company, Side Step Solution that manages all sorts of artistes.

Mitchell rose to fame when he joined Voice Print as a vocal percussionist, but as he grew, he realised that it just wasn’t his ‘thing’. He explained: “I wanted a group that could be very open in terms of vocal music, not just conform to singing. I respect singers but my interest, my thing, is to form a vocal band handling everything with the voice. There is no group in Sri Lanka, so I tried to do that with Voice Print, but I could only do that up to a certain extent because their concentration was solely on singing a capella.”

There is a thin line between a vocal percussionist and a beatboxer – one is the ability to mimic drum sounds and the other is the ability to produce just more than drum sounds like horns, synthesisers, strings, bass and vocal sounds.

And this exceptional talent of his has won over so many people that today, he performs both locally and internationally. In the last year alone, he performed over 50 gigs, mostly consisting of corporate gigs.

His most recent performance was at Freeze, the hip hop festival held in India last November and he revealed that he has more overseas gigs coming up this year. “I’ll be performing at the MAD festival in India this year,” said Mitchell. He is also set to perform in Singapore, Qatar and New York.

Mitchell is currently looking forward to working on his first album and is also focusing on scoring more shows internationally, and as a part of his future plans, he also hopes to make beatboxing a language. “It’s natural to me and that’s what music is – conversing. You are giving out a message to people through music and that’s what I want to do with beatboxing.”