Whattup? My name is Tom Thum, [a] Brisbane based beatboxer, creative kind of weirdo.
Beatboxing, I guess if you boiled it down to its essence, is vocal percussion, emulating
instruments, songs, sounds, drums, everything with your voice.
So it’s all very a cappella based - just pure, unfiltered voice and what it can do,
pushing the boundaries.
So I first started beatboxing, in its rawest
form, when I was about 16 and I was a breakdancer at the time.
So I was doing a lot of B-boy shows and getting out there quite a bit and every now and then
somebody would ask me, “yo man, Tom, do the beatbox,” at the breakdance shows.
And I remember the first time I got on stage was at the Moorooka Street Festival - just
a little community festival near me - and I think the CD player wasn’t working.
So one of the guys in my breakdance crew was like, “hey man you should go up and do some
beatboxing.” And that was my first time on stage.
This piece here is like my main looper. And it’s really good for creating on-the-fly
sort of things like...
Before I was able to go full time professional
as a beatboxer I guess I was drinking goon in parks quite a lot, running around the train
lines late at night, attempting uni and I figured out that it wasn’t for me, and I
just went off on my own.
Good old sound.
Come see me.
Get down the ABC.
But now the internet is just such a huge database of knowledge and it’s also given me a huge
platform to grow on. Because when I first started doing shows it
was all about “do as many shows as you can” to get the exposure and maybe there will be
someone in the crowd that notices you and gives you the big career-making gig.
But, now you could literally sit in your bedroom all day and make number one songs and not
even have to do anything, so it’s great.
Please give a warm hand of applause for the
one and only Mr Peeping Tom. Take it away.
Yeah, so after I did my TED talk I still got
the same amount of gigs. I just suddenly somehow became a public speaker
as opposed to a public drinker. I mean, it changed things heaps.
It was a lot more high profile gigs that you get from a wider exposure.
So that was really great and really welcome because at that point I had been doing it
for a long time - a lot of people, that’s their first introduction to what I do, but
for me I felt like, okay, maybe this is the make or break point.
Not that I had any idea what a TED talk was before I did one.
I’m super proud of this space because it is the first time in my entire career that
I’ve actually had a dedicated space for being creative.
It’s always been certain rooms and cupboards, storage cupboards and things like that that
I’ve stuffed with mattresses and I’ve tried to make it look pretty with a nice background.
But in reality there was, just like, OMO leaking on my foot.
I’m Andrew Russell Clark. I’m the builder of Tom’s shed.
So this shed’s got three layers of wall in it, two layers of floor, three layers of
ceiling, double glazing all the way through the window openings.
So it’s definitely one of a kind.
Can you give us a shot at some beatboxing?
Yeah, that’s about my limitation.
Now that this place is finished I’m just
so chomping at the bit to rip into it and just not be bothered by anything but the sunshine.
I do a lot of arrangement for, like I did some stuff for Roadshow recently, which is
cool, which is reinterpreting a lot of theme songs from superhero and hero movies.
Totally outside the realms of beatboxing - I mean there’s so much really.
I really want to get into doing character voices and a lot more foley stuff and I’ve
also been recently trying to get into animation. So I’m kind of in the process of writing
an animated series as well based on Australian wildlife and all their character flaws, which
is going to be dark and twisted but super fun.
I’ve been working with orchestras a lot recently.
That’s been really challenging for me - not so much as a beatboxer, but as a musician
on a whole - learning a lot about suspended chords and different time signatures.
There’s stuff I never would have learned within the confines of hip hop - a lot of
that’s very four-four based stuff. I’m playing with a symphony orchestra in
Germany later in the year and we’ve got songs in eleven and seven and things that
I never, ever, ever in my wildest dreams thought I’d be doing.
So I’m really excited about that.
Anybody who puts a limit on music is an idiot
- like, go away. Let people just be creative whatever their
means, whatever their methods are. I haven’t really seen any negativity at
all. I think it’s a pretty loving place, people
just try and really get behind any new thing people are doing.
There’s guys doing beatboxing with AI - like Reeps One - and people really pushing the
boundaries. That’s it’s not a guy sitting in a corner
with his hat backwards doing some old school shit.
People are killing it right now, really on the cusp of finding out what the human voice
can actually do.