Beatbox House Share Thoughts on Egypt Tour, Career, Music

The US Embassy in Cairo announced the award-winning American vocal music band The Beatbox House will visit Egypt as part of its 2024 world tour. 

The Beatbox House’s visit to Egypt is the only stop in the Middle East during the 2024 tour, and the band will bring this uniquely American musical genre to three Egyptian cities: Luxor, Cairo, and Alexandria.

Therefore, the US Embassy hosted an open talk with the band and journalists in Cairo.

Chris Celiz started his talk about expressing the band's pleasure and enjoyment to be in Cairo, and share the stage with Egyptian artists. He also praised the efforts of the US Embassy in Cairo for their tour.

After that, he briefed the history and the culture of the Beatbox, saying: "New York City, in the 70s, specifically the South Bronx. It actually came about because in the Bronx there were a lot of budget cuts and the first areas that were kind of hit because of that were more of the poor areas and the disenfranchised areas, so places like the South Bronx. And hip-hop started.

It started as an effort to end violence instead of people trying to express their violence with violence, they would turn it into art. So just because you take away the opportunity for someone to express themselves doesn't mean that they're going to stop expressing themselves. So we turned to hip-hop for that. And beatboxing was one of those art forms."

"Over the past almost 50 years of hip-hop, beatboxing itself has transformed into a global art where you have a lot of solo, just like a really, really amazing techniques that have been developed and kind of borrowed from all the other, so many places around the world to really share what the human voice can do."

About their experinece as a group, Gene Shinozaki expressed that they all learned separately through and all of them started that way and then they met through championships. So they battled each other, after that they came together, and lived together.

Regarding the target and the message of their performance, Amit Bhowmick highlighted that Beatbox is a mean of communication through music. Every culture has rhythm and every culture has something that they can connect with. So, by meeting other beatboxers, they were inspired whether by different beatboxers, different music, or different cultures.

Neil Meadows continued that they are very lucky to be in New York City, which is the hub of so many different cultures and different types of people. In addition, they are the first members of beatboxers who did the step of forming a band, and introducing concepts like the Beatbox House.

After that, they discussed the future impact of AI to their genre. Celiz said that the beauty about beatboxing is it's organic, so AI can come out, but the fact that they are able to create this from our voices, nothing can really compete with that. AI hasn't really caught up to beatboxing yet either.