Beat4Battle TV: UK – Preview

We return with the first video from the latest member of the Turntable Radio family, Yoshi, featuring some of the UK’s finest tablists – Tigerstyle, Muzzell, Mr Brown and Silk Kuts. More on that in a minute though.

Hailing from Japan, Yoshi recently got in touch with us as he’s visiting Europe on a mission to try and document the freestyle scratch scene around the world. We met up at the weekend and it was a pleasure to see you a young man, all of 18 years, passionate about scratching and the artform and equally passionate about wanting to document it and share this with the world at large, with little preoccupation for trying to cash in.

I’ve got to be honest, meeting Yoshi was also great because it reminded me of just how I was about 7 or 8 years ago when I started my own attempt at documenting the scratch scene at the time. Over the years I’d slowly despaired that maybe I, and others like Mr Trick before me and Mark from Skratchworx, was a little weird in wanting to do something like that for nothing other than self-fulfillment, pleasure and the ‘glory’ as they call it. It’s nice to know we’re not alone.

Yoshi is an independent film-maker who hosts an open turntable event called “Scratch Day” at the Vestax Tokyo HQ every three months under the name Beat4Battle JP. The event has featured some of the best established scratch DJs in Japan, like TTR friends Ken One and Human Rhythm, as well as many upcoming/unknown scratch kids from the Tokyo area. You can check videos from Scratch Day Japan on Yoshi’s Youtube channel.

Some of you might recognise the Beat4Battle name, originally from France it’s an online scratch community which developped around a forum in 2005 and has since grown to incorporate regular freestyle scratch and beat battles, both online and in the real world, as well as free compilations released online. Check their site for more info and links.

So back to the matter at hand. We hooked up with Yoshi and had a chat, and the decision was made to invite him on board here at Turntable Radio to bring you fresh, video content regularly from his travels as well as regular events in Japan.

The first such video is a preview of the Beat4Battle UK series. Yoshi has been in the UK for about 10 days during which he’s hooked up with some of the country’s best, and still active, scratchers: from established names like Tigerstyle and Muzzell to younger DJs like Switch and IQ. Everytime he’s filmed them doing what they do best and the results will be broadcast here in downloadable glory as well as on his youtube (and maybe on TTR’s own streaming channel once we’ve sorted that out).

First up is a 10 mins preview featuring Tigerstyle, Muzzell, Mr Brown and Silk Kuts, 4 of the UK’s most established scratch DJs and who we’ve not heard of for a while, so it’s a pleasure to be able to bring you this video. The video is sponsored by the good people from Dephect Clothing, who long-time listeners will remember as we featured them on the site about 4 years ago when they first launched.

As always the video has been optimised for iPod/iTunes viewing, and can also be watched using any standard media player as long as you have the latest codecs. The video is available on our feed, via our iTunes feed (subscribers should have received it by the time they read this) and via direct download for the lazier among you (see below). File type is .m4v and file size is 128mb.

So that’s it for now, a big and warm welcome to Yoshi as well as a big thanks for his hard work. Look out for much more from him coming regularly on the site. Next up is episode 1 of the Beat4Battle UK series with Switch and IQ, and then more including vids with the Community Scratch guys which are being filmed tomorrow. After that Yoshi will be heading over to France to film people there and hook up with the Beat4Battle people, before returning to Tokyo for more. In the future we’ll also be hooking up more videos with our Japanese connections, so stay tuned for news on all this.

You can preview the video on youtube (below) and download link is right after!

Download the Beat4Battle TV UK preview right here! (right click and save as)

Beat4Battle TV: UK – Preview
Featuring: Muzzell, Tigerstyle, Mr Brown, Silk Kuts
Sponsored by: Dephect Clothing
Filmed at Mr. Brown’s house in Harrow, UK on 26th June 2009. Filmed and edited by Yoshi.
Beat by J-One from “Wildstyle Looper 2″ available for download at YourLooper.com

Liked this post? Then you might like these:

Beat4Battle TV: UK – Episode 1

Beat4Battle TV: UK – Episode 2 (part 1)

Beat4Battle TV:UK – Episode 6

Beat4Battle TV:UK – Episode 3.1

Beat4Battle TV:UK – Episode 5.1