United By Breakbeat’s Weekly DJ Showcase #10

United by Breakbeat (UBB) is a drum and bass DJ collective that includes artists and broadcasters from around the world – it is an open enrollment Twitch team founded by Christopher Goodacre (a.k.a. Guddah) that focuses on increasing the visibility and reach of it’s members. The team offers a mutltitude of resources to every member, including tips on getting a stream started, using Open Broadcasting Software (OBS) and other tools, endless troubleshooting, promotion, community raid trains (a way to pass viewers from one artist to the next), and now a weekly community DJ showcase. As Twitch has grown and changed in the last few years the discoverability of new DJs has been a challenge – there is almost no way to grow on the platform without some sort of help, and retaining viewership can be a difficult game. That being said, there are many things that the platform provides that can’t be found anywhere else: the openness of being able to essentially play whatever music you want, the gamification and amount of interactions, and the strength of the community. On the artistic side of Twitch, it is delightful to see the creativity of individuals show on their stream through the infinite customizations that are available as well as their broadcasting style, aesthetic, and knowledge. Every presenter has their own story!

The core goal behind the showcase is to put a spotlight on these artist’s hard work, whatever story they would like to share, and to provide a space where the public can see their acclaim. Organized by Guddah with support from the UBB team, the showcase is now in it’s third week – when Guddah isn’t working on this or streaming, he is helping other people and building his community/platform. The team is designed to be a collective to share ideas, promote and help one another, and increase the visibility of its members as well as drum and bass in general. Every week this show is improving, last week we introduced the discord format in which some of the presenters including Guddah speak in between the sets about the previous DJ.

Every week I will provide a short biography of the artists, a quick look at their set from the week, background based on their submission questionnaire, and provide information about forthcoming shows, sign-ups, and membership perks.  The full recording of these showcases will be available on Guddah’s YouTube channel.

This week brought surprises in all forms with four unique and contrasting performances from some major streamers in Twitch DnB right now, as well as the bossman himself Guddah. We had veteran DJs, veteran streamers, and some newer faces as well – vinyl, controller, widely varying styles, and interesting broadcasts to boot! One of the best things about the platform is the ability to customize the visual look of the broadcast to accentuate the style of DJing and musical selections, with performers adding their visual style in many different ways – animated backgrounds, green screens, redeemable celebrations or lights, and multiple camera setups to put the maximum focus on the DJ action are some of the things I’ve seen. These performers use this aspect extremely well to accentuate their sets this week and brought some incredible performances with them.

Heres what went down:

First performer: SnkySnarez

Originally from Galveston, TX now living in South Carolina in Hartsville, this vinyl DJ draws influence from a wide variety of sources to fill his sets from jungle and drumfunk to dark techstep. Streaming for nearly 20 years with a beginning on Evolution FM, he found DnB at the Wax Museum in Houston. Hooked, hes dedicated a huge amount of time to his craft and his performance this week showed his experience and prowess with the sound he chose to showcase. Opting out of the “3 favorite tracks” question due to myriad choices, his set speaks volumes about the knowledge, DJ craft, and collecting music.

Snky’s set from today was nothing short of storming and he’s done it all on vinyl. Opening with a blend featuring the classic “Ego” from Digital, right into a sample from “The Earthquake” blended into another banging classic “Bottomfeeder” from Gridlok. This opening section set up the rest of the hour in brilliant fashion with the focus on the epic techy sounds of the early to mid 2000’s, and this artist did not pump the brakes for a second. To DJ at this energy level with DnB on vinyl is incredibly difficult – the sheer volume of transients in the percussion makes the margin for error razor thin, not to mention the skill it takes in cueing and switching records! The stream features a glitchy visual theme, with a camera angle that features the decks themselves so you can really understand the process behind the craft of this set in real time. I love the old-school aesthetic (hard to say that this is old school), featuring VHS hardware, pixelated video game clips, ravey chopped up lasers, and robotic anime scenes – it really adds to the twists and turns this set takes. Snky goes through a wide array of sounds during his performance taking pieces from all over this era of DnB – it’s dark through and through, but sometimes he takes a detour into deeper and more choppy vibes before returning to the dark tech. A great blessing for the showcase to get a vinyl performance like this, and hopefully watching this inspires DJs as it has myself! Check out what Snky has been up to below:

SNKY Links

Second Performer: Oulsen

Hailing from Emmen, NL, Oulsen provides sounds from the Dancefloor and Liquid camp of DnB, sometimes playing the occasional deep house set. Vying for DnB these days, he’s now been a DnB lover for 15 years after discovering the sweet sounds of this music on the UKF channel – the “…melodies, the drums, the vibe, it just clicked..” with him instantly. Starting his streaming journey with a friend back around 2010, he’s returned to DJing on twitch after taking a break to focus on other things. Something about this music brings us back though, as Oulsen has continued DJing throughout his recent life even performing at hometown events spreading the love of DnB. Great to see another community oriented streamer doing his thing – his name actually comes from a typo from a search for “Pulse”, a local club, with the ‘n’ added after for dramatic effect. Oulsen is a lover of all things music and uses this to create unexpected blends and mashups on the fly. Heavily influenced by the music of Netsky, The Prodigy, Metrik, and Sub Focus he takes a melodic orientation when building his sets that goes heavy and soars high.

From the questionnaire:

Around 2010 I got to know a friend who was always doing DJ streams the old way before Twitch on crappy websites with crappy software and hardware, and I started to hang out during his streams on Sunday called ‘Weekender’, mainly with house/progressive tunes. Before that time I had never touched any DJ equipment but I was already always doing something with music (guitar & drums), so the riddim was there. After a couple of streams I started to get the itch to also try to DJ and asked my friend to teach me the ways. I started out learning to DJ with DnB tunes with Traktor and the Native Instruments X1 mk1.

 

After a while I bought a CDJ1000 set with a Behringer mixer to learn on some ‘proper’ equipment and do some actual beatmatching without the help of software and screens. Even though the setup was already old when I bought it, I learned a lot from it.

 

The next couple of years I got to know some more people in my area with DJing and started doing gigs, but mainly with top40 and EDM/House during small events, a club and sometimes even a wedding. At some point I got a residency a local club doing a monthly event for about 3/4 years for a room with more than 300 people every night. It was a fun time, but then… Corona!

 

So I started streaming then right? Actually no, I was a bit burned out with DJing without even knowing it at the time and the lockdown was actually a welcome break from DJing. After a while I wanted to DJ again so in 2022 I bought a simple DDJ-400 to use at home and started to stream with mainly DnB tunes, with a little break in 2023 when my daughter was born.

 

DJing on Twitch is all the DJing I do nowadays and I do it because I enjoy it, without any obligation, with the tunes I like to play, without any preparation, having fun and talk to people who tune in and have fun together. I don’t have a set schedule, I try to do 1 stream a week mostly during the weekends.

Top three favorite tracks of all time: Sub Focus “Timewarp”, Wilkinson “Afterglow”, Netsky “Give and Take”

Oulsen’s performance came out immediately with vocal blends mixed in key, featuring the vocals of dance classic ‘Silence’ remixes by DBL and DONT REFUSE into another anthem, Sub Focus ‘Waiting’. This DJ has a four deck setup to create as high an energy as possible with as many tracks as possible – the blends only stop for builds as he blasts through remix after remix, showing his favorites from the high energy Dancefloor producers of today. His stream features sound responsive lighting, top and side oriented cameras for deck views, and track ID to check the tunes for yourself (with some other surprises). As he moves quickly through his crate he drops classic after classic from this sound, playing all three of the top three tracks of all time from this list. My personal favorite blend from the set was actually with one of these, the ‘Timewarp’ with ‘Still I Fall’ by The Upbeats. This was a really enjoyable, high energy dancefloor set with a great vibe in the broadcasting. Check out what Oulsen has been up to below:

Oulsen YT

Third Performer: Guddah

Guddah is going to be performing for the 5 year anniversary at the end of May, and is going to provide a full bio for that showcase. His set from the showcase today was great though, featuring some of his most beloved blends from stream, brand new full sends, and shoutouts to friends and influences from across the Twitch realm including Billy 916 Junglist with whom Guddah credits the format of the showcase itself. Guddah slams through brand new bangers mashed with classics in true form today, staying off the mic head down for the majority of the set so as to send as hard as possible. Some DJs have seen this man’s workflow first hand, but it is a LOT quicker than it seems on stream sometimes, using the elements of each tune with surgical precision through creative cueing, beatjumping, and use of stems. Even though he might say otherwise, he’s making tons of decisions every moment if you look a little closer during the set on this recording you can see during the sends that he literally never stops moving and adjusting, making sure to utilize as much of the capability of his controller as possible at all times. During the three deck mixes he uses multiple drops of each song, moving backwards and forwards in the beat on mutiple tracks like some sort of DnB octopus to explore and find the best possible iterations of each blend. The wizardry really comes into play when setting up the EQ for this controlled chaos (sometimes including a fourth tune in the mix), so that nothing is too overpowering and each piece of the blend actually adds something to the section. He’s revealed to me that the set from today was entirely freestyled with no plan whatsoever, so realize that doing all of this on the fly is just standard practice for Guddah – mans put ages of time into the craft and describes the DJing as ‘second nature’. He truly plays the decks like a musical instrument, twisting the tunes to his will. Seeing this set was just a taste of what’s to come for the May 31st performance, which apparently WILL be a more structured set. I’ll drop his links below:

UBB Twitch Landing Watch recaps here

Fourth Performer: DJ Pegasus

A longtime gaming streamer (among other content) who started on justin.tv, Pegasus has been streaming on Twitch from 2023. In that short time he’s developed a Discord community for the stream as well as a polished broadcast that features all sorts of different themes – he actively participates in the heavy side of DnB streaming as well as open format streams and delicious and insane mashups (he’s got a great sense of humor). In the questionnaire response he talks about how different kinds of art speak to him, and provided a list of some of his creative influences that include artists that do a little bit of everything such as: Prodigy, Pendulum, Weird Al Yankovic, Dieselboy, Spor, Stonx, John B, Diode, 10XX, Infected Mushroom “…I’m sure there’s more..”. He has fun designing the broadcast’s layout – his visual background for the broadcast is a heatmap of the mix he’s creating in real time which lest people track the energy of what’s going on really nicely. Calling sunny Vancouver home, Pegasus is an extremely dedicated streamer who seems to thrive on the community energy that this platform provides and alludes to this in his bio. He tends towards Dancefloor, Neurofunk, and Techstep, but digs into a bit of everything including jungle and jump-up during his DJ sets.  Quoting an appreciation for the versatility of the genre, Pegasus employs a similar flexibility outside of DJing; a multimedia artist and instrumentalist who paints and enjoys acrylic pouring (he’s got a stream for that I will link below).

From the questionnaire:

At one of the first raves I went to I was having a really weird time, I couldn’t decide what room to dance in and my mood was up and down like a rollercoaster, so I decided to just sit down and chill, in the upstairs “jungle” room, decorated with lots of camo etc. It wasn’t long before I understood what it was all about.. That was the day I would say DnB found me. (though it was all just called Jungle back then)

 

When I went to my first big rave at the Pacific Coliseum (a hockey stadium) I experienced what it was like having everyone in the room focused on the music that was being controlled by one person. I used to be in a band at the time so the limelight was always shared.. but this way I would be the only one they’re paying attention to.

 

I was taking a drafting course at the time and I knew one of the other students listened to some kind of techno so I asked him about it and turns out he was a dj so I borrowed some records from him.. they were Hard House or “Nu-NRG”.. so that’s what I started buying, until I went to that one party where Jungle (DnB) found me.

 

I started spinning in the summer of 2001 with only one Gemini XL300 and my mom’s old belt-driven turntable with a Numark DM3002EX mixer. It didn’t take long before I knew I was in it for the long haul so I got a brand new pair of Numark TTX1’s.

 

I got involved with the online forum FnK and found out about a lot of parties and got a lot of gigs through that site. I used to practice all the time and record my best mixes and hand out burned cds at all the parties I went to.

 

After the sensor in one of my TTX1s broke I went digital and ended up doing a lot of house parties, and then took a hiatus around 2011 to focus on work.

But we’re back! (more on that later…)

 

I got booked to headline a party called “To The Moon”. I was so excited, it was my first big gig. then a while later I find out one of my favourite DnB producers of the time got booked for another local gig on the same night. I was pretty choked, but I had some vinyl that he produced, so I was like whatever. there’s gonna be hardly anyone at the other party now. might as well go see DJ Fresh, I could get my records signed. So I did. I got them signed during his set. Then before I could get back to the car to put the records away..

 

The party gets busted by the cops. 20 minutes into DJ Fresh’s set. AND 40 MINUTES UNTIL MINE!! I was like Holy $#%*!!

I hauled ass to the other party, and I was lucky that my friend was working the door because he wasn’t letting anyone else in. the place was PACKED and well over capacity heh. I had to squeeze myself and the record case all the way from the back door to the decks. Completely packed. Sweat dripping from the low ceiling. it was pure madness. There’s a picture of me spinning at this party during my “Pegasus Origins” channel redemption video clip 😛

Top three tracks of all time: The Prodigy “Voodoo People (Pendulum Remix)”, The Prodigy “Breathe (Camo & Crooked Remix)”, Stonx “Ghola”

Pegasus played extra heavy today and took from new and old camps of DnB, reaching for only bangers to fill his set from start to finish. Starting off with his personal blend of Dancefloor and Neurofunk at a really high level, his first section included a slough of personal favorites that really started off the set right. During the transition into the middlle section he chooses to go for some classic neuro chuggers like ‘Ikra’ and ‘Chubrub’ which sets up the techy, rolling section to come. He rolls through some great old school tunes and vibes before throwing kudos to the new-school Neurofunk family for an energizing send that included “Shot of Energy” a new tune from Bad Syntax and MV. The close took the audience through a vocal heavy section that soared with samples from George Michael and Florence and the Machine. Excellent sampling from what his streams are like. Check out Pegasus’ streams below:

Pegasus links Gaming channel Art channel

You can watch the UBB DJ showcase every Saturday from 16:00 GMT – 22:30 GMT (10AM CST, 8AM PST) on Guddah’s twitch channel! The weekly recap will be available right here on Best Drum and Bass in the following days of each broadcast.

If you are a Twitch streamer that is interested in getting involved with UBB, ask about signups at one of the showcases and a team member will invite you to the discord and add you to the Twitch team. Membership is open to everyone who streams drum and bass on twitch in any capacity. This community aims to build each other up and provide an even platform for people to share knowledge. It is a safe space to discuss streaming as well as real life issues, with a member list full of compassionate and interesting creative people who are full of drive for this music.

Until the next showcase, we hope to see you soon!

Watch the recaps here! Guddah Twitch