By Manal El Warraky
The U.S. Embassy in Cairo has revealed that the award-winning American vocal music band “The Beatbox House” is visiting Egypt as part of its 2024 World Tour.
The visit of the “The Beatbox House” band to Egypt, the only stop in the Middle East during the 2024 round, brings this unique American musical genre to three Egyptian cities: Luxor, Cairo and Alexandria.
During their visit to Luxor, the five members of the “The Beatbox House”, Gene Shinozaki, Kenny Urban, NaPoM, Amit and Chris Celiz, talked about their experience in transferring this unique genre of music to Egypt for the first time, and to the text of the Interview.
So this is your first time in Egypt, who is your target audience? And are you ready to do more tours in the Arab countries?
Yes, we think our target audience is everyone of all ages, it shouldn’t just be Beatbox players or musicians.
And anyone can only love music, music is a universal language, because everyone understands music and feels the rhythm, the Beatbox House is the creation of music with our voices, so when we sing in the Beatbox House way, everyone understands what we do, it doesn’t matter where you are from, and it doesn’t matter who you are.
So our audience is really anyone who enjoys music, and we certainly like to visit more countries, and we want to spread awareness about The Beatbox House music to change people’s perception of this kind of music, to prove that it’s not just a festive trick, as many people think, we create music, so we think this is the biggest message.
What tourist places have you visited and what tourist places do you plan to visit in Egypt?
We visited the temples of Karnak, today, as we took a flok in the Nile River, and that was beautiful, that was amazing.
And on our rest day, on Saturday, we are looking forward to visiting the pyramids, this is what we look forward to a lot, just traveling around Cairo was really nice, it is unlike anything we have seen before, it is amazing, and we are very excited to see more.
Are you ready to repeat tourist visits to Egypt?
Yes, we need to, in fact, unfortunately, this tour was very crowded, and we didn’t have much time to explore, so we have to go back.
The Beatbox House music is not very popular in Egypt, and from time to time very few talents appear, so how do you think that your visit to Egypt for the first time can highlight the talents of Egyptians or those interested in the Beatbox House?
Through our offerings, we are definitely inspiring people to the Beatbox House, and if they are not a Beatbox House enthusiast, we inspire them that they can do anything, because the Beatbox House is just something inspiring when it is done right.
We certainly plan to connect with Egyptian Beatbox artists, and we want to drag some people to the stage to participate in the performance.
Were you able to meet the fans? Or did you meet the Egyptian Beatbox House players? Who work and try to develop?
We are planning to meet the Egyptian Beatbox House community, which is just a group of people who communicate through the The Beatbox House.
In fact, we are talking with different Beatbox players via Instagram at the moment, and we are trying to spend time with them, and we are friends with the Egyptian Beatbox champion, we have invited him to our presentation, and we are always open to cooperation, and this is also what we do here, where we teach to children and anyone interested in how to practice the Beatbox House.
What is your impression of Luxor, and what did you see? And what did you like about it?
Luxor is very beautiful, there was energy in the temple of Karnak, the energy of art and beauty and we think that we were all in awe of architecture, design and everything was great, and we have never seen anything like this before.
What is your impression of Egypt in general, and do you want to return to it in the future?
Yes, 100% we want to return to Egypt, and get enough time to go deeper into Egyptian history and culture, we feel that there is a lot of greatness and mystery, and we have not had time to see them.
We see how much everyone here is also interested in preserving history and tradition, and we believe that it is one of the most beautiful parts of Egyptian culture, the amount of respect that Egyptians have for their history and sharing it with everyone, and we think it is a really beautiful thing.
We hoped to have more time to be inside the Karnak Temple and learn why it was built, why it was so big, how they came up with the techniques that were used in its construction, and learn more about the gods and all the wonderful things we saw.
We can spend our lives learning and learning about the great Pharaonic civilization, and we certainly want to return as tourists, we were walking around with a tour guide, and he was explaining the hieroglyphic language, which astonished our minds, we listened to him and he explained, it was really wonderful moments.
Did you know the Egyptian music? And have you met the Egyptian band with which you will cooperate in your current tour? What is your impression
Yes, we met the Downtown band, it is a great band with great and very professional musicians, we were completely harmonious during the workouts, and just listening to their music, great Western music, with a special oriental touch, they have their own and special style of playing.
They helped us a lot in guiding us through our musical training together, and we succeeded in harmony sound well.
Why did you choose Egypt to be among your parties on your 2024 tour?
Egypt is an amazing country, a special place, and we always see it in movies, and things like that, but coming here is a completely different experience.
When we came to Egypt, a large number of people started to text us via social media, “Welcome to my country, welcome to Cairo, welcome to Luxor, we hope you enjoy your presence in Egypt”.
We believe that the art we do can reach anywhere, and this is the first time we have been in the Middle East, and the first time we have been in Africa, and I think this is a big answer to why as well, because Beatbox music at this level has never existed before.
We also believe that our experience in Egypt is unique, we have not seen in our lives anything like what we have seen from architecture to the beautiful energy that we can feel in temples, for hieroglyphic language and everything has been amazingly preserved, a long time ago.
There’s nothing like that in the US, where you can visit 3,000-year-old buildings, and it’s really hard to find that anywhere outside of Egypt, it was great.
As for our art in Egypt, we have a lot of fans everywhere watching us on YouTube, a Beatbox House is a form of art that brings people together, because we don’t need to speak the same language.
We were doing rehearsals with the Downtown band, many of them didn’t speak English, but we understood each other, and it was funny that Hani Adel performed the Beatbox House during the workouts, and we were astonished.
Were you generally familiar with the Egyptian culture and ancient history of Egyptians? Have you read something maybe about Egypt before you came?
Certainly we were familiar with Egypt, Egypt is definitely a country that everyone knows because of its history, but its vision in reality is completely different from reading about it.
We used to research Egyptian culture, but mainly on the aspect of how the pharaohs were very spiritually sophisticated kings, and they were former in their time, although it was a very old civilization, it was very harmonious and accompant with nature itself.
And not only spiritually, but also scientifically, geographically and mathematically, the pharaohs were scientists who kept their organs embalming, and their construction of pyramids is very amazing, they were very advanced to their time.
