[EXCLUSIVE] Honeycomb Talks How He Got Into Beatboxing in iEDM Intervi

On the beach in Mexico at Dejavoom Festival, the stages had ended, but then I stumbled upon a late-night beatboxing session from Honeycomb. We were mesmerized by the fact that he could make insane dubz and wubz rhythyms with just his mouth.

At Electric Forest, iEDM sat down with Honeycomb to chat about how he got started in beatboxing and his new album "What's Inside My Head."

Here's what he had to say:

iEDM: So this year there is a honeycomb stage at the electric forest. Tell us about that.

Honeycomb: I feel like it's more a coincidence that it's the critical stage. It actually looks like it. I'll take it. Electric Forest is doing a good job of giving me a little bit of free programming. So many people coming up to me saying, "oh good job with the stage and thanks so much." And even they're coming up to the person who curated the stage and say thanks for doing it for honeycomb and what the heck?

iEDM: It's awesome you are performing over there!

Honeycomb: It's meant to be yeah!

iEDM: I actually stumbled upon you over there a couple of years ago for the first time so I've been a fan since. You've been coming to Forest for years. Any favorite moments and what are you most excited for this year?

Honeycomb: One of my favorite moments, I think it was either last year or the year before that Juaz played in Good Life. Back to back with Louis the Child, Golf Clap, Mija, Justin J and a few other homies in the late. Right before they're about to finish it. They brought me out to beatbox and I closed out the Good Life stages. Really good time. And then another one of my favorite moments was when 12th Planet played like a three hour set at Tripoli and a couple of DJs backed out and then we did a huge back to back with Ekali, GTA, and a few other homies. It's one of the biggest crowds I got to perform for, for real. A lot of fun. Always performing in the Grand Artique every year. I love it.

iEDM: Awesome. Are you going to have any secret concerts this weekend?

Honeycomb: I wanted to do secret popups, but I tried to do some in the woods and they shut me down.

Honeycomb: Yeah, They won't let me do it, but I'm going to try to go set up maybe in Good Life or somewhere else where I don't think I'm going to get bothered. I don't want to get stopped.

iEDM: So tell us about your Dejavoom experience, it was cool to see you out there! We stumbled upon a pop up set on the beach!

Honeycomb: Big shouts to Bassnectar for bringing me out on the lo-fi stage. It was a lot of fun. The renegade on the beach was a lot of fun. Being in Mexico and on the beach and listening to the bass was an amazing time.

iEDM: Do you have a relationship with Bassnectar?

Honeycomb: No, I met him one time at Bass Center with Kyrian of the Fungineers. We did, a little jam out for the parking lot people and then he was like bring his luggage backstage and he asked me to bring it back and I was like, Oh shit, I might be meeting Bassnectar right now, It's like, of course I want to carry your stuff back. We went back there and I got to meet him real briefly before he played. But other than that I haven't got a relationship with him. That would be cool.

iEDM: So how did you get into beatboxing?

Honeycomb: So the first day of fourth grade I got on the bus and I sat with this new kid on the bus and he was like beatboxing and I said, "what are you doing?" He's like, "Oh, I'm a beatboxer." That's my friend Christian Pelletier, one of my best friends from high school. And I went home and I looked up on YouTube how to beatbox. I just wanted, you know when you're younger you want to be better than your best friend at everything. I went home and yeah.

iEDM: Are you better than him now?

Honeycomb: For sure. Yeah. But there was this one thing that he can do and I still can't do it and he always just holds it against me. I still can't figure out how to do it, but then I just learned from YouTube videos.

iEDM: Yeah. YouTube can teach you anything these days!

Honeycomb: Yeah I learned a little bit of piano from YouTube and guitar!

iEDM: Practice makes perfect.

iEDM: We've run into you doing shows all over. What's been fun? What's been fun this summer besides Dejavoom?

Honeycomb: We did this good party down in Florida called Home Bass. It's like a resort festival. Claude VonStroke did a bunch of stuff down there. It was like, Holy Shit-esc vibes, but on land. So I took my speaker and was out set up on the elevator and then go up and down and have like parties on the elevator and stuff. And it was. It was, probably one of the best things that I did all summer for sure.

Honeycomb: Otherwise, I kind of kept it pretty chill this summer didn't do too much stuff. Worked on content. I just dropped an album on 4/20 & it’s my birthday!

Honeycomb: I played Black Box on 4/19 before my birthday party for this One Vibration Festival! One vibration, two parties and a birthday in the same day. Then flew home on my birthday and threw a show in Northhampton, MA and that was packed out. All were a really good time!

iEDM: Awesome. When you do something like that or when you beatbox for a long time, does your throat start to hurt or like do you get tired?

Honeycomb: Not usually as long as I got water, I can keep it going for a long time. We did, a couple of years ago I did like a six hour set on this bus at Camp Bisco and then on my third or fourth Electric Forest I did something for 10 hours.

iEDM: You're savage. That's awesome. Keep it going. Tell us about your album that you just dropped.

Honeycomb: "What's Inside My Head" - It's eight tracks, it's called what's inside of my head because I don't really have songs. They're basically ideas that I do all the time. It won't be the same every time, but it goes through all different genres and starts off with like hip hop and then goes and it keeps, it keeps a little bit hip hop vibe and goes to house music, drum and bass and then dubstep at the end and it's a 15 minute continuous, nonstop mixed style. I try to keep it as close to my live performance as possible. It was my first beatbox bodywork, and I've been doing the Honeycomb project since August, 2012 and just finally got motivated to release something.

iEDM: Nice. So what's your next project? What's your next show that you're looking forward to? What's next for Honeycomb?

Honeycomb: I really wanna start developing my live show into more of, or be using a bunch of different- Instead of me just beatboxing, I want to start looping a lot more and adding more instruments into my set and having visuals that are linked up to my beatbox so it's a whole audiovisual experience as opposed to just be standing on stage and beatboxing. I'm trying to take examples from a lot of the bigger artists that are out there and try to do what they're doing and then apply that to what I got going on. Take that next step into getting bigger.