In March 2020, the back bar of Mortimer’s hosted a night of hip-hop reinvention.
Through the gloom stood booths full of audiophiles bobbing their heads while they tinkered with mixers. They crowded together, excitedly pointing at each other’s screens. From the stage, mastermind Dimitry Killstorm looked on, sipping a can of Bauhaus Wonderstuff with satisfied anticipation.
This was an average evening during the short-lived but dynamic tenure of Beats Per Minute, a monthly gathering of the dopest nerds in the Twin Cities producer scene. Killstorm, inspired by the long-running “Last of the Record Buyers” series of the late ‘90s, decided to put on his own tournament, pitting producers in a series of head-to-head competitions, beat for beat, to spotlight the craft of hip-hop production.
BPM was presented as a simple, 16-round, March Madness-style competition. Each round consisted of two one-minute beats per producer. A panel of rotating judges selected the winner, and those chosen progressed through the bracket until a champion was crowned. It cost $20 to compete, and the winner got the pot.
“I wanted to do something to get the beat-making scene a little bit of a fire under their ass,” says Killstorm, a prominent local producer known for his work with Haphduzn and Sean Anonymous. “I wanted there to be a competitive spirit.”
Killstorm’s passion project was just hitting its stride when Covid brought it to a halt. BPM ran for 18 months; that night in March proved to be the final event. Now, four and a half years later, Killstorm is finally resurrecting his producer-vs.-producer showdown October 5 at the Hook & Ladder Theater.
The world has changed since BPM’s glory days. Artists have come and gone from the Twin Cities, many chased out by a #MeToo reckoning in 2020. Winners no longer get beats featured as a play-in segment on First Impressions with Chaz Kangas on Go 95.3; the station has since flipped formats to Christian radio. Killstorm has become a responsible father of twins. But the spirit of BMP remains, and Killstorm is ready to reignite the fire he first sparked in 2018.
“Beat battles aren’t something I invented at all,” the DJ/producer says. “I’ve thrown beat battles in the past, but not with any consistency. I’d participated in a handful of ‘em. It pushed me to ask myself, ‘What’s my best material? How do I present my hottest shit?’”
In 2020, Lou-E was a 25-year-old stranger to the Twin Cities music scene who’d learned beatmaking in an online RPG. He’s become a fixture at BPM after winning the February 2020 battle. In the first round, he took his lo-fi Dilla-inspired boom bap up against the flashy Mickey Breeze, a two-time winner who played his beat live, to the delight of the crowd.
The night’s judges, dance collective New Black City, gave the round to Breeze, who went on to win the night. Killstorm holds him up as one of the big success stories of BPM’s first incarnation.
“He was 17 when he was coming to the beat battles for the first time, and his mom vouched for him at the door,” Killstorm remembers. “Now, he's playing at Timberwolves games. He's got nightlife residencies all over the Twin Cities. It's just really cool to see this shy, nerdy teenage kid developing this professional musician.”
For the new incarnation of Beats Per Minute, Killstorm has tweaked the format slightly. No longer will you see producers huddled around glowing screens while competitors play. The Hook & Ladder’s theater seating will bring the performance at the fore, creating more of a show. He’s also moved the judges off the stage, so that the upcoming panel of Maria Isa, Chance York, and Big Wiz can experience the battle as the audience does. Their feedback will be voiced over as part of the show.
“This is kind of a test to see how it works in this space,” Killstorm says. “I want to revamp it and do it a little bit better than I did, but I am really hopeful it’ll be a recurring thing.”
BPM is a nerdy environment. The producer community is, by nature, insular. At that March 2020 show, the table was buzzing about a new Lil’ Baby song, dissecting the hi-hat pitches. Eirwolf was in the room that night, arguing about Eminem’s Music to Be Murdered By with André Mariette. Soon, they were debating the merits of Ableton vs. FC Flow.
Producing can be an esoteric art, and BPM doesn’t seek to bring in an average music fan. Killstorm’s audience is aficionados. But there is a fascinating inversion of the hip-hop norm. At BPM, rappers stand to the side, giving an uncompromised platform to the people who typically fade to the background. It’s a resetting of the balance, returning the art to its roots, when turntablists took the spotlight and MCs hyped them up.
“I don’t know that most people really care about the credits on a song,” Killstorm says. “People think that beats are made by a DJ playing records live. They don’t know that there’s someone flipping through hi-hat sounds in their bedroom.”
It’s those homebound artists that Killstorm is striving to reach. The next Mickey Breeze. The next kid who took a $20 chance on their art and found a career and a community. The pandemic taught Killstorm that Instagram and Soundcloud don't provide a sufficient network, and if BPM wants to compensate for that, Killstorm knows it’s going to have to grow.
“I’d like to make it bigger, there are a lot of repeat people,” he says. “I know there’s some kid in their bedroom on the North Side who’s never heard of this league, they probably don’t even know what a beat battle is, but they have a computer full of amazing shit.”
BPM Beat Battle
With: Dimitry Killstorm
Where: Hook & Ladder Theater
When: 9 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 5
Tickets: 21+, $10/$15; more info here
