SpeshFX's GBB25 Reflections

The last GBB in Japan is over. Reports from the event — IG posts and stories obsessively checked over a weekend — suggest that the in-person experience was quite good. 

Unsurprisingly, with the event in Japan, most of the faces in the crowd were Asian of some sort, a testament to the bet that Swissbeatbox made that there are local audiences hungry for beatbox all over the world. Indeed, during his closing remarks, Pepouni spoke to this, thanking the people of Asia and Japan in particular who had attended the past three GBBs and invited them to see what a GBB looks like in Europe when it returns to Poland late next year.

Aside from the fact that the GBB is leaving Japan, there wasn’t much about this event that was unique. After years of experimenting, adding both to the bones and periphery of the event, I imagine it was nice for Swissbeatbox to simply put on a classic version of their event (give or take a producer category and live commentary) for the first time since 2019.

With that said, I have plenty of thoughts, so let’s dive in. 

The big picture 

The long journey back from second place

Three Korean acts came in second, which is more of a testament to the quality of the beatboxers in Korea than anything else, but it’s impossible to ignore the disappointment Dice and Wing in particular showed at coming up just short at the GBB. I can only imagine how exhausting it must be to walk up the stairs to the second place podium at the winners’ ceremony.

(Serpent, another Korean performer, also came in second in the crew battles, but with a crew that is mainly from Japan.)

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Amit, the 2013 American Vice Champion and 2018 Vice World Crew Champion finally won a major competition, taking home first place in the crew battle with The Beatbox House. Amit has been a beatbox luminary, loved and appreciated within the scene, for well over a decade despite never winning a major or even mid-level battle.

His victory in the crew round robin with The Beatbox House is a long-overdue title that befits his many contributions to beatboxing since his first battle in 2011. Whether he can emotionally retrofit this title onto the past fifteen years of his career is up to him, but watching Amit win and the Korean boys lose I couldn’t help but think about how hard it is to make it back to the top when you have been so close.

For every Matej, Mad Twinz and NaPoM, who climbed back from the brink to reach finals yet again, there are three battlers who can’t say the same. NME, Hiss, Osis, the list goes on. 

Considering the pensive ambience and lyrics in Dice’s final round, it seems this difficult reality was already on his mind during his preparation. Play the audio of Dice’s song behind videos of Dice, Hiss and Wing’s battles over the past seven, ten and thirteen (?!?!?!) years and you have a tragic montage of battlers almost but never reaching the pinnacle of beatbox battling.

But as Dice said, “If I die tomorrow, at least I played the music.” Absolutely no beatbox fan will be forgetting their many contributions to beatbox culture — even if they came in losing efforts. 

Another GBB, another year with no women on stage. 

Somehow, Swissbeatbox managed to take a step back on this front this year. Pe4enkata was a member of the judging panel, per usual, but Julianna Olanska, the General Manager of Swissbeatbox was unable to make the event as she is pregnant and can’t travel. (Mazal Tov to Julianna and her partner!)

Without Julianna, Pe4enkata was the lone woman representing as part of the GBB, and she did not even perform. It goes without saying that this is a tremendous shame. 

Swissbeatbox clearly appreciates the value of finding new audiences and bringing beatbox to them — they traveled halfway around the world to Japan for three years, didn’t they? They created pathways for Japanese beatboxers to make it to the GBB, gave support to local beatbox organizations, and gave local luminaries premium showcase opportunities during the GBB each of the past three years. 

Swissbeatbox’s disappointing decision, year after year, not to make the same investments in female beatboxers is a blight on the company in an otherwise uncontroversial era. Noting that their channel has plateaued at about 5 million subscribers for over two years now, it would behoove them to acknowledge literally an entire half of the world’s population. 

Standout beatbox moments

There was plenty of quality beatboxing at this GBB, but I have to be honest and say that fewer performances caught my attention in ways that I hoped. Wing and PacMax battled admirably, but I find it hard to believe that their final will come close to the level of River and NaPoM in 2023 or even DLow and Colaps’ quarterfinal in 2019.

With that said, Martin Benati’s style was a revelation. A bit Josh-O, a bit Chris Theodian, and 100% himself, Martin brought beatbox looping into a whole new realm of musical fun, and for that alone merited his title. 

Among the loops, I found Martin’s final round and Mahiro’s second round vs Junno shockingly similar in structure and idea. By now, the world-ending ballad is well known in the battle looping scene (see Yaswede’s Attack on Titan tribute and Rythmind’s heart failure) but it is still incredibly compelling to me as a concept. 

Funnily enough, I enjoyed Mahiro’s rendition more than Martin’s. (They were both great, don’t think too hard.) I will always give preference to a track that isn’t full of navel-gazy references to beatboxing’s past, and Martin used the ghosts haunting the battle conceit twice, which diluted each of the rounds in my eyes. 

The final minute of Mahiro’s Renegade is classic GBB looping. Heavy, with choral stabs, Renegade gives every beatbox fan ample opportunity to pull out their stank face. One has to wonder what might have happened if he swapped the Megalodon and Renegade from battle to battle… more on that in a bit. 

The Tag-Team final clash of styles was very fun. All four rounds were great, but the last round from Hiss & Wing was a standout for me. The patience to do a slow beat after MaxSkill’s high-energy rounds showed serious maturity, and it was comfortably the most listenable round among the tag teams. I love beatboxing that uses complicated techniques to do simple things, and I’ll be coming back to this performance for a long time. 

I saw folks on Reddit calling their pitching into question and other folks calling one of their syncopated bell techniques the “Jairo technique.” While I encourage those people to go all the way back to Rogue Wave’s 2023 rendition of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence for a reminder that syncopated melodies predate Jairo, any suggestion that Hiss and Wing were not walking their own musical path is misguided.

Whether with Wing, Beatpella House, or his buddies from France, Hiss has been into syncopation for years. His influence shapes others, not the other way around.

Smaller things

Interesting choices / battle game theory

I wish I could get in the Judges' heads while they voted on Blackroll’s battles. Since I first saw Blackroll at the 2023 Beatbox Battle World Champs, I have been intrigued by his value proposition. Freddy Beats and Kenny Urban spent much of the GBB25 livestream discussing Blackroll’s proficiency and consistency with a very tight sound kit, and that has always been my impression as well. 

On the one hand, Blackroll never leaves the “battle mindset,” even using battle-style rounds during his showcases. He is always incredibly prepared, rarely losing the beat and always delivering a strong sound on-stage. With that said, he is incredibly limited in musical imagination, which makes the limited sound selections more pronounced, and undermines the technical proficiency, because he is not displaying that proficiency in different settings.

I once heard it attributed to Tioneb (maybe in a Bizkit stream?) that a looper once messed up the beat in an otherwise exciting round, and that alone made Tioneb vote the other way. (Tioneb and Bizkit, if I got this wrong, my apologies.) True or not, this story illustrates a very intuitive perspective. This is beatboxing. If the beat isn't perfect you're not doing a good job.

Blackroll seems the ultimate test of this philosophy. How far can a beatboxer go while almost exclusively striving to achieve perfection on this metric alone? At what point does technical proficiency cap out? At what point does an elite drum replicator need to find lyricism, songwriting, a unique sound or something else in order to advance?

Speaking in the winner announcement for Blackroll’s final in the Show Your Masterpiece Battle against Zekka, Colaps said Blackroll is “a little bit repetitive” and there are “not as many new sounds” in his rounds. This comment was meant for the final, but that is particularly interesting to me, because it seems Blackroll’s technical proficiency can get him near to or even into finals of big battles, but at times he struggles against beatboxers with a wider range.

For example, barring his first round against Kaji, every one of Blackroll’s rounds at the GBB this year was at about 130 bpm. All these rounds had generic build ups with empty aspirational or angry lyrics, and once he reached the drop, then he would let loose with as much tech as he could.

I don't think I will ever seek out a track Blackroll has released to this point. Maybe I have a thing against meaningless lyrics, maybe I’m sensitive to the repetitive structures, maybe I’ve heard versions of Blackroll’s rounds in every wildcard competition since 2017, and maybe it’s just not my style.

With that said, satisfying Tani Levitt's musical itch is not a battle category, and Blackroll has never shown any interest in doing anything other than battling. He is thrice an Italian champ, a Great North champ, a Florida champ, top-3 in this year's GBB, top-8 in the 2023 world champs, and top-2 in Europe. If that's the highest a beatboxer can reach without ever trying to write a song, I'd say that's pretty damn high.

The comment sections of beatboxing’s greatest battles are always full of what-ifs and fanfics written by fans who wished the loser would have won. Prime among those wishes is always “if only so and so had used [insert other good routine here].” 

For most battles, this apocryphal retelling presumes that the battle in question was the most important and deserving of the loser's best rounds. Of course, one can only know that a quarter or semifinal battle is the most important after learning that it is lost, but set that aside.

Our beloved commenters also ignore the fact that the rounds are often pre-selected, making an ad-hoc switch difficult at best. Other considerations include the knowledge that advancing past the quarterfinals of a competition with a small final is a guarantee that you will perform six rounds, leading to exposure and production level from the battle videos. (Value that as you will.)

With this in mind, I struggle to understand Mahiro’s choice to use his new track renegade against Junno and repeat Megalodon against Martin Benati. 

Just like our beloved commenters, I presume that Mahiro rated his brand-new track Renegade as a better battle option than Megalodon, already a staple of his battle arsenal. I also assume that Mahiro valued the chance at a win in the semifinals over a win in the quarters. But in hindsight, it is unquestionable that Renegade was Mahiro’s most impactful round, and I wonder if he now wishes he hadn’t used it against the weakest competitor in the field.

On the other end of the spectrum, I was quite affected by Dice’s final round of the competition, even before it was layered with meaning when four of the five Korean competitors placed second in their respective categories. 

It is incredibly bold to choose a low-energy, if beautiful, track for the final round of a beatbox battle. Say what you want about the widening aperture of acceptability in a beatbox battle, it is still high-risk to eschew drops and some bass-driven moments of impact.

In 2021, Frosty went with a very slow round to close out his battle against Bizkit, but that round was still heavy and clearly minded towards battle. The only possible way to construe Dice’s finale as a battle move is to call it a battle move against battle itself, which would be asking a ton of the judges to vote for it in the context of a beatbox battle.

One can’t help but look at the camera pan to Martin Benati while Dice is performing and think that he is realizing in real time that he is the GBB champion. In 2021, Bizkit told me immediately after the final that he knew he had won, but Martin’s certainty when he smiled and hugged Dice at the end of their battle was surely stronger.

The only true corollary to this would be NME’s finale against Rythmind. NME had toyed with the idea of an anti-battle song against Saro at the 2018 Beatbox Battle World Champs, and he took it to the next level against Rythmind. By chance, it felt like NME had already lost by the time his round had begun, but he planned this round in advance and surely couldn’t have anticipated following two defining loop tracks in Headshot and Heart Attack before he performed his no-drop tribal track.

I enjoyed both his and Dice's finales, but I don't quite understand battling to get this far only to basically fold in the final hand.

Upcoming Calendar: Wild Cards

• Turkish Beatbox Championship: Submissions until TOMORROW November 12, 2025.
• Guatemala Beatbox Championship: Submissions until November 14, 2025.
• USA Beatbox Championships, Tag-Team and Loopstation: Submissions until November 15, 2025.
• Peru Beatbox Championship: Submissions until November 16, 2025.
• Paraguay Beatbox Championship: Submissions until November 30, 2025.
• Beatbox Insanity New Year Beatbox Battles: Submissions until November 30, 2025.
• Costa Rica Beatbox Championship: Submissions until November 30, 2025.
• Israeli Beatbox Championship: Submissions until December 1, 2025.
• Spanish Beatbox Championship: Submissions until December 7, 2025.
• Japan Loop Championship: Submissions until December 15, 2025.

Upcoming Calendar: Events

• Uruguay Beatbox Championship: Montevideo, Uruguay. November 15, 2025.
• Venezuela Beatbox Championship: Online. November 16, 2025.
• Argentina Beatbox Championship: Buenos Aires, Argentina. November 21, 2025.
• Online Beatbox Battle World Championship: Online, November 22 & 29, 2025.
• Master Battle Beatbox El Salvador: San Salvador, El Salvador. November 234, 2025.
• EntreFest: Madrid, Spain. November 28, 2025.
• CLIP 2v2 Championship: Online, November 29, 2025.
• K-BATTLE Throwback International HIPHOP Festival: Korat, Thailand. November 30, 2025.
• Turkish Beatbox Championship: Online, asynchronous. November - January.
• Brazilian Beatbox Championship: São Paulo SP, Brazil. December 6-7, 2025.
• Loop di Loop: Almere-Stad, The Netherlands. December 6, 2025.
• Lithuanian Beatbox Championship: Kaunas, Lithuania. December 6, 2025.
• Beat Brothers IV: La Cisterna, Chile. December 6, 2025.
• Peru Beatbox Championship: Online. December 7, 2025.
• USA Beatbox Championships: Brooklyn, New York. December 12-13, 2025.
• Paraguay Beatbox Championship: Online. December 13, 2025.
• Guatemala Beatbox Championship: Location TK. December 13, 2025.
• Beatbox of the Month, December: Berlin, Germany. December 12, 2025.
• French Beatbox Championships: Toulouse, France. December 19-20, 2025.
• PROTOCROWN Vol.2 Main Battles: Hokkaido, Japan. December 20, 2025.
• Israeli Beatbox Championship: Rishon L'Tzion, Israel. December 25, 2025
• Costa Rica Beatbox Championship: Date TK, 2025.
• Beatbox Insanity New Year Beatbox Battles 2026: Online. January 3, 2026.
• Spanish Beatbox Championship: Zaragoza, Spain. January 4, 2026.
• FentaMan Loopstation Championship 2.0: Online. February 21, 2026.
• Japan Loop Championship: Tokyo, Japan. March 15, 2026.
• Florida Beatbox Battle: Agen, France. April 24-25, 2026.
• BeatCity Japan: Tokyo, Japan. May 5-6, 2026.
• German Beatbox Championships: Berlin, Germany. May 16-17, 2026.
• Maestro Beatbox America: Bogota, Colombia. Dates TK July, 2026.
• Grand Beatbox Battle: Warsaw, Poland. September 24-26, 2026.

If I missed any upcoming events or Wild Cards, hit me up on Instagram, I’m @HateItOrLevitt or @SpeshFX.