Dressed in typical hip hop gear - oversized sweatshirts, baggy pants, sneakers - the beatbox act would have looked at home on a Jay-Z music video. But the three mainland youngsters, who were in Hong Kong in June to perform at a music business conference, were an unlikely band of pioneers.
Calling themselves YB Box, Gui Jing, 23, Jing Xing, 19, and Jiang Linghu, 18, hail from Yanji, in northeastern Jilin province, where they have helped spawn beatbox fever among local ethnic Korean youngsters and turned the town into the mainland's beatbox capital. (About a third of the 2.2 million population of Yanbian Autonomous Prefecture, an icy delta region on the border with North Korea, are ethnic Koreans following a wave of migration in the 19th century.)
'We're just crazy about beatbox,' Gui says. A computer science student at Changchun Normal University, he is YB Box's de facto leader, from whom the other two usually take their cues.
But there's more to their deference than age and experience (Jiang is studying art and design and Jing recently finished high school).
Gui is regarded as a beatboxing trailblazer on the mainland. He first came across beatbox - a form of vocal percussion usually associated with hip hop - on a YouTube video in 2003 and was so captivated he was determined to master the art. Aided by amplifiers and microphones, beatboxers use their mouths, lips, tongues and voices to simulate a range of sounds from drumbeats and rhythm sections to other musical instruments and turntable effects.
'I had never seen that kind of stuff before. I was amazed and wondered what the hell it was,' Gui recalls. 'I was dying to find out about beatbox on a Chinese site, but I couldn't find anything.'
