Musician Adam Page is explaining his favourite beats down the phone from his home in Adelaide.
"My favourite beat that has been sampled by hundreds of hip hop artists is from a band called Skull Snaps and it's from a tune called 'It's A New Day'," he says."It's just a classic, classic beat. It's the type of beat I would use anyway if I was to use a funk groove. It's been sampled by LL Cool J, De La Soul."
But a fully immersive experience arrives when Adam begins beatboxing, the familiar loop crackling down the phoneline.
Beats have played a big role in Adam's life. He first began playing drums in primary school. "Back in Year Three, and I remember I used to play drums in the Year 7 rock band. I knew I had made it at that point," he laughs.
Page has since mastered everything from keys, bass, guitar, saxophone, flute, and much more, feeding improvised grooves through loop pedals for performances that have captivated audiences since he first took the stage at Adelaide Fringe in 2006.
This year, he returns to Fringe with a new show 'BIG BEATS'. Known for his completely improvised shows, 'BIG BEATS' finds Adam using familiar drum loops from history as a base to build new grooves.
"I'm dissecting big beats that exist in the pop and rock world, chopping them up live on stage, and creating new music from those," he says.
"Effectively, the scaffolding will be planned, but then in my true music-making spirit I will be opening it up for a lot of improvisation.
"Every night, the main elements of the groove will be similar, but then I'll be branching out a lot. I guess it's like a beat producer/ DJ but just in real-time where I build new grooves out of existing beats."
Alongside the Skull Snaps' break, Adam plans to delve deep into the history of beats. Some that have filled him with giddy excitement include Taylor Swift's 'Shake It Off', Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean', and Led Zeppelin's 'When The Levee Breaks', the latter of which he suddenly beatboxes.
"I'm effectively just seeking out really recognisable drum grooves, so that when I do create these improvisations the audience has something to latch on to even though they will be spliced up a little bit and rearranged and recreated, they'll still recognise the texture and tone and sounds of these beats.
"I'm really looking forward to experimenting with what I can do with these beats. Not just sampling the beat but pulling them apart a little bit. The anatomy of groove!"
This year's Adelaide Fringe will see the launch of a new venue, The Pyramid at Fool's Paradise. Located in Victoria Square, outside of the familiar Fringe Hub, Adam is "excited to jump onboard because it was a new venture".
"The venue is a lot bigger than what I would normally play. I'm excited because with a bigger room means there's a bigger PA. It's a cranking soundsystem.
"A lot of music from that big beat period in the '90s was really bass-driven with lots of big, fat, bin-shaking bass; a big beat, and a big fat bassline that'll make your molars shake, and then I'll take it from there."
Delving into the world of pop and rock is a challenge for Adam, certainly outside of his comfort zones of jazz – and funk-inspired improvised solo jams.
However, he sees the challenge as being part of the spirit of the Fringe festival, and audiences will be enraptured as they always are by Adam's incredible music-making abilities.
"I always like to do something different for Fringe because that's what Fringe is all about," he says. "I think if you're not pushing yourself creatively as an original artist, you're not getting everything you can out of the Fringe experience.
"I usually just create my own beats on stage, but using pre-existing beats and reimagining them on stage I think is going to be really enriching for the audience but especially for me."
Adam Page's 'BIG BEATS' plays Adelaide Fringe at The Pyramid at Fool's Paradise 1-5 March.
