Kid Beyond is an American singer, beatboxer, songwriter, live looper and voice actor, based in the San Francisco area.
Early career
Chaikin attended Brown University and was a leader in the co-ed fraternity Zeta Delta Xi. He sang in the Jabberwocks, a student a cappella group. He graduated in 1991 and moved to San Francisco to join the House Jacks with Deke Sharon, recording "Naked Noise" and "Funkwich" with the band. He left the House Jacks in 1997. In 2004, Kid Beyond made a cameo appearance as an actor in the music video Maximum Wage, which featured music he co-created with Andrew Bancroft. He released his first solo EP, Amplivate, in 2006.
Kid Beyond's performances often include some traditional beatboxing as well as live looping. The looped pieces make heavy use of Ableton's Live software on a laptop to layer and loop vocal and vocal percussion tracks together to create full songs. Prior to concerts, the software is configured with the tracks that will be used in each piece, including any necessary effects and levels, but lacking any audio. A set of MIDI controller foot pedals allow Kid Beyond to control the software during performance, enabling him to record, play, and manipulate the audio tracks with a set of predefined macros. In some cases, a single press of a pedal performs multiple actions, such as muting one track while initializing recording on another. In recognition of his innovative techniques, Ableton made him a featured artist on their website and presented him at a series of clinics in Germany. The associated footage was shown on a number of viral video sites.
Voice work
As Andrew Chaikin, he has performed as a voice-over artist for a number of video games and advertisements, prominently in American McGee's Alice as The Mad Hatter/The White Rabbit/The March Hare, and in the 2005 game ', where he does the voices of Clone Advisor and Delta 40 "Fixer". He also provided several voices in graphic adventure titles by Telltale Games, including Phoney Bone and Ted the bug in the Bone adaptations, a pair of suspects in ', and most notably Max for the first episode "Culture Shock" of Sam & Max Season One before being replaced by William Kasten for the rest of the series due to health reasons. The Telltale Games characters include a few pirates in Tales of Monkey Island and Narrator, Papierwaite, and a Moleman in '. He also voiced Biff Tannen in ', Grendel in The Wolf Among Us, Roman in ' and Carlos in the second season of '. He has also provided his vocal talents for the cover versions of the songs from Konami's Karaoke Revolutionvideo game series starting with Karaoke Revolution Volume 2. His song "Mothership" is on Tap Tap Revenge 2. He has appeared in the official video game adaptation of Iron Man 2 as the villain Ultimo and JARVIS. He has done multiple covers for the Guitar Hero series of video games, including "No One Knows" by Queens of the Stone Age and "Girlfriend" by Matthew Sweet. He appears as Penny Arcade'sTycho Brahe in Poker Night at the Inventory, making him the first actor to ever portray the character. He voiced Dio Brando in the 2004 English dub of the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure OVA.
