Best Battle DJ

DJs in Houston generally don't get much respect on the national scene. Not including the late DJ Screw, you'd be hard-pressed to find a spinner from our fair city who has established a crowd outside its limits. Enter Fast4ward, a young, hip-hop-reared, experimental turntablist known for inciting near-riots of sound under his needles. Influenced equally by hip-hop forefathers like Afrika Bambaataa, today's turntable manipulators like DJ Craze, minimalist artists like John Cage and swooning, experimental rockers like Radiohead and Sonic Youth, Fast4ward takes music that, well, just shouldn't fit together and somehow makes it work. Oftentimes he'll come up with a whole new composition using nothing but found sounds from records. His "band," the Truth, is leading the new music revolution in Houston with a turntable orchestra of sorts, and when he's not cutting it up with them, you can see him performing with the Free Radicals, Studemont Project and Kwam from Freedom Sold. Quite often he's out of town, though, showing fools in other states how it's gonna be done in 2020, when the rest of the world catches up to him.