Dibia$e

Dibia$e is a Los Angeles beatmaker who makes music the old way — live, in front of an audience, with the process as the product. His Twitch production streams turn beat-making into a spectator sport: chopping samples, programming drums, and building tracks from scratch while chat watches every decision. The sessions run deep in Serato Studio — he has planned full batches of Serato-only beats for upcoming projects — and they double as education: part tutorial, part performance, part hangout. You learn something, you hear something, and you feel like you are in the studio.

The rig is humble by design, and the story behind it is the whole philosophy. Dibia$e started making beats in high school with an 8-second Gemini sampler and a Sony Walkman — finding samples, looping them, running layers back through the Walkman, stacking until a beat emerged. “Back then I used whatever I could get my hands on,” he has said of those years. The tools have changed — a combination of hardware and software now, sampling and layering drums through an SP-12 or an SP-404 to dirty them up, then dumping everything back into Ableton — but the method is the same. He starts with a sample or with drums depending on mood, kits or chopped layers, no fixed formula. “Most of the time I let the process happen naturally.”

That process grew up inside one of the most fertile underground scenes in American music. Dibia$e came up through the Los Angeles beat culture of the early 2000s — the lo-fi laboratories documented in Roland’s Beat Culture & the SP-404 film, where he appears alongside Flying Lotus and Ras G, tracing a lineage that runs through Project Blowed, Sketchbook, Boombox, and the Low End Theory. These were producers treating the SP-404 sampler as an instrument and a voice, building a gritty, warbling, cassette-hiss sound that has since found a global home. Dibia$e was there for the foundation, and the foundation still shows in every drum he programs.

The wider world got its first good look during the Red Bull Big Tune era. Billed as a legendary underground Myspace producer, Dibia$e battled his way through the Los Angeles Big Tune showcase — serenading the crowd, as the footage put it — and earned one of sixteen spots in the New York finals, a run that aired on BET. It was an early proof that his sound could hold a stage as well as a studio, and it put a cult figure in front of a national audience years before streaming made beat-making a spectator sport.

The catalog that followed is deep and defiantly independent. Instrumental albums like Sound Palace, Machines Hate Me, and Cakeology built the reputation: classic boom-bap bones fused with lo-fi aesthetics and experimental soundscapes, nostalgic soul samples rubbing against off-kilter rhythms and futuristic synths. Fat Beats Records tapped him for Volume One of its Baker’s Dozen series — thirteen raw, unfiltered beats that read like a direct transmission from the creative process — and projects like Looney Goons, Schematiks, Bonus Levels, and Last Wave kept pushing at the edges. Looney Goons in particular swung for the fences, blending hip-hop, dubstep, and electronica with video-game effects and MC vocal chops; even reviewers who found it chaotic conceded the ambition. In late 2024 he linked with Toronto’s Raz Fresco for KNOCKOUT, a ten-track collaboration the two broke down with Rhettmatic of the Beat Junkies on Soundcheck.

Independence is not a phase for Dibia$e — it is the business model. Releases land on Bandcamp first, vinyl pressings follow when the music demands it, and physical media is treated as the premium tier rather than a nostalgia play. In the streaming era, pressing wax is a statement of intent: this music is meant to last. The Twitch streams fit the same logic. Instead of guarding the process, he broadcasts it — every session a reminder that beats are not made by software, but by taste, patience, and ten thousand hours.

The stories stack up like liner notes. On the Inside LOOK couch at Twelve’s Wax in Sacramento — Dibia$e is Los Angeles born and Sacramento based — he talked early production years, experimenting across DAWs and hardware, and the kind of moments you cannot manufacture: smoking a blunt with J Dilla, drinking sake on tour in Japan for 404 Day. Serato made him one of the faces of its Serato Stems Presents series, sitting for an in-depth Unscripted interview and judging its Studio 2.0 remix competition. These are the rooms where the craft gets discussed seriously, and Dibia$e is a regular in them.

What separates him in the crowded field of producer-streamers is dexterity in the oldest sense. His MPC work is genuinely physical — fingers flying, timing human — and the streams preserve something the beat scene was built on: the idea that watching someone make music can be as compelling as the music itself. Chat is not an audience; it is a studio crowd, reacting to every chop in real time.

Los Angeles does not suffer mediocre beatmakers. The city that raised Dilla’s disciples and the Low End Theory lineage is the most competitive beat scene on the planet, and holding a lane there for the better part of two decades — from Myspace pages to Twitch chat — says everything about the skill level. Dibia$e did not chase the industry; he built a parallel one, one beat, one stream, one vinyl pressing at a time.

In a music business obsessed with finished products, Dibia$e still sells the process — and the process remains mesmerizing. Tune in and you are not just hearing beats. You are watching the hours accumulate in real time, the same way they did back when the whole studio was a sampler and a Walkman.