At Rap Showcase Crate Sessions, the Beats Are the Stars

Crate Sessions has one goal: to give both up-and-coming and seasoned rap producers a platform to show off old, new, and in-progress music live. Just under a year’s worth of grinding by co-creators Quincy Davis and Miles Krieger has led to five showcases, the most recent of which took place on a stormy Saturday night in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood over the summer.

Inside Loudmouth, the streetwear and record store where the series is hosted, the hype was palpable as around 100 young hip-hop heads stepped out of the rain and crowded around the front desk for a good view. The night’s headliners were a couple of new-generation underground rap pillars—New York’s Mike and Florida’s 454—best known for their prodigious mic skills. But that night, they barely said a word. They performed as their respective producer alter egos, DJ Blackpower and Gatorface, alongside a parade of fellow beatmakers, and let the loops do the talking.

Sample-flips and drum patterns were the stars of the night, as producers stood behind their laptops and MPCs like conductors draped in snapbacks and vintage Washington Wizards T-shirts. Instrumentals and vocal remixes hung in the air like vape smoke. Head bobs abounded, and the mood changed drastically from song-to-song: Fans went from swaying to New York producer Laron’s remix of Alchemist, Earl Sweatshirt, and Navy Blue’s “Nobles” to bounding up and down to lush soul samples from Virginia beatmaker Kirti Pandey and frenetic drum’n’bass from D.C.’s MikeyFM. The room was so shoulder to shoulder, someone inadvertently knocked a Godzilla painting behind the front desk off the wall. 

When 454 and Mike eventually popped out, they were met with a simmering excitement from the audience rather than thunderous applause. The reaction matched the intimate atmosphere—people weren’t there to worship an idol as much as appreciate their less-heralded talents. Both teased old and new beats out of their machines, their smirks suggesting a deep satisfaction. The average fan might not want to hear in-progress 454 beats or cuts from Mike’s Dr. Grabba instrumental project, but for an audience savoring the rare chance to see their faves in a small space, they might as well have won the SNKRS lottery. “Every single person on this bill tonight is on my playlist,” one attendee told me, while 454’s saccharine synths danced off our eardrums.

Beat sets and producer showcases are nothing new in rap. They stretch from producers passing around demo tapes in the 1990s to communities forged in local scenes and in the corners of SoundCloud. But outside of AAA figures like Alchemist or Metro Boomin, producers are rarely given notable platforms to showcase their skills.

Crate Sessions works in the tradition of nights like L.A.’s Low End Theory, which helped put artists including Flying Lotus and Nosaj Thing on the map, or the Flip a Beat Club, which has helped nurture beat scenes across the country over the last three years, giving the people behind the music the respect they deserve. “Everyone’s a headliner,” says co-founder Davis, summing up Crate Sessions’ ethos. Kirti Pandey, who played before Mike and 454 that summer night in Bed-Stuy, agrees. “Whenever I’ve done beat sets in the past, I always kinda felt like I was the intermission,” he ways. “But that was the first show where I saw people get hype for some beats the same way they’d get hype to see their favorite rapper. Definitely a one-of-a-kind experience.”

That same welcoming spirit has pushed Davis, 21, a current student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, for the last couple of years. A beatmaker himself, Davis threw DIY beat sessions at Manhattan’s legendary Astor Place Hairstylists barbershop, where he first met Krieger, 23, who had heard about the shows through friends and Instagram posts. The pair realized they shared an appreciation for producers like J Dilla and Madlib, and that they wanted more beatmakers to reach a similar level of recognition and respect.

The idea that would become Crate Sessions originally began as a jazz lounge for beats, inspired by Krieger’s brief time working at the fabled Blue Note nightclub. “There aren’t any really cool events where you can go, sit down, have a glass of wine, smoke a joint, and have it be a jazzy, [Robert] Glasper-esque event that doesn’t just cater to the 40-plus audience,” he says. “Everything’s targeted at older people. It’s out of our price range.”

But the plan to organize an affordable producer showcase with a debonair twist began to evolve when Davis went to his first Loudmouth rap show last summer and spoke to the store’s co-founder and owner, Sam Morris, who also happens to be a producer. Morris says hosting an event like Crate Sessions at Loudmouth was “a no-brainer. I wanted to bring more independent hip-hop programming to the shop, and Quincy was a younger kid I’d met organically through the store. I wanted to give him the opportunity to bring his idea to fruition.” (Disclosure: I’ve worked with Morris and Loudmouth several times to coordinate events for my podcast, Reel Notes.)

Davis, Krieger, and Morris began conceptualizing and booking their first collab together. By then, the jazz-lounge cool of the original idea had evaporated, with the focus shifting to each set’s intimacy and thoughtful curation. After a few months of planning, the first Crate Sessions went down on July 7, 2023, with California rapper-producer Ovrkast headlining, along with sets from artists like New York’s Stoic as well as Davis himself. Davis had never played beats in front of an audience before, so both running the show and performing in it had his nerves on edge. “I was in the basement making beats up until the moment I had to go on,” he recalls.

Though they didn’t break even, the event brought in a crowd of around 70—significantly more than the trio were expecting. The modest success of their first Crate Sessions pushed them to make every subsequent iteration bigger and better. Both by themselves and alongside the music discovery platform That Good Sh*t, which has helped promote the series from jump, Crate Sessions has spent the last year maintaining fidelity to the kicks, snares, and samples its founders came into the game loving. “That team moves with such good intentions,” Annabelle Kline, founder of That Good Sh*t, says of the Crate Sessions work ethic. “Their character and love of music is why artists like Mike and 454 have felt comfortable coming into this space.”

Now that they’re able to draw bigger names to play a small space like Loudmouth, Crate Sessions is looking to stretch that experience as far as it can. There’s talks of taking the series to slightly larger venues throughout New York City, and even a mini-tour spotlighting local beatmakers across the country. They want to do it all while keeping the series open, affordable, and reflective of local communities. But for now, they’re still working from the heart of Bed-Stuy, uniting devoted rap fans in the timeless art of head-bobbing.