Q-Bert (born 1969) is the performing name of Richard Quitevis, a Filipino-American (of Ilocano descent) DJ and music-writer. Living in San Francisco, he started playing with records at the age of 15 and was influenced by the street performers of San Francisco’s hip-hop community in the mid 1980s.
He started his musical career in a group called FM20 with Mix Master Mike and Apollo in 1990. They were playing a show in New York when Crazy Legs saw them and invited them to join the Rock Steady Crew. They accepted, and going by the name of the Rock Steady DJ’s they proceeded to take the 1992 Disco Mixing Club (DMC) world title.
Q-Bert was also one of the founding members of the band Invisibl Skratch Piklz. Entitled Wave Twisters, the album was created mainly with samplers and beat machines versus the turntable, and later turned into an animated feature of the same title. Wave Twisters (2001) the movie was somewhat unusual in that the animators and digital artists had to invent images and movements to the pre-recorded music, as opposed to the other way around.
His music was also featured in the game Tony Hawk’s Underground and FreQuency. |
