BENK Beats: East alum Ben Krebs has been making his own house music for the last three years and is now DJing at shows

In the Lawrence Jayhawk Cafe’s Boom Boom Room during his senior year of college, East alum Ben Krebs played one of his own house music-styled songs for the first time ever in front of a crowd.

Instead of being met with drunk college-aged kids cheering and dancing to his song, they booed. 

“It was bad, people hated me,” Ben said. 

He switched up the tracklist from his preplanned house music to “safer” options: Pitbull, Ke$ha and The Black Eyed Peas. 

According to Ben, all songs have to sonically sound good to do well at shows. Before he started performing at the University of Kansas, he used the sound system at venues to test how his songs sounded on the big speakers. 

Then, he’d revert to the more basic songs such as Kanye and Katy Perry when people showed up — sneaking in one or two of his own songs as the night progressed, cautiously avoiding a repeat of the booing incident. 

“It kind of weighed on me that [I’d] hit the ceiling,” Ben said. “There’s no room to try anything new, so then I figured if I wanted to do that [in Kansas City,] I’d have to make my own path.”

Ben has spent the last three years boosting his DJ career through hard work and support from his family. Now, Ben is becoming more successful with seven of his own songs released on Spotify and he has even played a show at the Lowest Ferns, the “holy grail” of Kansas City house music venues. 

It takes at least a couple of weeks for one of Ben’s songs to be put on Spotify from production to release because of the difficulty of catching the attention of record labels. In that time, the quality of his music only increases. With each song he makes, the separation of sounds gets better, the sound gets louder and works in mono and stereo — different types of amplifiers — even more. 

According to Ben, the songs on his Spotify are worse than those he’s making right now — and getting the better songs noticed by record labels and onto Spotify is just a waiting game. 

The manager of his group, One 28 Collective, Karli Kelley, met and recruited Ben through a mutual friend. She sends Ben’s music out to different producers in the industry and is in charge of scheduling shows for Ben and the rest of the group. 

At those shows, she usually has Ben at the end of the setlist — making sure the crowd is hyped up for his performance and the show can end on a high note. The purpose of the group is so they can pool all of their resources together, they don’t play together like a normal band. 

“Meeting Ben, who’s someone who literally hasn’t even gone to a big festival or show [that] can produce at his level blew my mind,” Karli said. 

At one of his first Kansas City shows, Ben’s family, co-workers and friends from high school filled the crowd. He went earlier in the set order of the night and “rocked it,” according to Ben’s mom, Tory Krebs. 

Once his set was over the crowd emptied, leaving the headliner with a smaller crowd than Ben. 

For the past three years, Ben has developed an ear for music. He can identify which ear small beats are coming from in his headphones and find quiet ad-libs in the background of an otherwise loud song — helping him add the small details in his own songs too. 

Whenever he’s listening to music in the car — whether it be R&B, pop or rap — his mind’s constantly flooded thinking about beats and composition of songs. 

“It gets pretty depressing, because once you hear everything, you don’t really look at music as entertainment,” Ben said. “You kind of get in this mindset of you have to dissect everything you listen to.” 

His house music obsession started when his brother Will Krebs would come home from college and talk all about his DJ career at Texas Christian University. He showed Ben the music they listened to at parties, his own music and the Ableton software Will used to make his songs — Ben was hooked. 

Ben and Will ended up Instagram DMing popular house music artist, Kamino, and taking lessons over Zoom through other artist Lee Foss’s Repopulate Mars courses. 

While Will doesn’t have as much time or success as Ben to pursue DJing, a lot of their conversations revolve around music, and they share their songs.

“It’s great because it’s trickled down to every person in my family sharing that type of music,” Will said. “Now my brother listens to the same genre, and so do my parents.”

Ben’s parents attend as many of his shows as possible, despite their lack of rave outfits, their loud cheers for Ben making them stand out in the college-aged crowd.

One Christmas, about 20 of his family members piled into his parents’ basement to hear the debut of Ben’s song “Action Action.” 

“We were trying to do headstands on the pole in the basement [and] jumping on the couches,” Tory said. “It was loud, and we were flashing the lights. It was hilarious.”

With each song that Ben makes, he prides himself in being unique — no one has access to the flash drive he plays off of. 

“I could play an hour of just my music, and I could deliver an experience that you literally could not get anywhere else,” Ben said. “It’s cool, because it’s kind of like bragging rights.”