What happens when you take away the lights, the fog, the big arena rock star pretensions? You get accessible and very human musicians and story-tellers. That's the push behind Invisible Records' Beatbox Soapbox Tour: take away all the crap and the glitter and give you the core diamond. Meg and Jared took to the road to give their audiences a very intimate performance of material from their new albums and Earpollution got a chance to hang with the Candid and the Outspoken as they Kerouac-ed their way across America.

Nine guys in bar-coded overalls and freakish masks that would give Rob Bottin a run for his money get on the stage and sonically pile-drive the audience into a sweating, thrashing frenzy. This is Slipknot, the Halloween collective that has hijacked Kiss' historical penchant for anonymity and coupled it with a sound that comes across as a handful of the noisiest, fiercest animals in the zoo being forced through a giant blender. As "8" likes to say: "This [song] will rip your crotch off." eP's Jeff Ashley straps on the iron jockstrap and heads into the cage for a chat with Slipknot.