REAL CEX: “I’m trying to promote places that are more instinctual, less intellectualized and condemned.” |
ATLANTA — Detroit’s cartoonish thug MCs Insane Clown Posse have an unexpected admirer in Rjyan Kidwell, a/k/a Baltimore-based laptop improv artist Cex. What binds Cex and ICP, however, isn’t that obvious: it’s not white-boy rap, or even a dark carnival mentality, though it could be said that the perpetually neurotic, anamorphic Kidwell has explored both since breaking through in 2001 with Oops, I Did It Again! and following up with Tall, Dark & Handcuffed. What Kidwell applauds is ICP’s ability to forge a community. “Every year they do this Gathering of the Juggalos, and it’s like a four-day long festival where you camp out and paint faces and attend panels and performances,” he says during his Atlanta tour stop. “And you get to play dodge ball and four square with, like, Violent Jay. It’s some mystical shit.”That’s another thing ICP and Kidwell share: there are times when it’s hard to tell whether you’re being toyed with. Critics are starting to take Cex seriously, however. With his new, sixth album, Actual Fucking (Automation), he’s being accepted as an artist with license to play with his identity rather than just a sketchy kid tweaking post-Aphex-Twin-isms or busting lap-hop raps one minute and touring as a Nine Inch Nails–style aggro band the next.
Barely 24, Kidwell still struggles with the doubts and self-loathing he explored on 2003’s claustrophobic Maryland Mansions. As he fidgets on a patio near the Drunken Unicorn, where he’ll be performing later in the evening, he rambles on about how he became a “computer guy” only in part because of his short attention span — he was also mortified by his rangy body. He’s reluctant to rely on others, something he attributes to nuclear-family-bred, computer-fueled introversion and also to growing up around Baltimore, a porcupine city of hard streets. But, as Actual Fucking attests, he’s finding a better balance of id, ego, and super-ego.
“When I started, I pushed the idea of ‘Don’t be self-conscious, let’s have a party,’ and I pushed it a lot,” he recalls, looking back on the period when he lived in the Bay Area and founded the laptop terrorist Tigerbeat6 label with Kid 606. “Then pop got embraced by the guardians of the underground, and since that job was done, I felt I could worry less about dropping a bomb track and more about dropping science, exploring more who I was.
“Now I feel free and that it’s important for me to bring as much id as possible because the audience usually doesn’t bring it. Sex is usually presented as either overly humorous or something to be overly shameful of. I think it’s really important to present a middle ground where people can be free about their sexuality. With this album I wanted to show how changing the way you look at just one aspect of your life can affect other parts of it. I’m trying to promote places that are more instinctual, less intellectualized and condemned.”
Aided by wife Roby Newton (formerly of Milemarker) and Joan of Arc’s Tim Kinsella, Portland’s Nice Nice, and Aloha drummer Cale Parks, Kidwell on Actual Fucking campaigns to repeal repression. The album’s eight dubby tracks — named for cities where he’s had memorable encounters — are jittery yet approachable amalgams of Cex’s musical facets, resonant composites of abstract Radiohead, Eno-era Bowie, come-hither krautrock, and pure kink.
On stage at the Drunken Unicorn, Kidwell hunches over a red strobe light with a microphone cradled in a tight fist. He breaks songs down into digitally deconstructed Baltimore Club beats. And as the soundtrack becomes a single-minded mantra, he interpolates Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” into his anguished plea: “I’ve kicked the habit. Shed my skin.” That’s the real Kidwell — the Kidwell who isn’t fucking with anyone.
On the Web
Cex: //www.rjyan.com/
