Miguel Depedro, aka KID606, has nothing left to prove–and anyway he’s never seemed to care what people think of him. Depedro, who runs Tigerbeat6, the most perverse and irreverent electronic label I can think of, made his mark in 2002 with The Action Packed Mentalist Brings You the Fucking Jams (Violent Turd), an obnoxiously agitated, in-your-face pileup of dirty gabber breakbeats and uncleared, uncredited samples from the likes of Jay-Z, Bikini Kill, and Missy Elliott. Since then he’s put out a few more hyper-jacked genre-busting albums, but the new Resilience (Tigerbeat6) is a big middle finger even to the folks who liked his aggro self: it’s a gentle, lilting album, distant and muted, with a lead track called “Done With the Scene.” He lingers interminably on the smallest seed of an idea–a trip-hop or dancehall beat, a keyboard melody that an untrained musician could plink out with two fingers–and then adds synthesizer bug bites or a layer of flange or distortion. I get the feeling he’s sucking a little on purpose, just to see what people will say, but fortunately he still uses one of his best tricks: every so often a song surges into another galaxy at warp speed, mutating the beat and adding new layers of sound, before returning to the original pattern 10 or 15 seconds later. On Resilience these little trips tend to be to the land of Prefuse 73, where hip-hop hangs out in an opium den. “Banana Peel,” the strongest cut, is a jungly tangle of muted synth stabs and wood-block clicks under a constellation of bright keyboard dribbles, and the whole thing sounds like a reggae dance club that’s dipping underwater and then bobbing back to the surface every couple bars. Nothing on the album goes anywhere or builds up any drama, but given that none of Depedro’s stuff ever has, I have to ask: Who cares? –Liz Armstrong
