After his last encore, Rjyan Kidwell usually remembers to take care of introductions. His hair stringy with sweat, his bare chest shining, he gestures toward his band–singer Roby Newton, who’s also his wife, and drummer Cale Parks. “Thanks,” he says. “We’re Cex.”
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Kidwell has been Cex since high school, when he spent his evenings dinking around on his parents’ computer. One thing led to another, and his interest in ASCII art (“fantasy graffiti for super-introverted computer kids,” as he describes it) turned into an obsession with freeware music applications. In 1998 he self-released Cells, a CD-R of mechanized music for laptops and their geeks. It impressed the equally green Miguel Depedro, aka Kid606, and together they founded Tigerbeat6, a label specializing in off-center versions of what’s usually called Intelligent Dance Music–if the IDM world were a plain Oreo cookie, the Tigerbeat6 roster would be mint, mocha, and Double Stuf.
Actual Fucking is Kidwell’s seventh full-length and his first since 2003’s Maryland Mansions. Cex hasn’t been one dude and a laptop for a while now–the new disc includes contributions from eight other musicians, including Newton, Cale Parks (who also drums in Aloha), and members of Joan of Arc and Make Believe.
When Cex played Seattle’s Chop Suey in June, Newton and Kidwell spent most of the set bent over podiumlike laptop stands tall and narrow enough that they wouldn’t have looked out of place propping up Bibles at the front of a church. They danced in place there, picking their knees up high and punching the air, and Newton ended up wrapping her mike cord around her neck. The gel lights turned both their shaggy heads an identical dirty blond.
I can’t disagree, but unfortunately his analyses don’t get much deeper than that–he’s a lot better at pointing fingers than explaining himself. And there’s a big difference between the humility of Chrysostom and the content of Actual Fucking’s cover illustration–a masked man wearing nothing but Kidwell’s tattoos stands behind a perky-assed pink lady, spraying come all over her back. It’s hard to tell which is longer, his forearm or his dick. Elsewhere in the album art there are disembodied mouths and winking vulvae–if we’re supposed to fuck to become whole, why the fixation on parts?
