Baltimore's white kid Rjyan "Cex" Kidwell was a child prodigy of electronic dance music: his first three albums were conceived in his bedroom when he was still a teenager.
The 73-minute Cells (1998) is a collection of lengthy dance jams for synth and beat-boxes.
The instrumental synth-pop fantasia At Least One Unwilling Passenger on Keith's Ego Trip sets the tone: a sort of Mike Oldfield with hip-hop beats and juvenile exuberance.
The rest runs the gamut from
the more abstract eight-minute Any Door Part 1, which blurs the border between musique concrete, hip-hop and post-rock,
and
the nine-minute Times Man of the Year, which bridges orchestral new-age music and industrial hip-hop.
In his hands, percussive tornadoes like Sterile- Starve become atmospheric and mildly exotic ambient music.
He tinkers with the dissonant jazz and gamelan of the eight-minute I Have Life Rage and
with the hard-hitting electronica of the nine-minute Heartbeat of Korea,
where Mike Oldfield meets Aphex Twin and
DJ Shadow.
The longer pieces are complemented by frenzied futuristic instrumental hip-hop vignettes like Bsnbc and Helvetica.
After the seven-song EP Role Playa (2000), which includes the somber seven-minute Rjyan Kidwell's Funeral,
Cex released his second album, Roll Model (2000), which combines
relatively facile suites like the
seven-minute At Least I Can Say I Tried with noisy experiments like
The Angels Are There (and it reprises Rjyan Kidwell's Funeral).
Starship Galactica (2001) introduced an art of brainy, glitchy, humorous and effervescent beats, notably Monster-Face Pills, but most of the album is filler.
In 2000 he co-founded the label Tigerbeat 6 with musical partner Kid 606.
Oops I Did It Again (2001) is a more consistent work of instrumental hip-hop, although mostly devoted to an odd form of wordless
parody, notably Texas Menstruates)
and Florida (Is Shaped Like A Big Droopy Dick For A Reason).
He converted to rapping on
Tall, Dark & Handcuffed (2002), his first
album with vocals throughout, containing
Brutal Exposure and
Ghost Rider.
The eight-song mini-album Maryland Mansions (2003) instead mixes
rock songs like Drive Off A Mountain, rap songs like
Stillnaut Rjyan
and hybrids like
Kill Me. A rather amateurish work.
After relocating to California,
Being Ridden (2003) was another mixture of
rap (The Wayback Machine, The Marriage) and
rock (You Kiss Like You're Dead, Dead Bodies),
drawing inspiration from both
Eminem
and Beck.
It is telling that the standout is
the abstract beat-less instrumental Other Countries.
The album's instrumental version is a completely different beast,
where the fusion of hip-hop, pop and noise yields atmospheric vignettes
like The Wayback Machine and You Kiss Like You're Deadly that
don't even remotely resemble the originals.
Actual Fucking (Automation, 2006) is less of a hip-hop album and
more of a collaborative effort (his wife Roby Newton,
Joan of Arc's Tim Kinsella, Nice Nice's Jason Buehler and Mike Shirazi,
Dismemberment Plan's Jason Caddell, Love of Everything's Cale Parks).
It's another odd mixture of songs
(the bluesy Denton, the stately Chapel Hill)
and straightforward dance jams (Los Angeles).
The quality declined very rapidly with the subsequent albums:
Sketchi (2007),
Dannibal (2007),
Bataille Royale (2009),
Tiny Creature (2011),
Presumed Dead (2012),
Masokismi (2012),
Prosperity (2013), released as Rjyan Kidwell,
Shamaneater (2014),
Prismatic Spray (2013),
Shamaneater (2014),
Irreducible Sensations (2016),
Maryland Club Music (2016),
Multsatan (2017),
Spell for Ascending Through the Heavens (2017),
Cave Paintings (2019),
etc.
Cex was also active as Secs, releasing: Rags (2018), Doer (2020), Nixy (2021), Bats (2022), etc
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