The Thousands

For a time in the early 2000s, Baltimore’s Ryan Kidwell was the most innovative figure in electronic music, both as aliased producer Cex and co-founder of the Tigerbeat6 label: home to Kid606, Electric Company and others helping define now-commonplace ‘glitch’ editing styles and mash-up sampling technique. The first Cex releases, 2000′s Role Model and 2001′s Oops I Did It Again, are authentic bridge documents from British IDM to bedroom ‘electronica’ as we know it – personal, molten and expressive rather than strictly experimental, and wildly prescient in terms of anything-goes electro-acoustic home recording.       

**Then, anomalously, Kidwell developed an MC persona and issued a string of albums predicated on ironic raps – culminating in the woeful 2006 band album made with his wife called Actual Fucking on which they both sing. Unbelievably, nearly a decade into his career, Kidwell now returns to form with Bataille Royale, an album which, title aside, takes itself dead seriously. Tracks ‘Lazt Gasp’, ‘Roland Park Acid’ and ‘Pond and Hooper’ sound like Autechre, but aroused; ‘The Fifth One’ and ‘1l’ are suites for green LED and migrating iron filings; while ‘Freq’ and ‘Brains Out’ suggest sounds of Kidwell’s native booty, B-more neighbourhood.