NEWSLETTER

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Remember the first time you:
French-kissed, rode a roller coaster, successfully shoplifted, went to a (good) punk show, held a puppy, fucked, got drunk, fell in love, realized you’re gonna die, saw a rainbow, heard Public Enemy, ate crème brûlée, cried (good cried), got in a fight, laughed so hard your stomach hurt...remember the last time you had an epiphany?

They seem to be kind of few and far between these days, don’t they? Especially those of the musical variety. Especially especially those of the electronic music variety. In a world that’s way too full of laptop techheads glitching away to rooms full of straight white guys, Jesus has arrived to lead us out of the darkness. We thought it was just Kid 606. Then we put in the new album and realized it was holymotherfuckingKidmotherfucking606.

The action packed mentallist brings you the fucking jams is a seven-song masterpiece that will blow your fucking head off. Seriously. This is the kind of music that makes you stare at your friends in disbelief with the kind of expression on your face that you usually only make on four hits of ecstasy at 5:00 AM. You know, that open-mouthed, caught in a wind tunnel, “Can you believe this?” face. That “He didn’t just fucking do that did he?!” kind of face.

The action packed mentallist brings you the fucking jams is an absolutely essential album not only because it sounds so cool but because it’s bringing some punk, aggressiveness, experimentation, and sex into the land of the laptops. It is very fuck-driven music and the person who made it deserves to conduct himself like a rock star à la the Stones or Zeppelin in the 70s. We asked Kid 606 if there is such a thing as an IDM groupie. “If I was gay, I’d be cleaning up like you wouldn’t believe,” he told us from his home in California. “I’m not naming names, but I know a couple of gay electronic acts and they just fucking score. It should be the same for heteros. There’s nothing wrong with having sex with someone on the first night, but in so much of America it’s an issue. In Europe it’s not and in Japan they have no weird emotional attachments to having sex.”

Perhaps more dangerous than free love is US copyright law. Kid is running into serious infringement land here. One of the most profound examples of this is when he samples Missy Elliot going “I’m copy written so...don’t copy me. Don’t copy me. Don’t copy me. Copy me. Copy me. Copy me. C-c-copy. C-c-copy. Copy. Copy. Copy. Copy. Copy. C-c-c-c-c-c” until the unadulterated chaos is broken up with a drawn out silence and then “c-c-c-c-o-o-o-o-p-p-p-p-y-y-y-y-m-m-m-m-e-e-e-e” and then fucking explosions. Wow.

Some people hear this shit and they can’t figure whether Kid 606 is a true fan of the music he’s manipulating or just a smirking satirist. “It’s weird how people have to know if I like the music before they decide whether they’ll like my stuff or not,” he says. “I live in Oakland, and my friends just drop by the house and are like, ‘This shit rocks.’ They don’t ask how I feel about the samples I use.” There’s no doubt that the indie-tronic community is going to be divided over this. Those with their heads up their own asses won’t be able to hear its genius through all the shit. Kid goes on in his high-pitched, hyperspeed voice, “This is music that: a) you can’t publish, b) you can get in trouble for making, and c) most people will think you’re a clown for making.”

This is not original material in the strictest sense of the word. It’s closer to remixing, although it isn’t that either. It’s more like electronic plastic surgery disasters. Sculpting a Frankenstein from the graveyards of urban Top 40 radio and nostalgic 80s corpses. Kid doesn’t want to become (as he puts it) the “IDM ODB,” ending up in the clink for unlawful use of a sampler, so you’ll have to just buy the album and keep your mouth shut next time you’re hanging around Missy, Thom Yorke, Jay-Z, or anyone else that’s appropriated by the Kid. Okay? Most of these uncleared albums sell around 1,000 copies (like Z-Trip’s Uneasy Listening) because any more than that means showing up on the global radar and getting dinged. Thanks to Kid’s label Violent Turd being buried in the mountains of New Zealand you KNOW this monster is going to get away with 20,000 before the day is done. The sky is the limit. “If we can sell twenty or thirty thousand copies, we’re just gonna keep pressing it up,” says Kid. And if any authorities ever do try to put him on lockdown, we at VICE are going to fight it like they just put Nelson Mandela back in jail. We haven’t been this fucking head-over-heels for a musician since the first time we heard Andrew WK.

In the course of this sixty-two-minute CD, Kid 606:

• crafts a juggernaut of a track, entitled “never underestimate the value of a holler (vipee-pee mix),” that starts with a jump-up version of “Get Ur Freak On” and ends with an equally jungle-damaged “Take on Me.” After fourteen minutes of the most damaging, punishing, exhilarating glitchcore, ragga, techno, and hip hop in a punk blender, A-Ha coming completely out of nowhere is the aural equivalent of a cripplingly good orgasm.

• blasts into “Video Killed the Radio Star” (via Eminem and Mystikal), intercutting it with vocal samples of a toaster chanting, “When the crowd say Bo! Selectah!” and NWA intoning, “Street Knowledge.” All of this is over another frenetic and amphetemistic junglish backing. The fucking track is called “mp3 killed the cd star.”

• takes on Bikini Kill — which in a way is more daunting than risking a lawsuit from Ja Rule — with a blistering cover of “Rebel Girl.” Kid 606 sets the original vocal and guitar to a violent ragga/drum and bass backing and glitches the fuck out of Kathleen Hanna’s voice. It’s like hearing a gigantic Kathleen Hanna cyborg scream from 500 feet below the sea. It’s fucking scary and awesome and if Hanna is anywhere near as cool as I hope she is, she’ll love this when she hears it.

• in “this is not my statement,” Kid juxtaposes a men’s college a cappella group’s rendition of Radiohead’s “Creep” with the laser-y scraping sounds of an iBook trying to turn itself inside out. Then he loops the “I don’t belong here” part for a good ghostly ten minutes, bringing you into a paranoid and hypnotized but also transcendental place that’s not unlike the “terrifying elf kingdom” that DMT users report traveling to.

The Kid is on tour now with Jamie Lydell (of Supercollider) and IDM rap sensation Gold Chains, both of whom are kindred spirits in putting some unpredictability into live electronic music. “I tend to just get crazy drunk and really mess it up,” Kid says of the tour. “I have to get fucked up to play live. Maybe it sounds stupid, but there’s no way that I could, with a straight face, stand behind a computer and geek out for an hour. I can make it more interesting the less conscious I am of what I’m doing.” If he’s capable of reproducing even one-tenth of the visceral impact of this music in a live setting, bring a fucking diaper to the show. All your friends, too.

It’s time to join the Kid 606 Army.

JERRY MCPHERSON

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