CEX: “Enter Carter”

(Get Your Badass On 7" EP, 555 Recordings of Leeds, 2000)

It almost certainly required the Internet—and the early Internet, at that: a bunch of isolated mid-’90s obscurists seeking anonymous congress and debate with other freaks via 2400-baud dial-up line—to invent a musical genre name as self-obliviously stupid as “Intelligent Dance Music,” or IDM. And yet, deep in the Bill Clinton years, before the Hale-Bopp comet flickered past and businesses bought ad space to reassure us they were “Y2K compliant,” IDM was an accepted, if ridiculed, descriptor for synthesizer-or MIDI-based music never intended for clubs, but that—if you were a sensitive, slightly misunderstood fancier of vintage drum machines, C++, weed, and soldering irons—might well have provided insistent clicking background rhythms on your minidisc player as you sat in your school’s computer lab, toggling between some listserv digest on the ASCII-formatted screen of your Pine e-mail client and a search of rec.music.marketplace.vinyl for old Aphex Twin 12"s.

Rockism was so suspect by the latter half of the 1990s that everyone I knew had traded in their guitar records for techno, ambient, and trance; trip-hop, illbient, drum ‘n’ bass, and jungle; techstep, dubstep, and grime; digital hardcore, chiptune, laptronica, electroclash, and all manner of other absurdly narrow, precisely taxonomized subgenres of electronic music. I own records produced by sampling the stutters of intentionally scratched CDs, records “programmed in Music 2000 on a Sony PlayStation,” records made by modifying the circuits of handheld electronics, records comprised of “analogue tone poems” made by trading tapes through the mail—not one of which has been on my turntable for years. When everyone except the futurist diehards tired of records that didn’t sound appreciably better or worse, just slightly different, whether played at 33⅓ or 45 RPM, some listeners found even terrible rock bands like the Strokes and the White Stripes refreshing.

The earliest records by Rjyan Kidwell—then a Maryland high school student making music under the name Cex (does it need saying that most electronic bands are one or two people at the most?)—were electronic pastorals, tentative keyboard melodies twinkling atop distorted beats and granular dissolves, with the occasional vocal sample. From the start, Kidwell mocked the electronic music scene, with sleeve notes such as his list of “alternate song titles for the ‘IDM’ crowd who demand meaningless gob-bledeegook: Fff, Zadda Zoo, F?, Cpckes, Dol-Ell.i.zit, Zoo!d” and actual song titles—“Your Handwriting when You Were a Child in the Winter”—that punctured the fake nostalgia so many synthesized instrumentals seem designed to inspire.

“Enter Carter,” a seventy-second goof, samples a dude who sounds almost shocked by how stoned he is: “So when something is weird, you’ve got to get a picture of it!” “I see what you’re saying,” another dude responds. “Weird things deserve pictures of them. As proof that they’re weird. The pictures will then in turn make people think differently about the world and society.” An android voice chimes in, deadpan: “Woooord up. I hear that.” This conversation occurs over mournful synthesizer chords crossfaded into gentle feedback that wheezes briefly and is suddenly cut off. It’s the sound of artificial intelligence getting high and spending all day surfing—a verb that, in its sense of adventure, still pertained—websites where Flash animation had only begun to overtake flying toasters and purple text on black backgrounds. The track’s brevity, the dialogue’s simultaneous pretensions and inanities, and the swift, unexpected ending all seem fitting tributes to IDM’s historical moment: within months, Kidwell had moved on to spaz rap he improvised on stage, sometimes while stripping to his underwear. The only nostalgia the melancholic digital textures of IDM seem likely to inspire today is a yearning for what now seems the ease and prosperity of the pre-millennial years, when our traumas were small and isolated, and we coded our machines to sing them for us in the haunted voices of 1s and 0s.