ARTIST: Cex
TITLE: Actual Fucking
LABEL: Automation Records
GENRE: Electronic
BITRATE: 202kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 0h 40m total
RELEASE DATE: 2006-07-02
RIP DATE: 2006-03-29
Track List
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1. Baltimore 4:52
2. Denton 5:52
3. Chapel Hill 4:22
4. Ybor City 3:34
5. Covington 6:15
6. Chicago 4:08
7. Los Angeles 6:39
8. Tucumcari 4:44
Release Notes:
The first Cex album, Cells, was a compilation of tracks Kidwell had been working
on for several years, and was released in 1998 by his own CD-R label,
Underscore, while he was still at Dulaney High School in Timonium, Maryland. The
following year, Kidwell met Miguel Depedro (Kid 606) and the two founded
Tigerbeat6, a record label which would be among the vanguards of the electronica
movement at the time. The next Cex album, Role Model, was one of the label's
first releases (2000), and was quickly followed up the next year with Oops! I
Did It Again. Oops! not only stole its title from the Britney Spears album, but
played around with the title by depicting photos of the aftermath of a murder on
the cover art. All of the Cex releases up to this time were classified as IDM
(Intelligent dance music) and had very little vocals or lyrics for the most
part. However, Kidwell was not content to stay behind the laptop while on tour,
and quickly and openly aspired to become "..1 Entertainer". He started to hone
freestyling skills and performing new songs with vocal tracks like "who's the
man with no clothes, underwear, fur coat, chilling in the alley?/I'm the man
with no clothes, underwear, fur coat/I'm brandishing knives!" ("Fur Coat") and
"I know you're stressed/'cause there's only one Cex/and your girlfriend's
pissed/'cause you ain't him" ("One Cex"). His vocal style was very
confrontational and nearly atonal, and contained typically outrageous
bragadoccio; he frequently would go out of his way to chat to his audience
between or in the middle of songs, and was known to strip down to his underwear
(or less) from time to time. In 2002, he won a coveted tour spot opening for the
East Coast leg of the Death and Dismemberment tour with Death Cab for Cutie and
old friends from Washington, DC The Dismemberment Plan. Later that year, Tall,
Dark, and Handcuffed, his first album with full vocals, was released. He
continued to open for noted bands such as Super Furry Animals and The Roots, as
well as musical friends Grand Buffet. 2003 was a pivotal year for Kidwell -
after spending his entire life living in or around Baltimore, he packed up and
drove out to Oakland, California. Car malfunctions and a week stranded in the
western US became the inspiration for his second album of that year, Maryland
Mansions. In April, he gained further exposure opening for indie darlings The
Postal Service. Before this, however, he released Being Ridden in both vocal and
instrumental form. The album cover paid homage to David Bowie, imitating the
cover for "Heroes". Also notably, the album was not released by Tigerbeat6, and
it seemed to have largely abandoned both the IDM and jokey old-school hip-hop of
Tall, Dark, and Handcuffed for rawer sounds and themes. Maryland Mansions, an
album about suicide, pushed those motifs further and was modelled somewhat on
the Nine Inch Nails EP Broken, and was released just around the time that
Kidwell returned to Baltimore. Two music videos for Maryland Mansions were
released early in 2004, and Kidwell moved again, to Chicago a few months later.
Shortly thereafter, he married Roby Newton (from the band Milemarker), and
reorganized Cex as a three-piece: Kidwell, Newton, and Cale Parks (from the
bands Joan of Arc and Aloha). This configuration released an EP, Know Doubt, in
2005 on a Chicago label called Record Label. The next and supposedly final ([1])
Cex album is titled Actual Fucking and will be released February 14th, 2006.
Each track is named after and written about a city (Baltimore, Los Angeles,
Denton, etc). The album is heavy on vocals and will be released by Seattle label
Automation Records. Kidwell is said to be planning on concentrating on a
newly-formed side project by the name of Sand Cats in the future, described as
being "a solo project for two people", his wife and himself. They moved back to
Baltimore in 2005.