Rjyan “Cex” Kidwell has been consistently revising and switching his modus operandi for recording and releasing music since his career began in the late ’90s. Early Cex releases featured instrumental IDM, before he began rapping, then singing, and later returning to making beats without vocal accompaniment. His first handful of albums tended to run an hour or more, before he began to favor concise 40-minute albums and even shorter EPs. And after beginning his career with high profile national releases on the trendsetting IDM label he co-founded, Tigerbeat6, Kidwell has released much of his music in recent years on deliberately low key vinyl or cassette-only releases, while remaining as prolific as ever. And since some of his best music yet has been on less heralded records like the 2007 Steely Dan sample collage Dannibal or the 2009 experimental club music of Bataille Royale, it’s proven worthwhile to give every new Cex record close attention.

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Rjyan Kidwell has been releasing records and performing as Cex in and around Baltimore for roughly a decade now. And while there was a period, running from 2002′s Tall, Dark and Handcuffed through 2006′s Actual Fucking, that he operated primarily as a vocalist, creating music that was a vehicle for his singing or rapping, the majority of his work before and since then has been instrumental, driven by programmed beats. As closely associated with the IDM scene as he’s always been, though, there’s long been a thread of appreciation for less “intelligent” dance music running through Cex’s catalog. And his latest release, Bataille Royale, is his most overt attempt at incorporating the sounds of some of those other genres, particular Baltimore club music, into his own murky, proggy aesthetic.

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