Kid606 - I Want to Join a Gang

Kid606 - "I Want to Join a Gang"/"She's = Defective"

Like Field Manual, this album has a robot on the cover and nothing of any real musical worth on the CD inside. But like the inner sleeve says -- "Real music is the sound of the past which today's youth has very little understanding of," -- it doesn't really aspire to. Kid606 heaps on the same kind of manic gabber/post-rave assualt of giddy breaks and huge slabs of laptop-treated noise as Bomb20 or any of his DHR comrades did, but this time it's all in good fun. There's a screencap of some anonymous anime mecha pilot inside the CD tray. His old website has catgirls on it.

Don't Sweat the Technics was my first Kid606 album, and even though it came out on Vinyl Communications, it lead to my obsession with the Tigerbeat6 label for the next few years. IDM and the sounds of Warp and Planet Mu were getting boring and the nerdy wunderkinds of Tigerbeat6 -- Cex, Blectum From Blechdom, Knifehandchop -- spoke to me, at least as well as laptop musicians making loud and obnoxious but undeniably personal music could. I was jealous of their creativity and success at such a "young" age and how they were able to do this while being themselves and nerver apologizing for being the complete nerds that they were.

Especially going by this song alone, there's not a lot to really "identify" with when it comes to Kid606. Somehow, that's pretty much what I ended up doing with his music (especially on later albums like Down With the Scene and PS I Love You) and other Tigerbeat6 releases (maybe none more than Role Model by Cex. I realize they didn't invent laptop techno but they had a DIY spirit to them that took electronic music out of the highbrow realm and made it something that anyone thought they could do, no matter how weird their ideas were.