Kid 606: Down With the Scene

By Sam Frank

It's coming, kids, it's coming—or maybe it's already here. What? The next punk revolution, the next 1977, that's fucking what!

NB: I didn't say "punk rock revolution." No, this is the punk that smashes everything worth hating DIY-style, whether it's made with electric guitars or with electronic gizmos. It's all around you: Providence (where Lightning Bolt grinds punk down to a prog-rock seizure), Brooklyn (where Black Dice reduces hardcore to 10-second bursts of fingernails on the blackboard and alligators in the throat), San Francisco (where Blechtum from Blechdom improv-spazz into their samplers, a far cry from the play-the-tape purity of better-mannered electronica)... It's where you are and where you aren't: Olympia's K Records is about to release an album by America/Germany/Australia's Chicks on Speed, an art/glam/punk trio that shouts out the Austrian/Chicagoian Powerbook trio Fenn O'Berg over electro tweaking. And so it begins, in America and around the globe.

Kid 606? Well, he's from San Diego and he's one of the punkest of them all, the one who's perhaps come closest to unifying the most destructive, redemptive possibilities of electronic and rawk. He's a self-proclaimed "indie-punk whiteboy," and Down With the Scene has spastic luminaries like Mike Patton (Mr. Bungle, Faith No More) and Dave Astor (the Locust) as guests. His instrument is a Macintosh, and his cliché-cum-watermark of choice is Digital Signal Processing, a collection of blenders that pureé every raw sound in reach.

Down With the Scene is an album that feels important— even if it doesn't always sound good. It mangles up hyperspeed jungle and gabber beats into a glitchified mess, disembowels Ma$e's "Feel So Good," and doesn't see a beat or melody that wouldn't be improved by a vicious rip of static. A bonus track, Hrvatski's remix of 606's "My Kitten," points a light to the future—to 1978—to actual songs built out of digital decay. A Macintosh voice represents like a ragga toaster over a jungle track that staggers, swaggers, and splatters in equal parts. Meanwhile, Space Invader bleeps and stepped-on cats squeal underneath, until everything blanks into a white noise slow-grind. It's verse-chorus-verse for the 21st century. However, the rest of the album is rarely more than the sum of its rubble. But it doesn't matter. When you're in the demolition business, you don't always have time to rebuild the ruins. (Ipecac)

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