Rapper, producer, and Magic: the Gathering enthusiast Rjyan Kidwell, aka Cex, is one of the most consistently underrated and constantly adventurous musicians of the past decade. A few years ago, around the time his slightly tweaked, slightly too-cute electro-rap started to earn him a measure of popularity, he blew his crossover potential by taking a hard turn into abstract tribal psychedelia, and he’s been wandering from sound to sound ever since, apparently completely free of concern about the usual metrics for music-career success—like how much of your remaining audience each new stylistic shift drives off. There probably aren’t too many people, aside from Kidwell himself, who like everything he’s done—actually, I haven’t talked to him in a while, so far all I know he might not even like everything he’s done anymore—but you have to respect his gutsiness.
