Kid606
w/ Jamie Lidell, Gold Chains, Bobby Karate
I-Spy, Thurs April 11, $12.

Hand a punk purist digital-music software, and you better get ready to duck. It's likely you'll get the box thrown back at you in a fit of rock disgust. But if you broaden the punk attitude to include artists of the electronic persuasion, you won't miss out on the masterful audio tweakery that Kid606 has been cooking up.

Born Miguel Depedro in Caracas, Venezuela, the 23-year-old Kid was raised in San Diego during the culturally vapid Reagan '80s. Like his sound-collaging forefather Negativland, Depedro found exuberant possibilities in sample culture, a perfect place for a brainy, sneering indie-boy to get his rocks off. His four albums of overstretched breakbeats, crunchy noise, and splattered vocal samples (broken off into tunes with titles like "It'll Take Millions in Plastic Surgery to Make Me Black" and "GQ on the EQ") speak of an irreverent rage against the digital-age music machine.

After its initial crash into American and European charts and mindsets in the mid-'90s, electronic dance music has split into mainstream acceptance and underground elitism, two factions that Depedro (like fellow breakbeat thrasher Atari Teenage Riot) scorns with gleeful skill in his music. He's best known for the chaotic remixes (both authorized and not) that he's done of pop icons like Depeche Mode, N.W.A., Eminem, and Missy Elliott. The two takes he's released so far of Elliott's "Get Ur Freak On" (one of which clocks in at 14 minutes) have become left-field cult classics for the best of reasons: Kid606 simply loves the damn music enough to strangle it within a granular inch of its former life.

But it's not simply about the ol' cut-n-paste for Depedro, as shown on his surprisingly ambient album P.S. I Love You, or on sample-free freeform experiments like "Sometimes I Thank God I Can't Sing" from his recently released album Kid606 the action packed mentallist brings you the fucking Jams. But artistic growth never stands in the way of a true punk: A Kid606 live laptop show remains a raw, abrasive, and hyperactive good time.