Rex The Dog

Rex the Dog has generated numerous catchy and energetic tracks rooted in 1980s electro-house. Veteran producer Jake Williams, known earlier as JX, eventually confirmed his connection to the project after rumors had circulated, drawing notice within electronic music communities even though the attention never eclipsed the recordings. Those tracks follow a recognizable and resilient pattern built around straightforward, solid midtempo beats, lively bubbling bass, and tuneful yet continuously shifting portamento synth lines, sometimes incorporating vocals that are flanged and filtered to an extreme degree. After several favorably received singles appeared on Kompakt and Kitsuné, each featuring straightforward cartoon drawings by Williams, the full-length The Rex the Dog Show came out in 2008. Beyond remixes created for Robyn, Fever Ray, and Röyksopp, Rex the Dog has worked with Kris Menace and DJ Haus while continuing to issue solo singles such as the 2023 track "Change This Pain for Ecstasy."

Throughout the 1990s Williams achieved several mainstream house successes, among them multiple top 20 U.K. singles, recording under the names JX, Mekka, and Oblik as well as with Planet Perfecto, yet after the millennium he pursued a less commercial path by adopting the Rex the Dog name, drawn from the 1950s DC Comics character Rex the Wonder Dog. He located a Korg 700S synthesizer from 1974, the year of Williams' birth, after discovering its prior use on the Normal's "Warm Leatherette" and Depeche Mode's Speak & Spell album, and relied on it almost entirely for the first two Rex 12"s, Prototype and Frequency, both issued by Kompakt in 2004.

Those two releases gained strong favor among DJs and compilers, as did the Rex remix of the Knife's "Heartbeats." "Maximize" appeared in 2006 and "Circulate" followed in 2007 on Kitsuné. At the same time he supplied remixes for Client, the Prodigy, Röyksopp, and his influences Depeche Mode, plus another for the Knife and Robyn's "Who's That Girl," produced by the Knife. The debut album The Rex the Dog Show, which gathered shortened edits of the four 12" A-sides plus the B-side "I Look into Mid-Air" along with two remixes and six additional pop-oriented tracks, was released on the artist's own Hundehaus imprint in September 2008. The cartoon artwork that appears on Rex the Dog sleeves, videos, website, and live visuals, all drawn by Williams and showing him alongside his dog engaged in everyday and unusual activities, matches the neon nostalgia of the music in appeal; Williams routinely speaks of Rex the Dog as "we."

After the album, Rex the Dog returned in 2011 with "POW!," a collaboration with Kris Menace released on Compuphonic. "Do You Feel What I Feel," featuring dramatic yet playful falsetto vocals by Jamie McDermott of the Irrepressibles, came out on Southern Fried Records in 2013. Rex returned to Kompakt with "Sicko" and the three-song EP You Are a Blade in 2015. Continuing to create and perform with a self-built modular system, he issued further Kompakt singles "Teufelsberg" in 2016, "Crasher" in 2018, and "Vortex" in 2019. He also released on Unknown to the Unknown's modular sublabel Soft Computing, with "Experimental Housing" and "Transmitter," the latter alongside label founder DJ Haus, both appearing in 2019. The remix EP Versions was issued by Kompakt in 2020, and the trance-inflected, arpeggio-driven single "Change This Pain for Ecstasy" arrived in 2023.