Rickey Kinney is missing. The outsider artist and electronic musician called Fort Worth home in the late 2000s through late 2010s, composing, performing, and releasing electronic music under the nom de guerre Squanto, as well as producing music videos for local bands like Oil Boom and Son of Stan. Around 2019, he decided to give the West Coast a shot and moved to Los Angeles, but in 2022, he joined his family in Oklahoma. He would bounce between there and here until October 1, 2024, when he left Oklahoma again to give L.A. another try. Based on a post shared through the Facebook group Missing in America Network, that was the last his family saw him, though they maintained contact with him through July 24, 2025, when he no longer responded to any communication.
Like everyone else who knows Rickey, my heart sank seeing that post. The last I heard from him was November 14, 2023, when I got a text from him at 1:58am asking if he could crash on my floor. I read it hours later. Regretfully, I did not respond. I’d known he was in a rough patch and that the tribulations of getting by in Los Angeles had really ground him down, but I also knew that was kind of par for him. He always seemed consumed with The Weight — never in a substance-abuse kind of way — but I really felt like he was an artist for whom the pressures of surviving, like paying bills and keeping up with the endless flood of high-stakes-but-meaningless bullshit that gets in the way of, you know, just experiencing life, were both creatively inspiring and also forever looming over his psyche. His entire aesthetic arose from his attempts to mentally corral the contradictions, confusion, and intrusive absurdities engendered by late-stage capitalism.
As Squanto, Rickey made punk out of an abrasive tangle of computerized noise and electronic beats that somehow still tethered itself to pop music. He took elements of trip-hop and glitched them out into nervy, agitated, aural tics. The videos he made for himself and his friends’ bands felt like you were watching a late-night real-estate infomercial dosed with acid, perhaps in an attempt to mitigate whatever anxieties a sentient infomercial might fixate on. Rickey’s art was jarring, weird, and wonderful. For all its darkness, it still felt earnest, honest, and even hopeful.
In a 2015 Fort Worth Weekly interview about Squanto’s debut EP, clrtvdth (pronounced “color TV death”), Rickey said he was “driven by what everybody’s paying attention to, getting frustrated about. What is this bullshit we are paying attention to? I’m on the same boat. I’m making music, and I’m affected by it too. We’ve all been affected by it for a long time. We are just now suffering repercussions from it, and for me the music is funny. It’s satirical. I love Frank Zappa. I love all the musicians who saw the humor in things, but I also have a very deep appreciation of musicians who made free-expression music with a little more experimentation, like free jazz, things like that, Ornette Coleman, crazy stuff that never settled down.”
A decade later, the world has not improved, and reading a missing person alert about him only makes me fear the worst. If you have any information about Rickey Kinney’s current location or situation, please call the Los Angeles police department at 213-996-1800 or the Missing in America anonymous tipline 844-MIA-LOST (844-642-5678).
