In the summer of 2000, between sifting through the racks at Ross Dress for Less and whispering about crushes at sleepovers, four preteen girls in Santa Rosa formed a band. They called it X-Cetra.
The group — Ayden Mayeri, Jessica Hall and sisters Mary Washburn and Janet Kariuki — never performed live. Their only album, a set of songs recorded over pre-existing Europop tracks, was burned onto about 20 CD-Rs. Embarrassed by what they heard — unvarnished, youthful voices that reflected exactly who they were — the girls shelved the project.
Two decades later, the music resurfaced online. Shared in forums and passed among curious listeners, the album, “Stardust,” found an unlikely audience. What once felt mortifying to its creators was recast as something rare: an unfiltered document of childhood creativity. Listeners described it as strange, dissonant and, at times, enchanting. Music publications took notice, including Rolling Stone. The four friends, now in their 30s and scattered across the country, began hearing from strangers — and from one another.
The rediscovery set in motion an unexpected second act.
Now, X-Cetra is the subject of a documentary, “Summer 2000: The X-Cetra Story,” directed by Mayeri. The film premiered in March at South by Southwest in Austin, where it won the Documentary Feature Competition Jury Award, a recognition that underscores the unlikely trajectory of a project once dismissed and forgotten.
How it started
The story begins in Bennett Valley, where Mayeri and Hall met at age 4, growing up on the same street.
“Right away, something between us sparked and we were so creative,” Mayeri said.
The Washburn sisters joined the circle a few years later. By the summer of 2000, the four girls — most of them 11, Mary just 9 — spent their days choreographing dance routines and filming elaborate home movies, driven less by ambition than by the simple urge to make something.
“All kids have an imaginary life and want to play and create,” Mary Washburn said. “But especially where we were at technologically at the time — we didn’t have the ability to be on our iPhones or tablets — I think part of it was having space to create. Having boredom fosters the environment where that comes forth naturally.”
Inspired by pop groups like the Spice Girls and Destiny’s Child, they began writing songs, with lyrics that oscillated between the concerns of childhood and imagined versions of adulthood. With the help of Janet and Mary’s mother, Robin O’Brien, a musician and producer, those lyrics became recordings. O’Brien layered the girls’ vocals over instrumental tracks from a German musician friend, Achim Treu, resulting in a genre-spanning collection that ranged from Y2K pop to trip-hop to reggae.
The girls hated it.
“I thought we were going to work with Robin and she would make us sound older and cooler,” Mayeri said. “And then when we heard it, it was almost like she put a mirror up to how we truly were at that age — we sounded young and our voices were not that great. I didn’t sound cool and sexy the way I had dreamed, so it just felt very embarrassing.”
The album was shelved. As they moved on to middle school and later Montgomery High School, the group dissolved. They drifted apart, left Santa Rosa for college and built separate lives: Mayeri in Los Angeles as an actor and writer; Hall in San Francisco in tech; Kariuki in finance in Denver; Washburn in Boston as an editor.
Their music might have remained buried if not for an anonymous upload.
Rediscovered online
In 2020, tracks from “Stardust” began circulating on the music forum Rate Your Music. Reviews praised its unpredictability and sincerity. At first, Hall recalled, the exposure felt invasive.
“Something that we had kept private was all of a sudden being listened to,” she said.
But that discomfort gave way to something else: admiration for what they had made as children.
“I was pretty impressed with our little selves being able to write these songs,” Hall said. “And I like that Robin had the thought to pair it with these German tracks; it’s a very dissonant sound, but it makes it so unique.”
An archival record label, Numero Group, soon reached out about a reissue. The album was released on vinyl last year as “Summer 2000 (Y2K 25th Anniversary Edition),” introducing X-Cetra to a wider audience. The group was reborn.
Now in their 30s, the four found themselves living a version of their preteen fantasies, complete with photo shoots for Rolling Stone and a listening party in Los Angeles hosted by the actor Alison Brie.
“Douglas Mcgowan (A&R rep for Nuermo Group) has been our personal champion through this whole process,” Washburn said. “He said what he loved was that he could tell (the record) was a pure reflection of children. It wasn’t manipulated by adults to commercialize it, and that’s unfortunately something that’s rare.”
Revisiting the past
The documentary, financed and made by Mayeri and her filmmaking partners Barry Rothbart and Rachael Fung, follows that reemergence. Drawing on childhood footage, present-day interviews and scenes of the women reuniting in Santa Rosa in 2024 to record new material, the film traces not only the arc of a band but the durability of a friendship.
It lingers on their shared past, its humor and awkwardness, and on the more complicated terrain of adolescence and adulthood, years they describe as increasingly removed from creative expression.
What emerges is less a conventional music story than a meditation on time and the act of revisiting childhood, its openness, its lack of self-consciousness, and the vulnerability that comes with it.
“This was, in a lot of ways, an uncomfortable experience,” Kariuki said of making the documentary. “I don’t think I could have done anything like this without the support of the group, that’s the one thing that made it incredible.”
Washburn echoed that sentiment, noting that some scenes — including a singing lesson with Hall’s mother, the choir director Janice Hall — were particularly difficult to film.
How it’s going
When they finished the film, the group hoped, at most, to stir a bit of nostalgia or attract a niche audience. Instead, its reception at South by Southwest brought a level of recognition none had anticipated.
“The making of the film and all of us being proud felt like the biggest win,” Mayeri said. “Getting into South-by was shocking and so affirming. The winning of the award didn’t actually cross our minds.”
During the festival, the four friends spent a week in Austin promoting the film, though only Mayeri stayed for the awards ceremony.
“We were in the high balcony seat of the award ceremony just watching, and then they started describing our movie. Barry (Rothbart) and I were like…wait,” Mayeri said. “I just can’t believe we won. I’m so proud of the whole team, too. It’s just been such a team of sweeties and friends. It feels like, ‘Is something this good allowed to happen?’”
Washburn reflected on how the entire journey had shifted her sense of possibility.
“So much has happened to us over the past few years that is unbelievable,” she said. “I truly have started to embrace this concept that anything is possible.”
The four are now in discussions with distributors. Mayeri hopes for a screening in Santa Rosa. There is also talk — tentative but increasingly serious — of something X-Cetra never attempted the first time around: a live performance.
“Because so many people have asked, it’s time to get prepared,” Mayeri said. “By the time our premiere happens, maybe we will perform.”
Get the latest updates on the band at instagram.com/x_cetra. Their album “Summer 2000 (Y2K 25th Anniversary Edition)” is available online and at independent retailers.
