PREFUSE 73
Apr 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy
“I'll put it this way,” says Prefuse 73, aka Guillermo Scott Herren, during a recent press junket to New York City to promote his new joint, Surrounded by Silence (Warp, 2005): “Hip-hop, in its purest form, should always be about experimentation — it always has been. For me, I'm not out to invent or reinvent anything. I'm just carrying on a traditional element of hip-hop that never left my system.”
Although he often gets lumped in with the “glitch-hop” crowd for his extreme manipulation of samples and his fractal, randomized approach to beat sequencing, Herren is not as easily pinned down as some might prefer. His tastes range from the early-'70s jazz-fusion sound — which spawned the name Prefuse 73 and provides the main source for his sample-crazy collages — to the quiet strains of Brasilia futura that course through the work of Savath & Savalas (just one of several pseudonyms Herren has adopted to accommodate his wide-ranging musical output).
Surrounded by Silence is the latest progression in a musical journey that hit its stride about five years ago with Prefuse 73's sophomore album, Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives (Warp, 2000). A sonic riot of sampladelic improvisation, the set featured guest raps by Micah 9, Aesop Rock and MF Doom, with Herren flouting convention by chopping up the vocals just about as furiously as he did the music. One Word Extinguisher (Warp, 2003) followed, exploring an even deeper seam of melody and fractured rhythms but with the sporadic vocal tracks (this time by rhyme stylists such as Diverse and Mr. Lif) left mostly intact to float over a constantly shifting bed of Akai MPC — generated grooves and vintage synth stabs.
The MPC series, in fact, has been Herren's compositional tool of choice from the beginning; he currently avails himself of an MPC2000XL and an MPC4000 to create all of Prefuse 73's signature sound mosaics. “I like trying to inject a sense of randomness and chaos into the music, and the MPC is great for that,” he says. “I mean, I don't profess to be a gear head at all. With the MPC, you're not stuck to a screen and a mouse — you know, you're playing pads like it was an actual instrument. You take the quantizing off, and it's just live, like any other instrument. That's why I don't fuck with computers. With external samplers, you have way more freedom.”
This same sense of freedom is what drives Surrounded by Silence. At first listen, Herren's orchestrations feel even more unhinged than usual, but his loyalty to hip-hop's penchant for all things analog — aided, no doubt, by a late-generation Fender Rhodes, a Minimoog Voyager, an Access Indigo and other vintage synths that he keeps in his apartment studio in Barcelona — smooths out the rough edges, revealing a fully realized hip-hopera that brims with an open-ended confidence. Instrumental excursions such as “Ty Versus Detchibe” (the title itself a splice of Detroit, Chicago and Berlin, reprising the same track from One Word Extinguisher but this time with experimental guitarist Tyondai Braxton in the mix) are still as prominent as on past Prefuse albums, but, here, they provide the aural glue for the vocal-fueled gems. “Hideyaface,” with Ghostface and El-P on lead spits, offers an immediate taste, tapping into the lo-fi lilt made household by RZA and Wu-Tang, while Masta Killa and GZA lend an ominous urgency to the sci-fi mood of “Just the Thought.” “Sabbatical with Options” features the incomparable Aesop Rock switching gears on a dime with Herren's angular rhythmic spurts, and “Morale Crusher” finds fellow Warp artist and touring mate Beans dropping inspired verbiage over a jazzy Rhodes fugue.
“Everyone on this record was on some love shit and helped me immensely,” Herren confides. “This wasn't about money or about trying to rent the hottest MCs and put them on top of my beats. I just wanted the world to hear these different people on totally different wavelengths on the same record, and I wanted to do it with respect, not out of novelty or commodity. People might feel it in a lot of different ways, but when I was making this record, I wasn't thinking about anything but hip-hop. That's where I'm coming from.”
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