If you listen to any form of electro-hop / glitch with any regularity then you have heard Prefuse 73. Just maybe not by that name. Like the elusive DOOM, reviewed here not long ago, Guillermo Scott Herron is one man behind many names: Prefuse 73, Savath y Savalas, Piano Overlord, Diamond Watch Wrists, among others. The spectacular thing about Prefuse, however, is that while all of those projects sound different, you can easily tell that they are all Herron productions.
This is no easy task, especially in a genre that most non-believers complain “all sounds the same.” While that argument falls flat on its ignorant face when tested, you never even have to worry about it with Prefuse 73. The man seems to be a never-ending fount of spectacular ideas; he just creates different projects to channel like ideas together.
The cover of Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian, the most recent Prefuse 73 output, shows an astronaut/explorer traveling into what looks like a version of our world, only slightly skewed. While this image is interesting in its own right, I believe it represents something of what Prefuse 73 does. It seems that he draws upon a massive reservoir of sounds that are almost from our world, but not quite. He gets the grainy synths that no one else can; the sick drum breaks no one else finds; the creepy vocal samples no one else uncovers; and then places them in a sound pastiche held together by sheer will.
That description could in some ways apply to all of the records released under the Prefuse 73 moniker, from the scratchy boom-bap of Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives and seminal haze of One Word Extinguisher to the glitch-hop of Surrounded By Silence and blissed-out Preparations. But nowhere is it exemplified so perfectly than on Everything. Running 29 tracks long, few longer than 2 minutes, the album is a collage of sound: ideas flow in and out of one another, colliding/eliding, meandering around, some bursting forth only to recede and then show up in some altered form later. Some are hip-hop, some funk, some psychedelia, some folk, some electronica, some all of those and none simultaneously.
The mixing of sound pallets puts Prefuse in a sort of cosmic DJ role, creating a soundtrack for a post-modern world filled with jagged international urban landscapes, filled with people half-plugged in, unsure of their footing while ushering in a new world paradigm of electronic contentment/complacency. While it is mostly pretentious to seriously call something “dada” these days, Everything is Prefuse 73’s dada experiment in a world reeling from over-produced CGI order in a chaotic universe.
Everything finds Prefuse smashing together sounds (that most artists would keep apart and on different albums) within each song. A perfect example of this is the movement between “Violent Bathroom Exchange” and “Nature’s Uplifting Revenge” (two of the longer songs on the album at 1:30 or so): “Violent” builds into a crushing beat fuzzy with synth and overdrive layers, muddy and bass-heavy, forcing your head into bobbing position, but just when you have tasted the rhythmic kool-aid, the beat fractures, turning inside out, running backwards and forwards, flying off axis – only to be hammered back down as “Nature” comes in with broken up vocal harmonies and an old-school 808 beat.
The transition is seamless, as are all of the transitions on the album, and supports the need to listen to this album straight through, no breaks, no skipping. I know, the iPod generation is not used to this, but hey, you can put whole albums on iPods and listen to them straight through, I know I do.
Every Guillermo Scott Herron fan has a favorite Prefuse 73 album, and I am no exception despite the fact that I couldn’t tell you what mine is. Whether or not Everything is my favorite is less important than the fact that I believe it to be his best. On no other album is the thesis of the Prefuse 73 project more explicit. Herron has accessed some remote corner of the human experience, only to replicate it, mutate it, loop it, sample it, cut it up, rearrange it, (damn, I sound like a Daft Punk song!) and blast it back into are faces one tiny fragment at a time.
Listen to this album; you will not be disappointed.
No comments:
Post a Comment