Review #19: Prefuse 73

Prefuse 73-Security Screenings
(Warp)
8 out of 10

Pic links to Prefuse's website for the Screenings album, however, Warp's site for his Vocal Studies & Uprock Narratives album is here, their site where you may find a sampler of tunes from his legendary One Word Extinguisher album here, and an official website for his antics circa the Reads The Books EP is here. Don't worry folks, I did the Google searchin' for ya.

Instrumental hip-hop, as it stands today, is a genre that has several Everest-sized speed bumps ahead of it in its quest to become a commercially viable variety of music. One is the mainstream’s tendency to inherently tie hip-hop with rap. To many (even FYE), those two terms are interchangeable, when the truth is rap is a subsection of hip-hop which includes the lyrical technique many are familiar with. Hip-hop itself is the beats you hear in the background of these raps. Of course, instrumental hip-hop itself is somewhat to blame for this confusion due to its frequent inability to stand alone. Madlib’s bumping vintage breakbeats are nice, but they need the skills of a master rhymecrafter like MF Doom to complete them. RJD2’s solo work sometimes has autonomous abilities, but lately he’s confided in Aceyalone and Blueprint for raps to attempt to make his work more accessible.
Instrumental hip-hop does have one hero, however: Guillermo Scott Herren, whose wacky work as Prefuse 73 is so fiercely situated in its own perplexing league, it’s become a sort of taboo to cast rap verses upon it (as the slight critical backlash upon his previous collab-o-rific album Surrounded By Silence has shown). On his latest album, Security Screenings, he melds the spontaneity of glitch and the unmistakable urban bump of hip-hop together to make a sprawling lump of oddly synchronized noise so perplexing on its own, it might make you forget rap ever existed for a second or two.
A perfect example of this Linux-meets-Lil’ Jon motif is on “With Dirt And Two Texts-Afternoon Version”. It starts like a broken radio, jumping frequencies before diving into a synergy of heavily distorted bass and synth that glitters like the sun’s reflection upon a lake. On “No Origin”, snare drums and cymbals battle in the background while brass instruments frenetically flash as if a Wynton Marsalis track was put on a strobe effect. For “Creating Cyclical Headaches”, Herren mashes together a variety of industrial noises as if setting a synthesizer on fire while colleague Kieran Hebden (better known as Four Tet) utilizes his own synth to create a twinkling, blissfully comatose backdrop to this chaos. All these tracks symbolize the feel of the album: the serene crashing head-on with the spontaneous and unsettling.
As would be apparent with any listener, every song on here is somewhat purposefully disjointed, but if you consider the album as a whole, it’s certainly disconnected to a point since this “mini-album” is supposedly, according to Herren, a transition from Surrounded By Silence to whatever project he’s working with next. With that factor in mind, this album is surprisingly tight, as undertones of post-9/11 paranoia are reinforced by interludes demonstrating doubt, loneliness, and schizophrenia.
Granted, it’s still a long shot, but if there’s any one producer to bring instrumental hip-hop to the forefront and bring weaker crunk beatmasters like Mr. Collipark or Scott Storch to shame, it would probably be Guillermo Scott Herren.

Key Tracks: “With Dirt And Two Texts-Afternoon Version”, “No Origin”, “Matrimoniods…”, “Keeping Up With Your Quota”