For those of you who don't know Prefuse 73 A.K.A. Guillermo Scott Herren, this guy has been putting beats out since I was in middle school. And I'm not talking just about Prefuse 73: Herren has been active with his record label, Eastern Developments Music, and multiple artist collaborations on top of releasing new albums under several different aliases every year. Seriously, does this guy ever sleep?
Prefuse 73's fifth full-length, Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian, is not ground-breaking in any structural or melodic sense it stays the course of the gradual change Prefuse 73 fans have seen over the years. Prefuse 73's sound has changed dramatically over the years since the first album, Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives. Electro hip hop, IDM (intellectual dance music), glitch hop: you can try to define the genre of Prefuse 73, but you'll find yourself in trouble when you see how much Herren's initial sound has radically changed. In Herren's former days he was putting out electro hip hop beats that were melodically more chaotic but more structured. Now five albums deep, it seems like Herren has changed the formula, striving for an experimental hip hop sound that pushes the listener's sense of structure and form while dosing you with some synth-pop.
Don't expect too many of his trademark electronic clicks, pops, and scratches to wow you. Yes they're still present in the beats, but they don't tweak and crack like they used to. They used to sound like random particles in the music colliding with each other to give a vinyl-ish ambiance. Now, they've fallen in line with the other instruments, losing their nice unpredictable quality. These ambient effects get cheapened when you start putting them in 4/4 time.
But as a result, what you have here is less gritty and bubblier, more so than Prefuse 73's prior albums. Check out the track "Fountain of Spring" that sounds like an acid piano underwater, or "Digan Lo" with its space-like synth and airy vocals. The slower tracks feel like summer day meets old sci-fi flick.
For fans of the old Prefuse 73 sound, you'll want to skip around on the album, because it's few and far between. "DEC. Machine Funk All ERA's" is a real treat as it starts with a Nintendo-like prelude, jumps into an abrasive drum part, falls into a dream-like humming break down, and finally kicks in with ominous droning tones before it comes to rest. It's a classic Prefuse 73 track at its finest.
But Prefuse 73's latest incarnation of noise is still far from perfect. The album covers too many musical textures at once, even for Prefuse 73, and makes it feel unfocused. The strong point of the album is its ambiance and how the tracks seem to melt or explode into one another, but many of the minute-or-less tracks felt like fillers. Some of them I'd wish to be longer tracks; some should have never made the cut. And when you really get down to it, many of the tracks are forgettable and often times irritating. Take for example the bird squawks of "Whipcream Eyepatch" or the oscillating, atonal moans of "Four Reels Collide" they really break the flow of the album. The question is whether this new Prefuse 73 is a just a blip of change on the Scott Herren resume, or if Prefuse 73 will stay the path and continue to refine this style.
See also
Dabrye, Kid 606, Aphex Twin
