Atlanta-based DJ/programmer/producer Scott Herren will perform at the Fuji Rock Festival this year, which should come as no surprise. The event has hosted both techno-prankster Aphex Twin and vinyl bon vivant DJ Shadow, and fans of each will easily recognize Herren's cut-and-snip hip-hop project, Prefuse 73, as the logical next rung in the ladder.
Herren has already received fringe plaudits for his dabblings in post-rock ambiency (with Savath & Savalas) and glitch-riddled breakbeats (with Delarosa & Asora). Prefuse 73, however, is what his street cred -- and condemnation -- have been built on.
The multimonikered Herren drew the ire of hip hop's misinformed by dissecting the vocals on 2001's "Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives." Diced MC prose and R&B diva-dom were reduced to trimmed and arranged utterances. Stripped of their context, these phonetic nuggets were buffed and threaded into a percussive pulse that would make both Flava Flav and Noam Chomsky bob their heads. Herren was accused of mocking the language of urban radio, which is as ridiculous as it sounds. He wasn't dissing hip hop -- he was updating its lexicon.
The new release, "One Word Extinguisher," offers more choice clips of verbal origami, but now Herren's soul seeps through the incisions.
On "Busy Signal," for example, beat-box splatter puffs and pants past the orchestral loops and CD-skip synth. Instead of building to a block-rocking crescendo, however, it suddenly winds down and closes on a musky cello chord, adding a moment of melancholy. It would be misleading to call this a breakup album, but Herren has confessed that "Extinguisher" is a reflection of his last relationship's collapse.
With only an MPC sampler (no laptops or turntables), this Southern white boy has most likely constructed the future of hip-hop language. Chomsky would be intrigued.
