Southernplayalistic Intelligent Dance Muzik
URB Magazine, 07/08.01
Words: Jon Caramancia
Scott Herren cut his teeth in jiggy Southern rap
production and he's currently beloved to the IDM
massive, but as Prefuse 73 he makes the clicks go hop
and invites MF Doom, Aesop Rock and Mikah 9 along for
the jittery ride.
It doesn't take much to become a culture broker, or
biter, these days. A Pro Tools-equipped laptop here,
an MPC there - soon enough, any musician worth his
wiring can snag a bit of someone else's flavor, flip
it and call it his own. All of this without having to
leave the comfort of the [bedroom] studio.
But while the oft-pale denizens of the IDM underground
are wantonly appropriating hip-hop authenticity to
liven (and toughen) up their abstract laptop
swirlings, Scott Herren remains suspicious: "If you
grow up in a place around lots of different people,
you almost don't think about it. But did these kids
grow up with a diverse group of folks? I guess you
just have to know that person's approach. But if
you're a blind listener, depending on how you're
hearing it, you might not understand what's going on."
Upon first glance, it'd be easy to shove Herren in
with the borrowers. His latest album, Vocal Studies +
Uprock Narratives (issued under the recording alias
Prefuse 73), the first American release proper for the
ideologue UK imprint Warp, is the sound of hip-hop
fleeing from its own dismal future, the
by-now-traditional shuffled beats laid upon a
quivering bed of post-ambient noise only to fall
victim to an anarchic ambush of clicks and cuts.
Most so-called IDMers would let the machines win, both
to satisfy their own egos and to keep it real without
having to, you know, keep it real. Not Herren.
Instead, he makes the clicks go hop and invites along
a handful of MC friends for the jittery ride. Aesop
Rock, Mikah 9, MF Doom - they're all on board, and
that doesn't count the artists who were included,
let's say, without the trouble of contacting them
directly.
"When I was growing up, hip-hop was always my shit,"
Herren, now 26, reflects. "But at one point, it
started pissing me off more than it was doing good
things for me. I started getting angry, trying new
music, getting into jazz."
A compulsive tagger, Herren's graf inclinations kept
him close to hip-hop even as his musical tendencies
began to stray. "There was a group of us in Atlanta
who all met through graf but who were all going
through the same thing. Some kids were into My Bloody
Valentine, some were into straight jazz shit. I was
getting schooled from so many different directions, I
was like, 'I wanna make different shit,'" he says.
In 1994, Herren moved from his native Decatur, GA (a
town that abuts Atlanta to the east), to New York to
attend school, but soon found that the classroom
offered little respite from the city's out-of-breath
chaos. "That was a crap time," he says, not joking at
all. "I got [to NY] and realized, 'This is not how I
want to live,' so I bought a four-track and started to
make music."
"Dog shit" is the moniker Herren now as ascribes to
his earliest work. "My sampler didn't have a loop or
a sequencer, so I had to do all the beats in real
time," he says. "The other side I did beatless.
Everybody was like, 'This [is] so cool, he did an
ambient song,' but I couldn't do anything else!" Soon
enough, Herren was skipping school to stay home with
his machinery and try out new styles. In 1997, he
moved back to Georgia in an attempt to find a musical
space that didn't perpetually nip at his heels,
demanding attention.
By that time, Herren was already making a name for
himself in the electronic underground, thought to pass
the time he worked studio jobs. One particularly
grateful labelhead bought him an MPC-2000 in exchange
for producing the odd trail of local gangsta rappers
who used the studio, one of the few in Decatur. "The
guy who owned the studio was this old, out-of-touch
white guy. People would light up blunts and shit in
the studio and he'd be like, 'Can you go outside,
please?'
"I'd come up around hip-hop, so I could communicate
with them. I'd make the beats right in front of
them," he says. But scripting the sounds of
thug-bounce slowly began driving Herren back into his
own creativity, desparate for another outlet. "When I
started making music again," he remembers, "it was
basically just me sad, in the studio, not wanting to
do any more of that jiggy shit. I didn't know about
IDM or anything. I was just trying my best to do
whatever it was that was different."
Herren's hip-hop friends are convinced his approach is
working. "It's obvious that he knows his music," says
Aesop Rock. "If you're doing an instrumental hip-hop
track, it's got to have more than a hip-hop beat these
days. His shit is changing every two bars."
"Son is crazy nasty with the beats." Echoes MF Doom.
"It reminds me of back in the days, all them ill beats
that's on that Wild Style album. They have space and
room. I get a lot of beats, so I give them to my wife
- she's a real hip-hop head - and let her ride around
with them in her car. I knew anyway his beats were
dope, but that confirmed it when she said, 'That's the
one.'"
While most producers with Herren's influences would be
keen for IDM acceptance, Herren's blocked it at
seemingly every turn: "Richard Devine gave my shit to
the kids at Schematic and they were like, 'I hear the
influence of blah blah blah.' I was like, 'Man, I
know some of that stuff, but I'm not on the tip you
guys are on. I don?t' dig you guys' records at all.
There's not even any music in it.'"
Needless to say, Herren's relationship with Schematic,
who released his debut EP Backsome last year (under
the alias Delarosa & Asora), is less than cordial.
Indeed, Schematic sat on Herren's D&A long-player,
Agony Part 1, for months until releasing it early this
year, just a handful of weeks before his Warp debut
was slated to drop, an inconvenience that doesn't
thrill Herren. "We don't speak much at all," he says
flatly.
So instead of taking refuge with the cats who sought
to nurture him, Herren's retreated to more eclectic
confines. Not only has Warp allowed him the room to
do intelligent music that's danceable, but Herren's
indulged his melody jones via Savath & Savalas
project, released through Chicago post-rock
tastemakers Hefty Records. Says Herren of Folk Songs
for Trains, Trees & Honey, his Savath debut: "When I
was doing the Delarosa shit, I'd make songs on the
Rhodes and other instruments, then I'd chop it up.
Then I realized I have these songs that sound like
songs, and I like them. I kept those, too, because I
can keep playing instruments and making music. With
both Savath and Delarosa, I've found a perfect middle
ground."
But for now, Herren's in Prefuse mode, the alias he
calls the most "natural" of his three. But in truth,
Herren's music is best understood as a continuum. The
electro skittishness on parts of Delarosa hint at
Herren's hip-hop fixation, while the eerie soundscapes
of Savath prove that his ear for melody is just as
potent as that for rhythm. The best hip-hop has
always combined the two, and for Herren, it's the only
path forward: "I'm trying to get my shit to people who
are gonna relate to it, people who have always been
into hip-hop but are getting older. They want to hear
a little bit more in the mix. So do I."
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