Prefuse 73 - Preparations
Guillermo Scott Herren has released eleven albums and seventeen singles under four names in ten years. You get the impression that Preparations, his fourth as 'Prefuse 73', is just a small fraction of what he recorded for it. This is partly because it's what you'd expect from someone so active – Hip-hop DJing, producing stuff by 'Dirty South' rappers (whoever they are) in his native Georgia, exploring his Irish and Cuban family links in his straighter music and following his Catalan ones by moving to Barcelona – and partly because this kind of music is easier to make than most. Prefuse 73 is the moniker for his 'glitch' style, a strange but not unusual mix of samples and riffs and collaborations of the friends he's made during his career, whose singing is the only relief from what's otherwise a sound collage.
Even though there's not yet a common word to describe it Preparations isn't unique. Herren is under the audible influence of DJ Shadow, who got in the Guinness Book of Records by making the first album made up entirely of samples. The connection is spiritual as well - both assess what they think people normally like and try to re-educate them by doing it the wrong way round. 'Preparations' isn't a sonic assault on the senses. Nor the memory – sounds are in a strange order but no one's heard before. But there are moments here, short ones, that sound as predictable a rock record. Not that they're long enough to get up and dance to or get up at all from checking e-mails or whatever you're doing while you listen. The rest of the album, the vast majority, takes the patience of a samurai to listen intently all the way through. It's so freeform it could be the soundtrack to a sex scene in a film as plausibly as a murder.
'Preparations' doesn't sound like fingernails on a chalkboard. Herren's idea of sound is clued up and actually quite nice. There's a large enough demographic of fans determined to seek out the weird to give this a market but even they shouldn't count on listening to it more than once or noticing when one track (this isn't an album of 'songs') melts into another.