PREFUSE 73 - Security Screenings

Would you believe me if I told you this mini-album was something owed to us? Yet that's exactly what it is. At his Milan show the day after the release of "Surrounded By Silence", Scott Herren aka Prefuse 73 had promised me as much, assuring me it would come out before the end of 2005. All right, it arrived a bit later than planned (in the meantime there was that fine EP with Books), but it did arrive.

Over forty minutes for eighteen tracks, including several interludes. Inside are the pieces that didn't make the cut for the "main" album, many of them instrumental. This isn't a new modus operandi for Prefuse: after "One Word Extinguisher", he'd already put out another substantial little album titled "Extinguished".

This time the work is presented as more independent from the record that spawned it. Even the title doesn't call back to its "parent" but is inspired, Herren says, by what he saw this year travelling the world, especially the security checks he encountered in every airport. The paranoia, the fear disguised as courtesy.

As for the music, "Security Screenings" is a return to the instrumental form that had characterized Prefuse 73's work up until last year. Vocal incursions are few indeed, and mostly confined to the short interludes. In a sense, then, with this album Herren reasserts his own unclassifiability, his status as an object apart both in the hip-hop world and in the electronic galaxy. He touches both while remaining outside them, unique, pure. And allowing himself the luxury of saying no to Gorillaz and the cascade of cash that would have followed.

Alongside the rediscovery of instrumentals, Herren dusts off his surreal sense of humor in the vocal samples. "Illiterate Interlude", the best example, is a stroke of genius: thirty seconds of some guy, maybe a radio interviewer, who didn't like "Surrounded By Silence" because there are too many guests, and says so right to poor Herren's face. Staged or not, the effect is hilarious, especially when it ends with the accuser asking "Cosa sai fare da solo?". The following "Keeping Up With Your Quota" could serve as the answer, a classic example of a Prefuse instrumental fusing melody, rhythm and a sense of organized anarchy made of interference and distraction. And you can tell they mean business here, that we're at the high standard of the guest-free productions of the old albums. The two mirror-image versions of "With Dirt And Two Texts", especially the second, are the quintessence of Prefuse's world: enveloping melody, pulsations, an atmosphere that's both real and dreamlike at once, the hip-hop beat slightly slowed down and built with sounds unusual for the genre.

But there's also a certain evolution towards greater refinement to be noted. "Another One Long Gone" is more reflective than ever, thanks in part to the backwards vocals and the shy orchestral opening that follow in "Always It's Gonna Be Like That", while "Matrimonioids", written way back in 2000, is the sweetest composition this alter ego has ever produced, and probably one of its very best.

Finally, we must point out the gem, the meeting/clash with his friend Four Tet on "Creating Cyclical Headaches". The teeming, joyful sonic carpet laid down by Kieran Hebden finds its perfect counterpoint in Herren's skipping rhythm and sonic dislocations, for three ecstatic minutes and a half.

All things considered, this new release may well be a minor, "transitional" work, but it must be said that the guy is currently in a state of grace, and so here too you can hear ideas and flourishes that others could only dream of. Leftovers or not, this doesn't feel like a collection of outtakes and afterthoughts, but a complete, cohesive work with every asset needed to stand on its own.

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22/12/2006