prefuse 73 - security screenings
following on quickly from the recent album, 'surrounded by silence', and the minilp, 'prefuse reads the books', comes this new 17 track minilp/ep. does the man, known as scott to his friends, ever sleep? apparently, his hard disk is full of crunchy beats and looped samples and he just can't wait for us to hear it all. is prefuse 73 going to become the 'warp vs prince of laptop beats i wonder ? luckily though, the 40 minutes on offer are well worth your tracking down. of course, there are the usual distorted noise, random bleeps etc, but for one who has been accused of being overly serious, there is a lot of fun to be had. there is the mad cut-n-paste of the opening, where you begin to wonder if scott has been checking out ninjatunes' daedelus albums as old (v.old) movie samples are spliced and diced to draw the listener into an alternative universe, while making them smile, then there is the interview snippet whereby the interviewer is slagging off the album for having too many guests, this is even given its own title - 'illiterate interlude', self-deprecation is a wonderfully refreshing, and somewhat rare art in the heady world of electronica. as well as the supposedly mindfuck noises, there are large chunks of this album where intricate melody is beautifully brought to the fore, even if the actual sounds used to create the groove is unrecognisable, there's a depth and warmth in the sonics that is very enticing. as with the other releases, there has to be a collaboration somewhere amidst the sampledelica, and this time time round it's fellow broken beats mesiter, four tet, for the albums centre piece, 'creating cyclical headaches', a phrase that probably means little to most, but having had this situation for a week myself many years ago, i can tell you it's no fun ! of course the music created by these 2 masters of the funk, excel and extract a rather fine slab of distortion and harmony, the beat is pure hip hop, but the uncomfortable white noise overdubs and beautiful undercurrents make this rather special.
admittedly, there is little to really differentiate this from the other prefuse 73 records of late as the sonic template is very similar, but this is not a slur, as the machine led scott seems to be on a roll, and thankfully warp seem to be supporting the heavy release schedule, and as long as scott manages to generate such wonderfully sumptuous sounds as on this, i for one am glad.