| #650 |
|
2003 |
Perilous 650 Scott Herron returns with another album as Prefuse73 on Warp. Coming at the end of a spell that has recently seen the reissue of one of Herron’s early works the Crush The Sightseers mini album as Delarosa & Asora and also a recent EP as Savatah & Savalas, Heron’s many personas have continued to push out exciting new music. And since the last Prefuse73 album a lot of other producers have tried their hand (with varying degrees of success) at ‘glitch hop’. Most notably on the Merck there is Machine Drum and Kristuit Salu/Morris Nightingale whose tracks emphasise a rigid mechanical rhythm, Funkstorung’s classic vocal messups, most of the Chocolate Industries crews who travel more and more down straight indie hip hop paths, and Herron’s own protégé Dabrye who steers down a more classic mid-90s hip hop path sounding close at times to NY’s DJ Smash. The new Prefuse73 album One Word Extinguisher continues to keep Herron one step ahead of those who follow behind largely because Herron has continued to move down a track that has him aligned with indie hip hop rather than simply developing ‘mad dsp effects’. Of course such effects are still evident but where others use a cold mechanical hand, Prefuse maintains a lighter touch managing to keep a semblance of funk in his beat manipulations and using his guest MCs (Diverse, Mr Lif, Daedelus) and producers (Dabrye, Tommy Guerrero) wisely. Unlike Vocal Studies & Uprock Narratives the new record leaves the MCs pretty much intact and opts for shorter tracks (21 main titles plus two bonus tracks) each clocking in around 2 minutes with plenty of interludes. Keep an eye out for it as it will be out in a week or two through Creative Vibes. There’s also a new EP from Pole, 45/45. Now signed to Mute, Pole has moved away from his trademark broken filter glitched up stressed dubs and in the direction of stripped back minimal beat tracks. The soft dub styled chords still appear but the beats are consistent and on the four EP tracks click away like slowed down dancehall-influenced typewriters. It sounds like such a low gloss record for Pole and in some ways quite anonymous. More alert is the new Kit Clayton EP When Cedars Fall recorded for Soul Jazz’s new electronic vinyl series. A 12” with two tracks, Clayton, a software engineer for Cycling74, makers of [], drops two lovely dub techno numbers with his trademark slightly off kilter beats and soft squishy synths, and in the end turns up sounds that don’t seem so far removed from the rest of the Soul Jazz catalogue. Apparently the next in the series will be from Clayton’s regular San Francisco collaborator Sutekh. It will be a series to watch. At Frigid over the next two weeks there’s Robokoneko & Adelaide’s fantastic Toby1 who are doing their ‘proper’ album launch for their record Cracks Increase on Surgery. Sublime laptop electronics with live vocals. This is followed by another Firehouse at Frigid on the 27th. Yellow Peril (www.snarl.org)  Goto
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