Whenever I'm making a public appearance-- be it a guest lecture at an Ivy League institution, a poetry slam in the East Village, or a Costco outlet opening in Yuma, Arizona-- I'm often asked the same question by some concerned audience member. "Rob," they ask, "as a world-renowned Internet music critic, can you please explain to me what 'IDM' is?" Chuckling to myself and stroking my salt-and-pepper beard, I reply, "First of all, as a little joke, I like to say that the 'I' in 'IDM' stands for unlistenable. Ahahahaha. Ha." The laughter and applause is usually deafening, save the few pale kids in the back wearing Geogaddi shirts who choose to scoff and shoot dirty glances rather than salute my delightful witticism.
Ahh, but I kid, Grooves subscribers; I kid because I love. It's just hard not to mock a genre whose very name reminds people that the music within is 'intelligent,' lest any of us confuse it with the low-brow disrobing anthems of Nelly and Tweet. Also amusing is the D-for-Dance part, since a lot of the music in this pigeonhole seems to require a minimum of six legs and a mild case of epilepsy to actually dance along. Yeah, so IDM is a label dreamt up by critics stretching for words to describe bleeps and bloops, though the Very Serious attitude of a lot of artists in the IDM neighborhood does little to wash away the stink of elitism.
Of course, even I recognize that there are exceptions to this snooty caricature, and it's these exceptions that usually pace the field in terms of exposure and influence. The 'It' Boy of the IDM beauty pageant at this very second is Mr. Scott Herren of Atlanta, Georgia, for whom Prefuse 73 is the best known of a Stephen Merritt-like stable of aliases. Herren's turned a number of ears lately by setting up camp at the crossroads of the two most fertile sounds going right now-- your hip-hop and your electronic-- and catering to the forward-thinkers of both crowds. Herren even threw out a little bait named Sam Prekop on his last LP to get the indie rockers' attention, proving that the underground also knows how to sell a few more records with the "Ft." credit.
But being king of the hill in either electronic or hip-hop is generally a short-lived affair, and flirting with both scenes simultaneously makes Prefuse 73 an extra-juicy target for a coup d'etat. Hence his new EP, The '92 vs. '02 Collection, is receiving more scrutiny than an Arab-American at an airport security checkpoint, the rabble itching to throw Herren on the washed-up pile with Richard D. James and Dan Nakamura. Thing is, Herren's not going down easy. This EP's neither a retread of Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives' inventions, nor a needlessly abrupt U-turn away from that album.
Though they're subtle, there are definite changes afoot. Most noticeably, someone seems to have scared the hiccups out of Herren's music; after Vocal Studies moved the word 'glitch' from troubleshooting manuals to hipster dictionaries, he seems to be letting the style go its own way. And save a short chest-beating sample in the prologue to "When Irony Wears Thin" ("you want my style so much") and a diva given the blender treatment on "Love You Bring," Herren leaves behind the nothing-but-vowels linguistic deconstruction of his previous outing. Filling in the empty spaces instead is a busier, more jittery undercurrent, full of taps, snaps, and claps, clicks, flicks, and thwicks.
What's thankfully left intact is Herren's ability to present his art in digestible three-to-five-minute portions, or 'songs,' if you will. As with the similarly deified DJ Shadow, writers confronted with Prefuse 73 music tend to get so tied up with describing the artist's technical accomplishments and cultural relevancy that they forget that both men possess the remarkable ability to make innovation fun. There's a reason Vocal Studies turns up in more CD towers than Autechre; like a novel or a movie with both literal and allegorical meanings, Prefuse can be enjoyed on either a visceral or intellectual level.
And if you haven't already figured it out, I'd rather listen to The '92 vs. '02 Collection as a record than as a thesis. Forget musical evolution, I like "Desks, Pencils, Bottles" because the central sample of clanking glass bottles sounds really fucking neat alongside the window-rattling bass and astral synthesizers. "When Irony Wears Thin" is good, too; with brassy orchestration like a cop-show theme song coasting over a skyline of beeps and tests of the emergency broadcast system. "It Never Entered" and "Love you Bring" are slightly less ear-catching; the first concentrates on the same synthesizers (the '02, I assume) against handclaps (the '92?) battle as the rest of the EP, and the second comes closest to a Vocal Studies leftover with its R&B; vocals and looped acoustic guitar snippet.
That's an EP for you, though-- a low-profile snack between meals to tweak one's sound and hint at future directions. As a strategic move, releasing The '92 vs. '02 Collection is probably good policy, as it'll hopefully deflect some of the required backlash when the true follow-up to Vocal Studies is released (something, ahem, the Shadow knows about). For the rest of us, '92 vs. '02 is an entertaining fifteen minutes, thanks to Herren balancing out the I with enough D, and making pretty darn good M.
