Cultural orgasm. Whisper in my ear and tell me you hate me. Vikings invade the Mediterranean and don't leave. Diarrhea takes over your life. These are all titles from Scott Herren's latest EP, a relentless megamix of material that didn't make it into his latest album. And no, I couldn't resist spouting them all up front. Let's just move on.
Last time on Prefuse: The One Word Extinguisher LP documented a loss to be cherished. The raw material was putrid and abrasive, but it was smoothed a thousand times over in the obsessive preening of the mourning process. Prefuse tried to crush and explode himself, to revile and revel in and revise the emptiness. Nothing seemed to work. Then, somewhere near the last third of the album, it sank in: She was gone, even her impression was gone, and the beats were still dropping. Music had healed itself again.
Extinguished: Outtakes doesn't look back into that mess. There's no secret suffering or swollen self-denial, just a truckload of DATs full of sick-ass beats. The mix is verbal, hyped, rich, impatient, and constantly pushing forward. With a lot of the music on Herren's Eastern Developments label, the hard part of my job is to find purchase on the smooth surface of a non-verbal document. With Prefuse, and especially this EP, the music is so monstrously verbal that I'm worried it will review me. Here are the trademark vocal scraps and battle rhymes, yes, but also an array of dirty samples and relentless sequences that barrel through your Broca's brain with big balls and no brakes.
There are literally dozens of fragments here, for the most part ranging in length between five and ninety seconds. Each captures Herren's riddled attention long enough to get dropped in, flipped, then scrapped for the next. It's a dizzying and crowded ride, not always pleasant, and not one that can be navigated actively. What did you do during the Blackout of 2003? Rush home, search for candles and batteries, call loved ones? You should have set up a lawn chair in the middle of the Manhattan bridge and let the exodus wash over you with a daiquiri in one hand and a discman spinning Prefuse in the other. This album is like crowdgazing: If you don't tense up under the strain, it starts to wash over you in a way you can breathe through. It's a labyrinth, but check your watch: Less than forty minutes have elapsed.
The madness begins with a custom collage of rodeo Rhodes, mambo brass, curses, interview with an old-timer from the last days of the jazz age, and, inevitably, the rapture of a brisk, sample-driven limp. This alternates with a dirty-south feel built on the same samples, until the whole thing is swept aside for a thick, janky live feel. There's some chanting and the usual layered dirtwash, and then a vital, effluvial spray of mud and guts. Pase Rock gives an unremarkable shoutout, and we're ready to push this sucker up to the precipice so it can drop for real.
A harsh, cramped vamp: sick, rich clav scurrying all over the sawtooth basement. Skittish drill punctures little holes in a boom-bip clench already riddled with ligaments. A minute of strict, reckless, glorious invention in this vein, then the same beat is exposed in a stream of pre-sweetened sinewaves. Ripples forming around it push into a leisurely grind with some faded vocal hyping and a contagious snap-habit. Whining, malfunctioning synths do their abrupt flitters, squalls and death laughs.
Then a dirty one-two with faded guitars and rotted flute. Muted backspun whispers wire-tripping you into the snare every single time. Dribbled out into a froth of beatlets, pressured into giving note on the sixteenths, a soprano rebels. Nasty-ass retarded old school cereal box top decoder ring jam. Clav-busters with a glut of cutthroat mugs, and all to kill the garage punk interlude. Overheard at a local wedding reception, a stuffed shirt muttering: "Fuck you if you think that's bold. I couldn't feel your shit if my hands were stuck inside your asshole." Such sublime humor, all but buried in the beat salad.
Caulked-up fuzz bass riding a slaw of creaks and cracks. Alloys that strain the caustic slats. Muscular and doubled, chime delights a cadence uncontested: clap to the tick, tick to the trip, stiff with a tensile tip, let it rip. Whistle-dropped one to the punch of something fibrous, well-wrought with a grime delight. No effects, no intricacies, just a man and his sampler. Fives and threes stutter, wrong and bloodied like Mahler slotted into a Pharoahe Monch parody, and after all this, six whole minutes of cello and a headwrap, a Delarosa and Asora-worthy splay of velvet benevolence to lock in the freshness. Then, finally, abruptly, it skids to a halt with the blink-fast deceleration of stopped vinyl.
