Gems: One Word Extinguisher by Prefuse 73 (2003)
In this album feelings are not a glitch in the beat; they are the beat.
Gems is the Guerrilla Bizarre series that brings you special records worth (re)discovering. In these features you'll find forgotten albums by celebrated artists; promising releases that didn’t get the attention they deserved; surprising, underlooked, and plain cool stuff from the past.
Scott Herren goes by a variety of aliases, among which the best known is undoubtedly Prefuse 73. He hails from Miami, has lived in Atlanta, New York, Barcelona, and his beginning-of-the-century releases constitute perhaps the most hidden among the greatest influences on today’s hip hop; the missing link between DJ Shadow and Flying Lotus.
His most accomplished work, One Word Extinguisher, is from 2003 and was published by Warp. It’s a record that can catch off-guard any unknowing listener, and the British record company was probably the most indicated for it. It sounds like the exploration of a musical landfill where, mysteriously, scraps of sound have coalesced into geometric structures, like crystals. Herren relies strongly on samples, assembled and dissected to become building blocks for loops and angular breaks such as those of “The Color Of Tempo”. In his hands, chops of vocals become percussions, their humanity fragmented as if seen through a prism. Concealed among the rubbish there might be a longer dialogue excerpt, but it’s hard to understand its meaning and relation to the context.
Because some semblance of a context is present: this album is not as cold and rational as a gem. It manages to strike a delicate balance between the challenging and the warm, thanks in great part to the melodic bits of the tracks. The fretless bass and Rhodes organ of “Uprock And Invigorate”. The faraway strings of “Styles That Fade Away with a Collonade Reprise''. Tommy Guerrero’s guitar line in “Storm Returns”. The result of this melange is complex yet emotional music, a collection of beats meant to evoke a precise atmosphere. In fact, reading between the lines of interviews of the time, it seems that when he was producing One Word Extinguisher, Prefuse was in the process of breaking up with his girlfriend. It starts to make sense now: the melancholic vibe, some of the titles (“90% of My Mind Is with You"), the R&B samples that pop up between the tracks do not seem stylized brag anymore. They are the context.
Again, clearly listeners are mostly left on their own, interpreting the strange sound objects they encounter in this junkyard. The garbage analogy describes perfectly another aspect of this cut-and-paste style, which sometimes results in the impression that the beat is made out of “wrong” sounds, error sounds: a static from a TV, a phone interference, a needle scratch on a vinyl. It was very easy at the time, and perhaps it is now too, to label the result as “glitch hop”; a handy, trendy label indeed, which probably established more boundaries than connections, and helped in somehow pigeonholing this artist.
Warp Records was not known at the time for issuing hip hop music, which made it easier to overlook how obviously One Word Extinguisher derived from it: the intricate beats were produced (and played) on the most part on MPCs, and Herren liked to work with underground MCs such as Diverse, Aesop Rock and MF DOOM. Though the album was well received, Herren lamented the fact that it was hard, for his label in the first place, to understand what type of music he was selling. All in all, with a couple of decades of hindsight, it’s easier to see the connection now with established artists like Flying Lotus (whom he apparently contributed to bringing to Warp), not really in production style, but in the idea that there were so many possible options to what hip hop could be. It feels a bit weird even today, but maybe we should just call One Word Extinguisher what it is: a good hip hop album.
Words by Alessandro Cebrian Cobos
