Music Box | Prefuse 73

Mike Newmark Assistant Arts Editor

Prefuse 73
Security Warnings
[Warp]
4 out of 5 stars

It’s hard to find something positive to say about 9/11, but it did force many Americans to shelve their differences and unite as citizens of a single nation. It also made people really angry. Anger is passionate, deliberate, and easy to interpret: you know when you’re angry, and you’re often inclined to do something about it. Indeed, it can charge the creative juices in a way that few emotions can, and bands from Public Enemy to Minor Threat to Nine Inch Nails have streamlined their anger to give their music the visceral punch lacking in the work of their contemporaries.

Prefuse 73 (née Scott Herren) is pretty angry, too. In between joining new bands, planning upcoming releases, changing his name and running the Eastern Developments label, the prolific glitch-hop producer has made his own contribution to the post-9/11 music fold.

The target of his rage? Airport security, for showing him an “immense amount of respect (read: disrespect) and care (read: negligence)” since 9/11. I can think of greater threats to my well-being than airport security, but perhaps due to a handful of missed flights or an unholy strip-search, Herren has used this “mini-album” as a rant against the lovely folks in the TSA.
Or has he? Aside from the title and a few vaguely topical song names like “Keeping Up With Your Quota,” Security Screenings lacks a clear message and is every bit as scattershot as previous releases. Message or not, the mostly self-produced Screenings finds Herren returning to form after the clunky, collaborator-heavy Surrounded By Silence. The only full collaborator here (other than TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe pitching on on the outro) is former tourmate and rising indie-electronic star Four Tet, whose contribution tellingly results in the album’s dullest and most dispensable number.

With Herren left to his own devices, the product is his trademark melee of clicks, bleeps, hip-hop beats, sensual melodies and vocal samples that are cut, modified and rearranged to a pulp. Yet there’s something oddly listenable about Prefuse’s brand of chaos. Unlike much of the IDM crowd, Prefuse 73 has a keen sense of groove; with their rolling drumbeats and unassuming digital jazziness, “Keeping Up With Your Quota” and “With Dirt and Two Texts (Later Version with Love)” are plain intoxicating. Not one of the thousands of musical elements on Security Screenings sounds misplaced; each fragment has been meticulously selected and inserted with forceps into its proper slot.

As a mini-album, and not a proper follow-up to Surrounded By Silence (which promises to be just as overstuffed with collaborators), Security Screenings is about half full songs and half snippets. It’s a well sequenced album, with each track tumbling effortlessly into the next. Prefuse’s interludes are never just filler; some are amusing collages of archived film dialogue (“The Letter P”), and others are worthy of substantial lengthening (“One Star and Three Stripes”). The album’s most satisfying surprise is the one-minute “Always It’s Gonna Be Like That,” a stunning, lump-in-your-throat track with little more than floating strings and a hiccupping, heavily treated female vocal. Who knew that Prefuse’s first foray into less-is-more territory would be such a revelation?

I dare say that Herren is just going through the motions, which would be problematic if his “motions” weren’t so creative to begin with. Still, the passion is in curiously short supply. Prefuse 73 wasn’t the first artist to appeal to B-boys and computer-science majors in equal measure, but he was one of the best, fusing streetwise beats with every imaginable effect to create a digital swagger that few in his field could match. Without the heart, Security Screenings is superbly produced electronic music and not much more. It’s a good thing that Prefuse didn’t stick to one concept; his albums are too joyously schizophrenic for that, and politically-inclined instrumental music has generated its share of valiant missteps (Trans Am’s Liberation comes to mind). If only Herren had been a little angrier, Security Screenings could have been a monster.

All Music Box ratings are out of 5 stars.