Get to the Point and Keep Moving

Queens, NY rapper Nas once said, “I never sleep, ‘cause sleep is the cousin of death,” a phrase that bears a stark similarity to the old axiom that pertains to both Darwinism and art: evolve or die.
In the case of multi-talented musician, DJ and producer Scott Herren, that seems to be a philosophy by which to work. This one-man music machine is responsible for bending rules and pushing boundaries within hip-hop and production-based music, masking identity under three different monikers: Delarosa & Asora, Savath + Savalas, and the one that has brought Herren the most attention, Prefuse 73.
“Delarosa & Asora, which I’m no longer doing, was basically my original music project,” explains Herren, who is sitting in the Warp Records office in New York City before leaving for England, Germany and Japan on a promotional tour for the latest Prefuse release, One Word Extinguisher. “It was more random and unfocused, kind of a mix of everything that I do now, but just having more fun with it. Savath + Savalas, the newest thing, at this point, has turned into some complete Spanish folk-type shit. It’s completely different than it was. I mean, it still sounds like the other Savath stuff, it’s the same steeze, but it’s just more focused and it has vocals on the whole thing.
“I’m just doing less with the music, and it’s not really that I’m making an effort to,” continues the Atlanta native, who, after a stint in New York City, moved to Barcelona in 2002, which may explain his recent foray into Spanish folk. “I play guitar, and there’s a girl, and we both sing in Spanish, and when we’re done recording the songs they sound like they’re 30 years old just because we’ve haven’t done anything more to them yet. It’s just a classical guitar, a cello and vocals, but still sounds fresh and new, and not like a buncha’ shit. I’m really stoked on it. I don’t know when or where or how it’s coming out, so I’ve just got time and I’m gonna be working on it.”
The new Savath stuff may have to sit for a while, as obligations to Prefuse 73 loom in Herren’s immediate future. The already budding success of One Word Extinguisher — at the very least in the indie and college markets — comes from the buzz that was built from the last Prefuse album, Uprock Studies & Vocal Narratives. With this initial Prefuse release, Herren introduced a new flavor in hip-hop music, a mostly instrumental approach that folded abstract and unconventional rhythms with electronic blips and bleeps into the hearty backbeat of hip-hop. Part of the music’s appeal is its quirkiness and seemingly constant, even if subtle, evolution.
“There’s a lot of space and time you have to fill within an instrumental track, and that’s why a lot of my tracks aren’t really that long, because I’m the type of person who sorta just likes to get to the point and keep moving,” says Herren. “Even on this new record, I feel like I let shit ride a lot more than I normally do. I always have to make sure that shit is changing, though, every, um…at least four bars — just fill up that space with something that’s gonna keep the ear on that speaker, you know what I’m saying?”
That very drive for continual change is at the heart of Herren’s stylistic evolution, and though he’s managed to settle comfortably into his musical persona as Prefuse, even parts of that, he says, are wearing a bit thin. As part of approaching the writing and recording process of One Word Extinguisher, Herren had a bit of a master plan.
“I think that master plan was to get away from what I did on the last record — namely the vocal chops,” he states. Choppy vocal samples were a staple, almost a signature aspect in the music on Uprock Studies & Vocal Narratives. “I wanted to put those to sleep and just create a progression from the last one. I’m on some different shit now. I just had to move on.”
Moving on musically, however, did not mean getting away from Herren’s roots. In fact, he left Barcelona and traveled back to his hometown of Atlanta, heart of hip-hop’s “Dirty South,” to make the new album.
“I spent two or three months there just so I could be in that kind of environment, because that doesn’t really exist in Spain. It can be good to be isolated, but for me, I want to hear what’s going on, and I want to react to it in a certain way, I want to bounce off of it,” says Herrren, whose music, despite its nontraditional vibe, is very much hip-hop. And though he strived to move away from some aspects of previous Prefuse music, Herren still feels that One Word Extinguisher is a follow-up the first release. “I would consider it a follow-up. I think that the EP I released in 2002 [The 92 vs. 02 Collection] is more of a random thing. But this is a follow-up because in the first song, I’m sorta commenting on vocal chops in my own way, like, ‘Fuck this, this is it, blah blah blah.’”
Herren is not only a DJ and producer, but also a multi-instrumentalist who can play bass, guitar, drums and a few other things. His musical skill can be heard all over Delarosa & Asora and Savath + Savalas albums, and owes to his love of jazz music. In fact, the name Prefuse 73, according to Herren, came from his affinity for pre-1973, pre-fusion era jazz. And though he hesitates to compare Prefuse music to that era’s jazz, he feels that the two styles of music share a common motivation.
“It’s not so much that I would compare what I do with jazz music, but more with that era. I felt at the time I started Prefuse — and I’m not running parallels to people like Alice Coltrane, because they’re higher beings to me — that the parallel was that they broke away from the standard genre and were taking criticism left and right, and saying ‘fuck you’ and just doing it, and creating better music than a lot of what was going on in the standard jazz scene at that time. In a certain, small sense, Prefuse is doing the same thing, but in the hip-hop realm. It’s pushing some boundaries, and people either really hate it or really like it.”
Despite Herren’s love for jazz and his skill as a traditional musician, when it comes to Prefuse, Herren’s process has little to do with playing instruments, choosing instead to employ mainly an Akai MPC — a piece of electronic musical gear that, for ease of explanation, is basically sampler and drum machine.
“I try to keep Prefuse as much traditional MPC music as possible. Of course I interject live stuff every now and then, but I do like to keep it a certain way so it doesn’t get too spread out or random, and I like to limit myself. A computer is limitless, but an MPC limits you,” says Herren, who refuses to use a computer for anything more than mixing the machine’s eight output lines without adding or remixing any other tracks. “People have made comments on the production, like that it’s kinda weird, but that’s the way I like it — eight MPC outputs, 64 sounds and that’s it. It’s sort of my own quiet comment on people who have everything when it comes to music gear and still make shitty music. There are people in the hip-hop and electronic music realms — and really, in every aspect of the music world — who are trust fund kids and have tons of fucking money, and make shit music but still blow the fuck up off of it. So Prefuse is my comment: ‘I did this whole project with just this MPC, and I’m not bragging about it, it’s just how I did it.’”

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