PREFUSE 73 Vinyl & CDs

Review: Fresh after Prefuse 73 (Guillermo Scott Herren)’s new album, New Strategies for Modern Crime Vol. 1, comes this new 1/2 compendium, which marries the record with a follow-up Vol. 2. His first outing since 2018’s Sacrifices, the New Strategies for Modern Crime albums heard Herren delve further into his groundbreaking take on experimental hip-hop. The thesis in this case was orchestrated arrangements via the optic of the media’s sensationalism of crime, blended with influences from lost soundtracks, musique concrète, jazz and beat-tape music. Through its burgeoning jazz and noir soundtrack themes and motifs, Prefuse 73 toys with popular-imaginary associations of crime as something laced with excitement and intrigue, as opposed to a social force intimately adjoined to systemic issues, such as poverty or racism. The music is smokey and opium-denned, with its mystical zithers, freeform drumming and looming crunch-fest sound design - ‘Onboard, Overboard’, ‘Fare La Corna’, and ‘Empath Lords’ all among the album’s wackier moments - suggesting an imaginary miasma we must move through and past.