Webster Hall, NYC
Wednesday, March 26, 2003
Interview by Patrick Billard
Illustration by Adam Walko

As beat-oriented music has grown in popularity in the past decade, superstar DJs and electronic music producers are increasingly playing the roll of full-fledged rock stars. This means dealing with groupies, giving tons of press interviews, and hopping continents performing in front of multitudes of screaming fans.

Although he hates to admit it, Scott Herron of Prefuse 73, Savath+Savalas and Delarosa+Asora finds himself in such a predicament. He says the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle is wack. He’d rather be at home in his studio making beats for any of his multiple musical personalities. As Prefuse 73, Herron has forged a quirky brand of cut-up sample-based hip-hop that strips the art form of it’s lyric elements. There are vocals but they’re chopped, spliced and re-sequenced and become another layer of instrumentation, rather than the focal point of the music. As Savath+Savalas and Delarosa+Asora, Herron combines his expertise in electronic music production with his knack for instrumentation, creating a very personal, moody one-man post-rock band.

When we met at Webster Hall on a cold, rainy night in March, Herron had just got off a cross-Atlantic flight from Spain, where he currently resides, to do a four-date mini-tour with some Warp Records labelmates. He was delirious from lack of sleep, extraordinary time-zone differences and jet lag. His synthesizer wasn’t working. His set wasn’t as polished as he would have liked. Yet he still found the time and energy to wax poetic on hip-hop, electronic music and the creative process in general.

How’s it going?
Good. Bad. I’m tired man. I need some sleep. I don’t like my set. I want to go back to the hotel to finish it. It just kind of dissipates. It doesn’t do anything. Usually I try to wrap everything up somehow. This way it doesn’t really do it.

How do you come up with your live sets?
They are always different. When I’m playing alone, I try to change it, especially if they’re for a tour. I don’t know why because they are all in different places, but I try to switch it up. When I play with other people it’s more rehearsed. You have a way to interact. But I don’t like the end of what I have tonight.

It’s down to the line!
Yeah, this whole shit is down to the line.

Explain the name Prefuse 73.
I just coined it. I first started writing it, even after my graffiti days. When you are addicted to graffiti you just constantly write. So Prefuse, I just liked the way it flowed. It’s something I think I did, I think I coined. It’s that era of [jazz] fusion from ‘68 to ‘73.

I first heard you on the Lily of the Valley compilation on Schematic Records. I think your track stood out the most.
Really?

Yeah, a lot of that harsh, experimental electronic stuff doesn’t do much for me.
Yeah, I was really surprised when Schematic were the ones who called me. I gave them a demo, and they called me. I was like, they like this shit?

Do you like their sound?
(Laughs). I don’t really listen to that kind of music, and I never did. That era of my music is the way that it is because I was experimenting with my MPC [sampler] and it got kind of lumped in with them.

Would you say that after touring with them that you picked up some influences of that sound?
They showed me a lot of shit. They exposed me to a lot of electronic music that I was totally not up on. They were like, “You know this? You know this?” The electronic music that I was up on wasn’t really their thing. Electronic music to me at the time was bands with electronic elements in them.

For a while Warp and Schematic seemed to have a reputation for cutting-edge dance music. Now Warp is putting out different stuff. But it seems like a lot of that experimental electronic stuff sort of came and went.
Yeah, I mean, you could hear (becoming extinct) when it was coming out. How many times are you going to hear a crunchy beat with atmospheric chords? How long can you listen to the same thing? How can that genre exist and not expand? All that shit runs together to me. I’m not hating on it, but I don’t like it.

Tell me about your songwriting process with Prefuse. It sounds like it takes a lot of work.
It’s starts with something different every time. I just put stuff together. It’s really frantic and it’s not that graceful of a process. Once things start coming together the extra attention is added. But as I make it its just information gathered.

Does it come in fits of inspiration?
Sort of. The songwriting I do in Prefuse vs. Savath+ Savalas is completely opposite. With Savath+Savales I can sit down with a guitar, write a song and compose it. Prefuse starts out with anything. It’s all sample based. It’s minimal live playing. I only allow myself to use so much [live instrumentation].

Do you tend to sample yourself?
Yes.

Do you sample from records? Anything goes?
Anything, definitely.

How much midi programming do you do?
None. I did some midi on the EP I did, 92 vs. 02. I ran the bass midi from my MPC to the keyboard. But fuck midi. I don’t like it. I always lose the data. I just play live.

Do you ever DJ?
Yeah. I don’t consider myself a DJ, but I DJ. I’ll play records if I’m asked to.

Celebrity DJ?
(Laughs) I don’t know about that! I like to play records. I’ve just never been a really good DJ. I’ve done it in so long and I just suck at technically DJing. I can cut better than I can mix.

Were you a b-boy growing up?
I was a straight-up hip-hop dork growing up, until I found out who Slint was and then I got into other music.

What was it like working with Tommy Guerrero?
I don’t know! It was a FedEx endeavor. I asked him if he wanted to collaborate on my record because he had asked me to collaborate on his. But he had to go to Japan two days from when we spoke, so he wrote a song that night and sent it the next day.

The drummer from Mercury Program is on the record.
I don’t know them at all!

How did that happen?
I went to their show because my friend Danny, this kid that runs Counterflow Records, was putting them out. I was like, “Oh wow, Danny is doing something that’s not hip-hop.” So they played in Atlanta one night when I was in Atlanta. I went to the show and I watched and I was like, “Cool, cool, this is great.” And then I went up to the drummer and I was like, “Man you’re dope! Can I get your drum track?

Did he know who you were?
Yeah! And I was like, “I’ll make it worth your while.” That’s a Mercury Program track, that drum track. He said just give me credit. So I just put his name on there.

Guest musicians seem to be the theme of the record.
That’s the hip-hop cliché! For every non-formulaic thing you do, you have to balance it out with a formula.

So hip-hop heads can swallow it better?
Nah, fuck them man. Just to balance out what I’m doing for myself.

When are you going to throw in comedy skits or martial arts samples?
(Laughs) I don’t know if I can do that.

Would you say you make hip-hop?
With Prefuse there’s no other way I would ever describe it.

When did you start chopping up vocals, doing the thing that has become your trademark?
This album is dedicated to not doing that anymore.

If you are trying not to do the vocal chops anymore, where do you see you music heading?
The vocal chops, when I did it I was trying to make my version of ‘80s edit records like Mantronix and bass music – sliced up shit! I was taking elements from early ‘90s and mid-‘90s hip-hop and now and blending it all together. That’s where the whole slicing came from. It didn’t come from fucking IDM. That’s what I was trying to do, and now I’m just moving on. So, on the album, there’s still a few little micro cut-ups of vocals but that’s just to say goodbye to the style. I don’t want to make a part two of the same record.