Prefusely Prolific

"Thousands? I can't even count everything – I only own about three physical copies of my own records,” responds Guillermo Scott Herren when asked for a ballpark figure on how many individual tracks he's released over the course of his career. If it were any other artist, you'd be more likely to interpret these answers as poor attempts at comedy, but this is one serious talent. With his varied disguises including Savath y Savalas (with Eva Puyuelo Muns and Roberto Carlos Lange), Risil (including members of Sunn O))), School Of Seven Bells and PVT), Delarosa & Asora, Amhmad Szabo, Piano Overlord, The Predicate Production Guild, Diamond Watch Wrists (with Hella's Zach Hill), Sons Of The Morning (with Teebs, which he reveals have eight tracks ready for a 2013 album release) and, of course, Prefuse 73, not to mention his seemingly countless production credits, collaborations and remixes. Herren has punched electronic music forward in ways that see him earning heavyweight titles like the #1 Top 100 Artists Of The Decade by esteemed tastemaker betterpropaganda.com. Considering his prolific nature, then, it's been a little weird to see no album released in the last year or so, perhaps Herren's longest period without one since 2000. “I suppose a lot of things have added up in terms of projects,” explains Herren, also clarifying he hasn't been any less productive, with a heap of new material ready for release. “First, I'm used to focusing and working on one album at a time, even though it seems like I record three records at a time because the release dates might fall within a few months.

“I actually have been weaving in and out of multiple projects and I'm learning that this method definitely ends up being more time consuming. Multi-tasking has proven to be a lot more difficult than doing things in a more orderly succession. A lot of my silence is also due to the fact that I'm a lot more critical of my writing compared to all of my previous work. This has been a fairly recent epiphany, but it's taught me to reanalyze everything that I do in a more patient manner. At the end of the day, this is probably better for everyone.”

Even in such answers, it's obvious Herren is the thinking man's producer. And despite his breadth of talents, he's the first to admit two great heads are better than one. “Collaborations can shine a light on an otherwise serious, sometimes isolating, process. If it's just me, I'm not in the studio laughing out loud and having any dialogue about what's being created, even though I'm having fun. If someone else is there, I'm usually bugging out and working harder on getting the actual 'work' done.”

His passion for collabs last year saw him locking The Flaming Lips, a union that Herren surprisingly says “scared” him. “Honestly, I knew more about The Flaming Lips as an entity more than I knew their actual music,” explains Herren. “I met Wayne Coyne after I played a show with Neon Indian in Portland, Oregon and we hit it off… He sent me one song to collab on and I sent it back. Then he sent me two or three more, and they wanted to make an EP. I guess I would describe being 'scared' because I had full freedom and no direction, so I really didn't know how they'd react. I thought about it while listening to these weird, cassette-sounding songs and realized I definitely didn't want to chop it or make it sound like me. This was their music, so I ended up playing a bunch of instruments on the songs and sang on one of them. They were into it, so I guess it all went well. I try to approach working with other artists with as much respect as possible. I don't want to feel like I'm hijacking someone's idea.”

He's also worked with the likes of TV On The Radio, The Gaslamp Killer, The Books, Pelican, BLK JKS, Cornelius, Battles, Voices Voices and Mos Def, to name a few. As for his own though, with so many prolific projects and sounds mastered, how does Herren approach each differently? “Placing the music with the pseudonyms is the easy part, since I go into the individual project with an overall objective. For example, Prefuse 73 was, or is, a direct response to me growing up around hip hop and wanting to try new things within the genre. Savath y Savalas is a more live, typical or organic approach to music, which later evolved into an even deeper, cultural exploration that has very little to do with hip hop, beats or anything that spawned Prefuse 73. The inspiration part is more vast. Each release a project or pseudonym puts out is based on more particular feelings, places, objects or emotions on each album.”

With most electronic artists obsessed with moving forwards in the digital world, Herren's Prefuse album Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian was somewhat a surprise, a “homage to analog and tape spliced-beat edits,” which “avoided digital equipment as much as possible,” as Herren justifies. So was it a reactionary statement against modern-day producers' general lust for perfect production sheen? “It might have been reactionary, but definitely not in a vindictive way; more of a reaction to the way that I'm used to working.

“I like to test myself. Often it's more work than it needs to be, but I always learn a lot of random things along the way. Other than that, I embrace all technology and respect every individual's choice of tools. There is so much great music being made right now with very little financial confines. Analog might be my own preference but its price tag isn't really that easy for everyone to work with. It's taken me 10 or so years to build the studio that I have. One side is digital, the other side is a hard-wired analog set up. So, it's basically a big fucking mess in here, but I love it.

“Fifteen years, that's a load of changes!” laughs Herren when we switch conversation to his views on the evolution of the electronic music industry since he started. “Honestly, my whole entry into the music industry was really naïve. I didn't really use the word 'industry' too much back then; I had no reason to. Although, if anything has periodically slowed down my enthusiasm at times, it has been this industry's 'behind the scenes' shit that I wish I never had to deal with or see. It's a shallow and crooked place and it always has been. This has unfortunately stayed the exact same despite the demise of record sales and physical product. I have a hard time understanding the importance placed on numbers, play counts, trending, data, analytics and ridiculous Youtube discourse. That's just me though; everything has changed in the past 15 years, and it's best to focus on the good.”