Fascinated by news media’s sensationalism of crime, Guillermo Scott Herren created his own soundtrack. Danny Turner finds out more
For over 20 years, Guillermo Scott Herren has been releasing derivations of hip-hop under a swathe of pseudonyms such as Prefuse 73, Savath and Savalas and Delarosa & Asora. With the pandemic giving him the time and space to think outside of the box, the Miami-born producer emerged with The Failing Institute album series – a new way of working, collating vocal samples and textures using minimal effects.
The latest Prefuse 73 album, New Strategies for Modern Crime Vol. 1, continues Scott Herren’s search for new avenues of expression. After being troubled by America’s 24-hour news cycle of crime, he began digging into vigilante movies from the ’70s and ’80s. In deep admiration of their soundtrack scores, he abandoned his famous reliance on the Akai MPC and enlisted live musicians to create his own dark, cinematic jazz-funk soundtrack.
For the first 20 years of your career, your albums were mostly based around origins of hip-hop, but that seemed to change in 2020 with your Failing Institute albums. What did your explore with that series?
“That collection of stuff was more of an exercise. They were made during Covid when I was able to focus and see what I could do without inhibition and work and study with sounds and textures that were very similar. That wasn’t something I was used to doing because everything I’d done up to that point had been quite heavy-handed and maximalist. I loved being able to use that time to reconfigure things in my mind, separating everything I’d done from what was in front of me. During that period, I also did a bunch of commercial work, which was a side-hustle to offset things economically, but I didn’t think that was much fun.”
What didn’t you enjoy about doing commercial work?
“I love soundtrack work, but I didn’t like doing corporate commercial work like regular TV adverts. It can be really interesting and cool if you’re working with the right director or production group, but there’s usually 30 other people working on the same project and it starts to feel like it’s a race towards who gets the job and gets paid. The briefs are so vague – they want something ‘upbeat yet downbeat, cheerful yet depressing’, and it’s really hard to decipher that. The worst part is that you’re trying to hit the bullseye when out of nowhere they’ll come back and decide to completely change direction.”
Your latest album New Strategies for Modern Crime Vol. 1 continues your exploration away from hip-hop. What can you tell us about the ethos behind the album?
“During Covid, I noticed that certain people, whether through the media or government, like to enhance the level of crime and how dangerous it is and tell you that you can’t go outside without getting stabbed in
