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Prefuse 73
Knitting Factory
Filter Grade: 91%
by Sam Roudman | 01.01.2007

Solitary emcee Beans kicked off the night with a refreshing mix of authoritative old school vocalizations and a decidedly new school take on showmanship. Think an “I’m the king of rap” battle mentality performed at Mach 10 by a dude with a gnarly beard, a bald head, and wraparound P-Funk sunglasses. All done while bending and convulsing to the beats with a physicality that left a thousand beads of his sweat orphaned on the faces of a spent and smiling crowd.

Next up was Battles, a four piece that merge hyper-complex rhythmic layers into a tapestry of intense post-rock elusiveness, odd and intriguing enough to force any junior concert reviewer into the realm of unfortunate and/or lame analogy. Two of the guys would spend half the songs playing keyboard and guitar--at the same time, effectively serving any “musician” in the audience with the arrangement equivalent of a blindfolded Yngwie Malmsteen solo. I think they played one of their songs forward and then backwards…and the drummer hit so hard that his snare drum started crying like a little bitch half way through the set. We all got served.

Headliner Prefuse 73 proved a loose and welcome counterpart to the lock-step hyper-robotics of Battles. With a drummer, a guy on the 1’s and 2’s, a bassist/sometimes touch-drum machinist, a board certified knob-tweeker, and ringmaster Scott Herron switching between a second drum kit and various knobs and keys, Prefuse pounded and scratched through airy and rocked out versions of their glitchy earphone masterpieces. Tracks flowed into and through each other, with multiple spaced out breaks with flurries of drum and drone, inevitably kicked back onto the beat by a distant female croon, or some jacked up saxophone wail. The only possible criticism is that they were a bit disorganized in their performance, but given the hugeness and unusually touching reach of these instrumentals, plus the added difficulty of bringing computer cut-ups into real time, it was certainly understandable.

Still, as I walked out onto the streets after the show, I couldn’t stop thinking about what a great argument against those who see nothing but baseness and obscenity in hip hop to have guys playing with the depth and subtlety of any Jazz or Rock, tweaking sounds, breaking new ground, and all while getting the crowd to move their collective ass.