Listening to the records he makes as Prefuse 73, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Scott Herren has a kind of musical attention deficit disorder. Melodies and rhythms are ruthlessly dispatched within seconds of their appearance. Guest rappers, meanwhile, find their flow diced into incomprehensible fragments, lost in Herren's hyperactive, massively detailed and frequently astonishing blend of hip-hop and electronica.
Herren, it seems, can't stick with one idea for long. But on his second album under the Savath & Savalas alias, he reveals a much more patient, delicate musical side. The first S&S album, 2000's "Folk Songs For Trains, Trees And Honey", was a meditative post-rock record, indebted to Tortoise. A couple of that band actually appear on "Apropa't", but Herren and his music have moved somewhere else again.
Specifically, to Barcelona. Herren emigrated there from Atlanta in 2002, and met a Catalan singer-songwriter called Eva Puyuelo Muns, who is now the other half of S&S. As a result, "Apropa't" is an understated, immensely lovely album of duets sung by the pair, influenced by local folk songs and, especially, a certain strain of '70s Brazilian psych-pop.
"Um Girassol Da Cor De Seu Cabelo", originally by Milton Nascimento and Lo Borges, is the most obvious example of this dappled, hazy tropical style. Herren and Muns' own songs are every bit as entrancing: acoustic reveries punctuated by electronic flutter; restful where Prefuse 73 are constantly in motion, but no less inventive. Towards the end, Herren's love of the glitch tentatively tries to reassert itself, but poetry and seductiveness manage to pacify it for the duration. A triumph for prettiness, then: how long it rules Herren's world remains to be seen.
