One thing I’ve now learnt from Prefuse 73 is that the man produces such an insane amount of music you can never pin him down, no matter what you think he plans on doing next. Naturally I didn’t expect his new (awesomely titled, I might add) album Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian for at least another year, but here it is; sitting on my Foobar playlist.

His previous album Preparations/Interregnums was a warm, airy affair which was a massive departure of the MC’d glitch-hop of Security Screenings and the golden One Word Extinguisher. Everything She Touched… sees Prefuse – aka Guillermo Scott Herren – take a step back from the fuzziness of Preparations and work more into the foray of instrumental glitch-hop. It’s a 48 minute ride through 29 tracks, most of which push the minute-to-minute-and-a-half mark. Only five tracks push past three minutes in legnth. The album starts with a numbers of vocals, glitches and beats, before we really start seeing the material with Sexual Fantasy Scale, which brings about the old-school before switching over to some dark hip-hop beats in a brief minute period. We’re then dropped into the beautifully harmonic but robotic DEC. Machine Funk All ERA’s. This one kicks off with some lovely vocals before the robotic beat drops and the lasers and squeals appear.

Over the course of the ensuing 48 minutes we hear some pretty remarkable changes in style and mood. The dark, brooding, bass heaving drum crashing of Violent Bathroom Exchange drops into the high-above-the-clouds, glitched out, robotic sounds of Nature’s Uplifting Revenge. A bit later we completely lose all the beats for Simple Loop Choir, which delivers Herren’s vocoded vocals above a haunting appear-and-disappear bass over saddening airy analogue synths. Things are tied off with the tracks Digan Lo, which drops a stretched bass over a wicked cool beat, some ghostly vocal work and subtle sirens. Another closer track, entitled Preparation Kids Choir, takes us back to the playground with some school bells and childish vocals. The track sealing the album, Formal Dedications, seems a subtle way of saying thanks, but I’m not sure who Herren is trying to show gratitude to as the track has a dark, grimy vibe with a tick-tock pulsating throughout before petering out on some airy glitches.

The mood changes on Everything She Touched… quite a bit and you’d think that it would make it for a difficult listen, but thankfully Herren’s ability to structure his material shines through and so the album is strangely coherent as a result. It’s by no means his best work from the last 6 years, but it’s definitely his best work in the last 3 and that’s enough for me.