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READS THE BOOKS E.P.
WARP
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Prefuse 73’s jagged glitch-hop and the Books’ julienned folk are about as far apart as labeled genres get, but this collaborative EP shows that they’ve been speaking the same language all along. Prefuse’s Scott Herren turns out to be an interactive kind of reader, scribbling head-nodding boom-bap backbones up and down the Books’ acoustic margins. The Books’ usual archival-tape samples ("Something is happening which is not happening") are joined by voices from the street below muttering phrases like "Damn, that’s dope." On "Pagina Cinco," Herren rips up Paul de Jong’s wailing cello and Nick Zammuto’s banjo licks and reassembles them into a mournful ransom note. The more you listen, the more the two acts’ shared vocabulary of stuttering splices and disembodied voices blurs, till you can’t tell who made which sounds. The only shame is that, at just six full tracks, this fruitful mash can’t be more than a pamphlet.
