2/5
Scott Herren leaves no booklet, no acknowledgements and no liner notes to accompany his sixth and most official full-length LP. The Atlanta-based hip-hop producer forgoes the big-named cameos that littered his previous works, choosing instead to immerse us in the 29-track Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian with no preconceived notions, no judgments and without any clue of what the fuck we’re about to listen to.
But that’s the beauty of Ampexian ‘mdash; it’s a mind-body experience that takes us into the recesses of Herren’s reeling dreams and nightmares, channeling laser-sharp emotion into an unprecedented artist-audience correlation.
‘Periodic Measurements of Infrequent Smiles’ spins an introduction the length of a goldfish’s attention span. Glitchy speech samples mix with high-frequency, ambient-spaceship static, the white noise seamlessly slipping into a calm, harmonic chorus before ending up right back where it started ‘mdash; all in less than a minute, delivered in cracked-out, animated lurches.
Herren follows this stream-of-consciousness groove to its bitter end, jumping from blip trip to serene ambience faster and more erratically than Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, restlessly triggering disembodied samples and shattered-glass techno.
Though he unapologetically pushes the boundaries of hip-hop further than fellow producers RJD2 and Madlib, Herren can still stick a dance-friendly hook in our heads ‘mdash; no matter how scratched or blurry the lines are. Melodic vibrations infect ‘Fountains of Spring,’ resonating over a drum track coated in reverb and gravel, and what seems to be a troupe of Martians pushing lawnmowers.
Careful contemplation and introspection polish off Herren’s technique-based tracks, which shine brighter than ever. But, as he intimates with the album title ‘mdash; Ampexian refers to the old-school Ampex tape decks of the 1950s ‘mdash; there’s still room for a little analog spark in all the dense digital smog.