Yes, we all know that Twitter was essentially designed to give people with narcissistic personality disorder a more dedicated outlet to vent their trivial frustrations, but there are also some clear benefits to the service: 1. It’s hilarious reading people’s attempts to condense insightful thoughts down to 140 characters, only to have the resulting tweet be an incoherent mishmash of abbreviations (circa 2005), hash tags, and “at” signs. 2. Established artists like Prefuse 73 and Teebs can bypass traditional methods of publicity-seeking, and instead opt for such casual messages as, “big day today. starting work with Prefuse 73 on a collab record,” and “@teebsio yup! i’m there! + this musical email is amazing. I got the Other ‘5/5/2k12’. @teebsio + prefuse73 are: ‘SONS OF THE MORNING.’” For the purpose of clarity, and credit to Prefix: Warp mainstay Prefuse 73 and Los Angeles-based Brainfeeder bulwark Teebs are working on a joint album under the moniker Sons of the Morning.
Considering the numerous collaborations that Prefuse 73 a.k.a. Guillermo Scott Herren has already contributed his services to (Savath y Savalas, A Cloud Mireya, Prefuse 73 & The Books, Diamond Watch Wrists), this appears to be one of the few in which the artists involved both lie within close proximity to one another along the musical landscape. Ever since the release of Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives back in 2001, Prefuse 73 has steadily paved the way for the next generation of experimental/instrumental hip-hop, and Teebs, who has settled in on a label founded by Flying Lotus, seems to have found his niche specializing in a more downtempo continuation of that. I’ll take the evolution of hip-hop for now, but where the hell are those hoverboards we were promised?
• Prefuse 73: http://prefuse73.com
• Teebs: http://www.facebook.com/teebsio
• Warp: http://warp.net
• Brainfeeder: http://www.brainfeedersite.com
[Photo: Eric Coleman]