Pitchfork

Finally, Scott Herren has stopped being so damned culturally sensitive. Relocated from the American South to southern Spain, Herren fell in love with Barcelonan culture and music and recycled his former post-rock alias, Savath & Savalas, as an interpreter of Catalan folk music with this year's Apropa't LP. On paper, it sounded as if Herren would be applying his unique micro-editing CTRL-X/CTRL-V talents to another land's musical heritage, having already reprocessed the American tropes of jazz and hip-hop under his flagship moniker, Prefuse 73. Instead, Herren put his skittering rhythms in storage and produced a much softer album, like a romantic evening over a bottle of Rioja, a pot of paella, and sundry other stereotypically Spanish things.

For those who thought they could forecast Herren's tactics, Apropa't was a surprise and, very likely, a disappointment. ("Oh gross, is this world music?!?") Yet the project accomplished what Herren himself was likely looking to do: introduce his fans to the Catalan music of S&S singer Eva Puyuelo Muns with a minimum of distraction and interpretation.

But Herren has built a career on recontextualization-- be it of dusty vinyl excavations or his own compositions-- and this follow-up EP gives him space to exercise those strengths. 2003's Extinguished EP built a banquet out of leftovers from Prefuse 73's One Word Extinguisher album, mixing stray beats and found sound into a fully-developed companion piece. Mañana is also a re-imagination of source material; it's eight original songs that spin the Barcelona travelogue of Apropa't in a new direction.

The first element one hears on Mañana is a cut-up, hiccuping vocal sample-- an immediate indication that Herren is using the EP to inject his Prefuse 73 methodology into the Savath & Savalas sound. Though the track is titled "Interludio Inconcreto", it might as well be an overture for the half-hour of music to follow. A beat-less swirl of abrupt string swells and disconnected syllables, the piece retains the hazy atmosphere of Apropa't while happily shirking traditional instrumentation and arrangement. "Demà Vindrà" accomplishes a similar feat, preserving the whispery vocals of Herren and Muns that dominate Apropa't but sautéing them on a bed of sampled string-plucks, static crackles, and headphone-hopping ooo's.

Less subtle is "Sota L'Aigüa", on which an initial passage of soft singing and gentle backwards loops runs headlong into a surprise appearance by the kind of beat programming tweaked to perfection on One Word Extinguisher. For two minutes, this drum flurry gives Herren's Barcelonan project its strongest backbone, adding helpful variety to what was oftentimes on Apropa't a sound too weightless to leave an impression. "No Puedo de Cidir" is no less jarring when placed alongside traditional compositions; it sounds like a Tortoise outtake got mixed in with the S&S masters at John McEntire's Soma Studios.

The EP crests with "Equipatage de Flors Seques", wherein Herren gets all "Revolution 9" on his Barcelona period by pitting tetherless piano ramblings against loop fuckery that only coalesces for one short stretch. It's an intentionally disorienting take on the indigenous music at the project's core, and one wonders what Herren's collaborator Muns thinks of the final product-- and whether it's a coincidence that Mañana is rumored to be their final collaboration. But it's difficult to ignore that the track is far more interesting and dense than anything on Apropa't, at least to this typically foreign-culture-ignorant American. Mañana finds Herren working up the nerve to interpret the music of his adopted Spanish home instead of merely documenting it, and the results allow the EP to easily outshine its shy big brother.