Prefuse 73 / Edan / Golden Rules review – hip-hop work in progress

His 24-karat grill glinting under the spotlights, Eric Biddines promises the audience at Hackney’s spartan Laundry some more “authentic old-school shit”; the south Florida MC must be a graduate of Outkast College then, as his Golden Rules project owes much to the Dirty South pioneers. Beatmaker Paul White, meanwhile, hails from Lewisham, though his deftly funky productions pass any authenticity test. And if the amiable, drawling Biddines is not yet showman enough to make this stripped-back show feel anything more than a warmed-over PA, the elastic funk of Aunt Pearl’s House and sumptuous melancholy of Never Die flag their debut album Golden Ticket (released by Lex Records, the adventurous London label hosting this leftfield hip-hop soiree) as one of the year’s best.

Edan, on the other hand, has star power to spare. MIA since 2005’s sublime Beauty and the Beat, he arrives on stage tonight in Travis Bickle army jacket looking as if he’s spent the last decade panhandling, but his wild, wilful performance is proof of uncommon genius. Straight-faced Velvet Underground covers and kazoo-driven ditties owing more to Leon Redbone than Redman might puzzle, but he dazzles with bouts of simultaneous MCing and scratching, sparring in superhuman sync with rhyme-partner Paten Locke. It’s not just his showmanship that impresses: running mics and turntables through a phalanx of FX-pedals, he rearranges hip-hop’s atomised elements with psychedelic vision. Rock and Roll and a blistering Emcees Smoke Crack are immense; a handful of new tracks with Locke, meanwhile, tease that the self-described “Humble Magnificent” might end his recording hiatus sooner rather than later.

By contrast, Scott Herren (AKA Prefuse 73) is no performer. Hunched over a table of digital gadgetry, rarely looking up, his music is polyrhythmic, polyphonic and polyamorous, with ghostly yacht-rock harmonies bleeding over ballistic beats, before giving way to avant-jazz excursions and EDM-ish flourishes that last only several bars before moving on again. Indeed, this sample-delia is so hyperactive one can barely follow, let alone decode it, but this disorientation, like a drug high, is often its own reward. Indeed, Herren’s world-of-sound is so entrancing that, when curfew cuts his set abruptly short, the remaining clubbers seem dazed, like sleepwalkers who’ve been unkindly awoken.