Scott Herren has tried his hand at many styles since his debut album as Prefuse 73, Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives, established a new template for beat music in 2001. He has made fluttering folktronica in Savath & Savalas, opened his studio to collaborators like Four Tet and Helado Negro, and laid down beats for Ghostface Killah and EL-P. In 2015, he and Boston MC Michael Christmas came together in the psychedelic hip-hop duo Fudge to record Lady Parts, a buoyant album pairing the rapper’s free-associative wordplay with some of Herren’s most psychedelic beatmaking. Fudge Beats gathers those instrumentals, and a funny thing happens: With no vocals assuming center stage, Herren’s beats open up and breathe differently. In place of the sometimes antic spirit of the Fudge album, a track like “In My Shoes Beat” assumes an almost meditative mood (credit those pinging finger cymbals), while “Japanese Mall Beat” returns the focus to Herren’s dizzyingly deep pockets of rhythm. By the time the chords of the closing “I Got the Good Beat” come flickering into view, it’s not just Herren’s experimental tendencies that stand out; it’s also his ability to hang on to the ideas that made Prefuse 73’s uprock narratives so captivating in the first place.