Surrounded By Silence
- Prefuse 73
- Band Name: Prefuse 73
- Record Label: Warp
- Release Date: Mar 22, 2005
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A must-hear. [May 2005, p.138]
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90Prefuse 73 has defiantly asserted himself as one of the most important artists of his generation, ignoring boundaries and creating a landscape that recognizes hip-hop's original "anything goes" ethos. [Apr 2005, p.99]
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Surrounded by Silence is at once more scatterbrained and fast moving than any other Prefuse album (even more so than the blink-and-you-miss-the-hook Extinguished), but the difference here is the cohesion of the radically different cuts.
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88Track-for-track, Herren's stuttering production and Technicolor glitch madness turns the whole thing into some insane dance party. [#15, p.93]
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80The jewel in Scott's creative crown is that he has an uncanny knack of keeping it flowing, even when his beats and tones are jerking our sensibilities to shreds with their cerebral madness.
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80The album is diverse and slows up where it should.
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Silence easily matches, and likely exceeds, Mike Ladd's recent Negrophilia in regard to hip hop's lack of limits.
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75Herren has the good collaborative instincts of Handsome Boy Modeling School, but none of their seedy, crowd-pleasing shtick. [Apr 2005, p.108]
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70Fruitful collaborations... invite the listener to keep that dial locked, despite the odd distracting lapse into free-form digital static. [Jul 2005, p.112]
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70Silence's instrumentals - choppy samples, organs, and horns, set to the tune of a staccato digital pacemaker - sound great, but they hardly stray from the formula laid down by Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives.
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Several of the instrumentals recapture something of the Prefuse 73 magic, but Herren isn't entirely successful even when in cut-and-splice mode.
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Surrounded By Silence is never less than pleasant, but with the exception of "Hide Ya Face," it's seldom more than that either.
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70Fans of Handsome Boy Modeling School, DJ Spooky, RJD2 and other genre-melding, conscious hip-hop are gonna want to procure this one right away. [#9, p.71]
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68Whether Herren is using Surrounded By Silence to spread the word about some of his favorite acts, or to insta-build a portfolio of outside production work, or a little of both, it's a much different-- and far more inconsistent-- affair than previous Prefuse efforts.
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Overall, it's a story of too many ideas.
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Will only sound sweeter as summer draws nearer. [19 Mar 2005, p.59]
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60Subtle contributions from left-field electronic artists like The Books and Broadcast add variety, but at 21 tracks, it's still a marathon. [Apr 2005, p.126]
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Surrounded by Silence isn't exactly coherent, but it isn't supposed to be: Strictly for fans of fragmented, forward-thinking beatscapes.
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Those wanting significant progression will find Surrounded By Silence mostly lacking.
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60At longer lengths the jittery qualities of glitch-hop sputter, pushing patience towards intolerance.
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40There's a flightiness that lends the album a showreel quality. [Apr 2005, p.97]
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 6 out of 8
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Mixed: 1 out of 8
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Negative: 1 out of 8
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