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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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Alternative PressA must-hear. [May 2005, p.138]
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The 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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FilterTrack-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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Silence'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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MojoFruitful 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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Whether 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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PlanetFans 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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The 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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SpinHerren 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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Overall, it’s a story of too many ideas.
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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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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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UrbPrefuse 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]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 10 out of 12
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Mixed: 1 out of 12
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Negative: 1 out of 12
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mattaSep 9, 2005
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MCTravelApr 22, 2005
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trentApr 13, 2005