Prefuse 73 works best solo

Ubermensch producer Scott Herren makes music under many aliases, but Prefuse 73 is his most well known and most lauded: a club-basement mad scientist fusing underground hip-hop with the clicks-and-cuts style of 2000’s electronica. Prefuse’s music transcends mere fusion; it’s hip-hop for the computer generation. It pulls listeners into a trippy, groovy, and disorienting sonic universe home to spliced rap vocals, delicious melodies, blips, breaks, and the occasional eyebrow-raising sample. Sounds like a bit much, I know, but Prefuse pulls it all together seamlessly, and by the time Extinguished: Outtakes quietly exploded in stores he had yet to release anything short of stunning.

It’s in this context that his new album, 2005’s Surrounded By Silence, feels a bit like a letdown. Considering that nobody makes music quite like this, and that few electronic producers are so flat-out wonderful at what they do, it’s pretty good by itself. There’s no mistaking it for anything but a Prefuse album, since most of his trademarks—hip-hop beats, electronic cuts, and the like—are along for the ride. But the biggest change, and the biggest bugaboo, is the sheer number of collaborators slathered all across this album.

With Prefuse 73’s exponentially-growing reputation, it’s unsurprising that musicians from far and wide would be banging down his door to collaborate. For Surrounded By Silence, he has ingratiated himself with a number of them, including Ghostface (of Wu-Tang), Beans (formerly of Anti-Pop Consortium), and Kazu Makino (of Blonde Redhead). Predictably, it’s a mixed bag and a large one at that: collaborators cover a whopping two-thirds of this album. Aesop Rock lends his charismatic line delivery to “Sabbatical with Options”—a nearly flawless slab of prime Prefuse (though it’s a tad too short). Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino makes an unlikely candidate for Prefuse’s digitized hip-hop, but her childlike upper-register voice adds a lovely element to the restrained, equally beautiful melody. Ghostface and El-P’s “Hide Ya Face” is lyrically impressive, but rather bloodless. Beans’s rapping is so overblown on “Morale Crusher” that he constantly threatens to upstage his collaborator, and Camu sinks “Now You’re Leaving” with radio-ready loverboyisms that sound tediously out of place.

Predictable, too, is that Prefuse 73 is at his best when he’s working alone. Excluding interludes, you could count the solo productions on one hand, but they’re still strong, if not quite on the level of Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives (2001) or One Word Extinguisher (2003). “Minutes Away Without You” and the apropos “Expressing Views Is Obviously Illegal” hark back to the green fields of his earlier material, in which the songs were given considerable time to develop, and all on his own creative, dazzling terms.

The bottom line is that Prefuse 73 tripped and fell a little bit on this one, but that hardly means Surrounded By Silence is disgraceful. Like 96 percent of albums with 20-plus tracks and a herd of other voices, it could have used some editing. Okay, a lot of editing. Overall however, this is still a fairly solid release from a producer who never fails to deliver the goods.

—Mike Newmark, Staff Writer