Cats've called Scott Herren the dude digging hip-hop's grave, his
discography like so much soil, his rap game like the spade. Surrounded
by Silence is his attempt to knock the shovel, to stop the burial, by
aping other playas/players in the game, authoring, with so much
self-consciousness, this disc as his collaboration record. The gear is
glitzed with a guest-spot rundown as blaringly lengthy (19 names!) and
cross-promotional as any "urban" disc; he even goes so far to run
against former form — almost scribbling over his signature — by taking
his guest gangstas (Ghostface, Masta Killa, GZA) and backpackers (Aesop
Rock, Beans, El-P) and leaving their flows almost wholly whole.
See,
after starting out his on-the-record life making tasteful folktronic
splatterings under the ampersanded nomenclatures Delarosa & Asora and
Savath & Savalas, Herren made his name as Prefuse 73, and did so by,
essentially (as in: at essence), defiling the hip-hop tenet of
lyricism. In his world of microtone, whereby everything is rendered
bits and bytes, voices are but soundbites; and, so, flows are halted,
rhymes are salted, and sentences become collections of unconnected
syllables, Herren seeking to make a symphony out of vocalists swallowing
their own tongues, with the patter and patois of MCs but phonetic fragments
to be sliced and spliced into stuttering rhythms, words and meaning and,
for certain, storytelling trolleyed down into some redundant ditch, as he
cooks the hip-hopstrumentalism without the boring head-nod dreariness
of beat-loop dudes.
Herren thought it a continuation of hip-hop
culture, as he knew it, the idea being to seek out tiny fragments of
sound and to expand them into something larger; but, really, his
breaking down of sound was so un-analog that the boys in baseball
caps — the kind fingering milk-crates full of molded vinyl cast in
cardboard grown moldy, searching fervently for tiny pieces of recorded
ephemera that they can pull from the ashes of time and blow on with
fellatory enthusiasm, blowing 'til the ashes light up gold, a sun struck
in the black of past, this tiny piece of forgotten light, once birthed
as flame, fanned again now as the disc-jockeying boys in baseball caps
light up their lives with snatches of sound repeated ad infinitum, the
unceasing circularity of a loop striving to be as endless and unbroken
as a gold ring forged by fire.
These record-shoppers looking to live
life as a lock-groove, repetitive, going in circles, never heading
forward, somewhat predictably called Herren heretic, thinking his
treatment of vocalists vicious and pernicious, and him the man trying to kill
rhyming cold. The kicker was that the converse tales on the tails
side of the coin were singing the same song, just in a different key;
with those who hate the façades of fantasist lyricists (and, thereby,
their dodgy political leanings), also calling him the same thing, but
crowning him in coronation and celebration as the man trying to kill rhyming cold.
Neither of these extremist interpretations were really
singing the truth, and, so, after questions about this over
four years and two albums, Surrounded by Silence seeks to speak
clarifications into the ears of everyone who's ever passed judgment on
the hot topic of Herren's intentions. Here, he continues to do those
Prefuse things — spattered fragments of half-swallowed syllables sending
glowing keytone skittering on their hummingbirds' wings; fissures of
static making it sound like his stabbing beatmaking is pulling wiring
through the speakers; incongruous samples (here a Hebden-inspired Karen
Dalton and Linda Perhacs) wailing from beyond the pop-cultural grave
like ghosts in his machine — while allowing, say, Beans to get off an
off-the-cuff riff entirely unmolested. And, ever one to broaden
borders, Herren stitches his hip-hop guests alongside humans for the
kids who couldn't give a shit about whether something's "real hip-hop"
or not, his conceptual needle-and-thread binding the sample-science
monkeyshines of The Books, the treekid beatnik beat-pop of Broadcast,
and the sexualized sighings of Blonde Redhead's Kazu Mikano together —
all of these humans being brought out of the P73 blender, the whole
served cold like a Caipirinha.
|
