There's nothing like a record with a phat beat to kick off a laid-back, chilled-out spring.

But if that spring is a State College spring, there's bound to be unpredictable factors that impede on the supposedly sunny season of rebirth: fluctuating temperatures, ill-timed clouds and, as witnessed this week, snow. Prefuse 73, a.k.a. producer Scott Herren, makes strange but not overly spacey trip-hop for music fans who have big headphones and short attention spans. Much like this week's weather, his music is directed by a spring-like, slowly grooving beat, but it is also sprinkled with "musical snow" -- strange voices, bleeps and hums, brief samples from some country record, etc. Herren's latest release, Surrounded By Silence, contains some of the best beat-driven weirdness an experimental electronica fan could ask for.

The disc is fun and fascinating at the same time, the perfect soundtrack to a long bus ride and walk across campus in any kind of weather. Because for all of the odd textures that Herren purposefully throws into the mix, it is the ability of surrounding sounds of life to mix themselves into compositions such as "Expressing Views is Obviously Illegal" that makes this album interesting.

It is easy to zone in and out of Silence with rewarding results, but it does have its standout song moments. Take "Pagina Dos," a catchy blend of thumping rhythms and some unknown, exotic instruments, as an example of a fine composition that sounds triumphantly unique.

This is also a record that is heavily focused on collaborators, including Ghostface and GZA, who add memorable verses to tracks such as "Hideyaface" and "Just the Thought." But in the end, it all comes back to a big, solid beat, and Prefuse 73 certainly has its finger on that pulse.

-- Reviewed by Paul Weinstein