Sam Prekop - Old Punch Card

SAM PREKOP - OLD PUNCH CARD

Thrill Jockey

Sam Prekop is the singer in Tortoise-affiliated Chicago band The Sea And Cake, highly regarded for their indie rock / jazz fusion. Old Punch Card is his third solo album following two well-received singer songwriter efforts. Clearly (this not being a website known for its coverage of jazz-rock or singer-songwriters), it’s a major change of direction: an uneven and vaguely frustrating collection of free-form electronic experiments with several saving graces.

Old Punch Card was apparently mainly generated by “modular synthesis”, a term so monumentally vague as to describe nothing about what the album actually sounds like. “I Feel Love” this ain’t. A better reference point might be some of the early electronic compositions on Sub Rosa’s anthologies, and the more out-there experiments of the BBC Radiophonic Orchestra. The album title is apt. Such proto-Pro Tools were often programmed with punch cards; now you no longer need to imagine the sounds that would ensue if the card was moth-eaten and mildewed.

As a statement of intent to demolish preconceptions, you couldn’t do better than the first couple of minutes of the album’s eponymous opener. Some vaguely dissonant static dissolves into tape-loader burbles, interrupted by further bursts of randomly misfiring circuits. Then, without warning the track switches into two minutes of perfectly lovely analogue bubblebath (with a small A and B). It’s a pattern that occurs again and again over the album, as electronic burps, farts and squeaks repeatedly compete for your attention with drones and rumbles. Unfortunately, this schizophrenic tendency doesn’t do any favours and starts to grate. Thus most highlights are excerpts.

The reward in “Array Wicket” is a brief but mesmerising segment of classic arpeggiated analogue synth that could have gone on all day and not lost any magic. “A Places” drones fantastically into an almost groovesome bit of pulsing, and “Lazy House”, has a tasty tribal throb to it as it fades out. Of course, to hear these attempts to engage your alpha-waves you have to put in several minutes of listening to Prekop apparently plugging and unplugging the equipment to see what comes out. Maybe I’m missing the grand concept, but really, is it worth that?

So, it works best when there’s consistency. “Knitting Needles” is mercifully short and maintains its ambience effortlessly. “November September” wraps around a sampled and mangled fingerpicked guitar, and closing track “The Silhouettes” makes for the most satisfying and cohesive track on the album, as synthlines effervesce into the atmosphere over a resonant drone.

But overall, for something experimental and occasionally irritating, with so little to latch onto, it’s all very pleasant. You will probably struggle to recall anything afterwards, except maybe an image of Raymond Scott setting his Clavivox on fire and throwing it down a flight of stairs. If that sounds like something you’d want to hear then Old Punch Card comes highly recommended.

Sam Stagg