Sam Prekop — Old Punch Card

For "Old Punch Card", Sam Prekop delivers a gestural smorgasboard of pitched static and noise textures.  It's a sort of hollow monophonic music that could only be the result of long hours of solitary tinkering with old equipment.  He does not appear to fear the quiet of the room in which he works, as no well defined new sonic environment is created by this album.  Reverb is used sparingly, and there is rarely more than a single instrument or idea in use at any given time.  He has left the sounds alone in the quiet so that we might fully hear them.  No added polish here, either; the obvious knob turns are there for all to hear.

This album reminds me of excited, tech-obsessed musician friends of mine exclaiming, "Hey, isn't this sound cool?", "Hey, I figured out how to use this old analog sequencer!", or "Check this out, I rewired this old toy to play this simple 8 bit melody!", even "Remember that thing I showed you earlier?  I ran it through this crazy processor and now it sounds like... this!" (the same sequences and melodies often appear in different sonic guises on multiple tracks on the album) before showcasing some new snippet of sound sculpture.  Such snippets often exhibit some properties of genius, but lack the context that could make them powerful.

This album quite often feels like unedited or unsorted recordings.  There are so many quaint, undeveloped ideas...  One could easily create a great sounding album of glitched out IDM along the lines of Plaid or Oval with unprocessed samples of this record.  In its current form, each song is so fragmented and riddled with silence that track separations cease to matter.  A sound departs; another swells in.  At least it's obvious throughout that Prekop is enjoying himself as he tinkers - the music is uniformly innocent, relaxed and euphoric.  I must admit there is a powerful emotion present in this music that comes from its paradoxical solitude - joyful in its loneliness, it is the sound of a being deeply absorbed in his work.  His constant resourcefulness with DSP is impressive as well.  Every sound has depth, warmth, complexity and mystery.  The pacing quickly waxes predictable, but remains pleasant.  Changes occur fast enough that it's easy to listen for the duration of the album.

The opening track sounds like a large machine performing calibration tests, and unknown scans on the listener's body.  The rich synthetic textures remind me of the sounds of objects from every day existence - copy makers, printers and electric lights.  Prekop alternates this sound with some distorted, bubbling synth percolation, patching them together with a simple crossfade. 

Next "Array Wicket" begins and a distant, dissonant drone meets a heavy thud like a needle dropping into the groove of a very noisy old record.  Later, we get one of the first arpeggiated, stuttering melodies of the album.  These provide some of the album's most sublime moments.  The same tune appears again in the 3rd piece, "Knitting Needles", and that's about when I start to lose track of how far I am into the record...  It's one big collage-like blur of beautiful sound.

Later in the album, though, "November September" takes a more convincing stab at musical coherency, introducing acoustic guitar arpeggi and more percolating synth melody, this time sounding watery and nostalgic.  As I listen I start to ponder on the Fall season and its various moods.  Yes, a complete picture has been painted.  Yet once again the composer cannot resist the temptation to let the track dissolve into blankness, even if themes rear their heads again after such lapses with higher frequency than earlier in the disk.  With occasional insertions of mistake-ridden pre-session guitar noodling and other such seemingly pointless, momentum sucking sonic excess, it's almost like Prekop is forcefully reminding us of the structureless nature of the album.

I recommend "Old Punch Card" to anyone who has ever enjoyed listening to a modem connect to the internet, and to fans of other deconstructors of the erroneous digital noise of our age, like Oval and Microstoria.  As long as you are expecting sounds and not songs, it should be easy enough to enjoy this record