In January 2007 Sam Prekop talked to Pitchfork about an upcoming album by the Sea and Cake, the Chicago band he fronts. He also mentioned that someday he wanted to make an electronic record inspired in part by Plux Quba, an obscure late-1980s album by Portuguese composer Nuno Canavarro that got a second life when it was reissued a decade later by Jim O'Rourke's Mokai imprint. "That's the high-water mark, in my opinion, of electronic music," Prekop said. "It's a really delicate, beautiful, and really weird record." I can remember reading that quote and getting excited. Plux Quba is indeed a very special record that is also hard to pin down, and it's a good feeling when you find out that someone else hears what you were hearing in an album-- especially one that never really got around. A record inspired by Plux Quba was promising to say the least.
Three years later, Prekop returns with Old Punch Card, an instrumental album that's very different from his two song-based solo records. Whether or not this is the album Prekop was thinking about in early 2007, to my ears it shares a spirit with Plux Quba and brings with it some of the same slippery qualities. In describing the record, it's easier to begin with what it's not: It's almost all electronic, but it's not drone, not really ambient, and doesn't conform to the structures of pop. It's not cinematic, not minimal, and not focused on the sound of technology as an end in itself. It's an album that thrives in the gaps between established categories, with music that can come over as cool and cerebral or tinged with longing and melancholy, depending on what the listener brings to it.
Though it is abstract, Old Punch Card is playful. It's like the sound of a guy bumping around in a room filled with weird noisemakers, trying out one and then another until he finds one that sounds especially interesting. At which point he sticks with it for a while to see what it does and what sort of feelings might be coaxed out of it. So the first three minutes of a track called "Array Wicket" consist of static and a warbly organ line that doesn't go anywhere in particular, and then in the last two a pulsing synthesizer line out of an early Tangerine Dream record comes marching through, conveying something sonically clear and direct in contrast to earlier ambiguity. These sharp movements from one sound to the next happen a lot on Old Punch Card, but the overall effect is soothing rather than jarring. There are passages of quiet noise, retro-sounding sequencers, indiscernible electronics that sound vaguely like broken music boxes, bits of guitar. A mood of thoughtful contemplation mixed with blurry flecks of sadness and joy is maintained throughout.
Since the music on Old Punch Card isn't trying to do anything in particular and the rules of composition are pretty loose, the guiding principle seems to be to maintain a careful sense of balance that reinforces the music's curious Zen-like character. Prekop is also a painter, and you can imagine these pieces being assembled like canvases-- this one needs a little color in this corner, maybe, and that one could use a little more prickly texture in the center. The subtle and seemingly simple music that comes from such an approach is easy to overlook, and it's not going to appeal to everyone. But it can also lead to records like Plux Quba, records you can return to for years and never get tired of, in part because you can never quite "solve" them. I'm hearing some of that open-ended mystery in Old Punch Card; we'll see what it grows into.
