Sam Prekop has been a fixture on the Chicago scene for two decades, as front man of Shrimp Boat and the Sea and Cake and more recently as a solo artist. His forthcoming album for Thrill Jockey, Old Punch Card, is a departure from everything he’s done. There’s no soft nimble pop, no breezy vocals, no jazzed-up Brazilian bits. There’s no singing and no guitar licks—mostly it’s just modular synthesizer and a couple odd digital gadgets, which produce flattened drones and bursts of tones and distant digital whirrings and crunchings. Old Punch Card keeps with the forever-mellow tone of his back catalog, but it’s a much stranger and subtler sort of delight.
I dunno what this is. [Laughs.] This song is one of the older pieces on the new record; when I would work on a track I would finish and not listen again, just keep going, blinders on. When I made this I wasn’t even thinking “record,” I was wasting ti—
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spending time, wisely. [Laughs.] A lot of these things on the record were inspired by some new little piece of gear, and this one, the melody, is generated by an analog shift register, which is like a delay but different. The melody is improvised and the backing part is from an eight-bit sampler that is voltage controlled so it’s very unpredictable.
Casey Rice, from the Sea and Cake’s Two Gentlemen
I know we were early on with the remixes. We felt at the time that we were doing some stuff people hadn’t really tried yet. It was very new for us. I think John [McEntire] had just gotten a computer to record on. It was hard to do then. I was messing around at home with anything but guitars—I’d had it with guitars.
I dunno. [Laughs.] This is pretty hot. What is it?
Were you into punk?
