Fans of Sam Prekop, Chicago’s multihyphenate artist of easygoing cool rapport, know his seated improvisational modular synthesizer sessions from social media well. Back turned to his phone’s camera, he cooks up something fresh and exploratory with each turn. You’d hate to watch someone noodle around on guitar for minutes at a time, of course. That sounds like hell. But when Prekop takes his all too familiar position at the wire-strewn workstation, there’s a nobility to the praxis that insists he’s working toward something.
He’s come a long way from the tinkering stage of 2010’s Old Punch Card. His latest record, Open Close, is as tightly composed and edited for clarity as his synth work has ever reached while retaining enough constantly evolving textures and moving parts to bear the mystique of spontaneity and discovery.
The title track takes about three minutes to get rolling, although it’s anything but meandering. By name, it’s suggestive of motion. A Venus flytrap slowly opening its maw displaying a bubbly splendor, eventually clamping down, trapping its quarry without effort in a lulling anesthetic wash. Its final act sounds the way a warp pad must feel. “Font” then sets in with immediacy, a patient four-on-the-floor groove that never loses grip of its pulsating root note and accompanying icy descending bells sequence. It’s a gentle head-bobber with just a tinge of unease, fit for a hardcore game night or perhaps an elevated laser tag experience—meant as a compliment, to be crystal.
“Para” features blanketed swaths of a synth lead so soft at its edges, it could be considered childproof. Its staying power outlasts the brief runtime, as it hauntingly lies over a loop that appears uncannily lived in enough to have convincingly existed much longer. It’s this Boards of Canada flavor, this specter of menace that makes Prekop’s current stretch of output so exciting, as this mood simply doesn’t exist in his longstanding jazz-rock outfit The Sea and Cake, let alone seem conjurable from said perspective.
“Light Shadow” makes evident his formula for many of these tunes: one melodic element at the center set as a controlled constant while other curiosities flit around in its orbit. Here, a seven-note pattern outlasts several flights of fancy, unwavering in its implicitly danceable aura, yet the entire song is an exercise in restraint, never tipping into full body-shaking territory. The mammoth EDM tease comes off as especially withholding when paired with the following “A Book”, which struts onto the scene with the confident beat Prekop’s by now amassed the attention for. It smacks of instantly placeable voicings; spritely staccato leading lines heavily reminiscent of Eurythmics. It’s yet another flex of his deftness to let new ideas form from the ashes of a previous one, subsequently choosing the cleverest moment to reintegrate a hook.
For a musical pathway borne out of chance and happy accidents, every ensuing release finds Prekop in greater command of his gadgets and gizmos. While toiled over and finessed, the results are still rife with instances of eureka; the thrill of components sensibly locking into place. The distinct chapters of “A Book” all blend from one to the next quite gracefully, marking a standout achievement before the LP’s final bow. “Opera” may not be as definitive of an ending as its predecessor, but its off-kilter drone assortment makes for a compelling sorbet, resetting one’s palate clean in anticipation of flipping the record back to its beginning. Some of the best ambient works of this electronic ilk give the impression of a fever dream. The oddly catchy environs here let us go at the drop point of “Opera” only for the hankering expectation of our return to commence. At Open Close’s vaguest passage, it pulls us out of the haze, loosing the listener mid-thought, at once free and eager to make sense of the journey once more.
You may purchase the record here.
