June 10 11 12 Empty Bottle Chicago
10
Lucky Dragons
White Rainbow
Rene Hell
Mountains
James Plotkin
Zerang | Colligan | Baker Trio
Spiral Joy Band
CVLTS
11 Pelt
Oneohtrix Point Never
Bill Orcutt
Sickness
Outer Space
Sword Heaven
Dylan Ettinger
Leslie Keffer
12
Morton Subotnick
The Rita
Pulse Emitter
Telecult Powers
Mike Shiflet
Sick Llama
Beau Wanzer
Tiger Hatchery
Film by
Experimental 1/2 Hour
Alice Cohen
Amy Ruhl
DJ sets
Beau Wanzer
John McEntire
Dave Quam
Visuals by
Loo Tapes
Theodore Darst
Aaron Zarzutzki
12 Sonic Celluloid
Sam Prekop
Lichens
David Daniell
Sam Prekop (Official Site | Thrill Jockey | Acid Marshmallow Video) is known to most as the singer and songwriter of The Sea and Cake. He is a painter of some renown, a photographer and in addition he has released two solo albums of pop songs infused with his own blend of African and Brazilian guitar rhythms. Old Punch Card, his first solo effort since 2005, takes a dramatically unexpected turn away from either of these paths. Prekop described the move thus, "I'd have to say this record is pretty much unlike anything else I've done. There's some relation to music I made for my book "Photographs" but really only in instrumentation. The intro to The Sea and Cake's David Bowie cover of "Sound and Vision", on One Bedroom is an early precedent. The most significant difference, is that I've left the confines of "song" structure." The LP and CD each come in an edition of hand painted covers. "In painting the covers I found an appropriate shorthand to describing the music or re-imagining it. Start with nothing and without deduction an image appears reflecting only itself, the music arrived similarly." said Prekop.
Taking inspiration from early music concrete and electronic music, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Nuno Canavarro, Raymond Scott, David Behrman, and free improvisation, Old Punch Card is a beautifully noisy, jagged, yet stately album of synthesizer music. The ideas and implementation of Old Punch Card (the album title alluding to the electronic, faintly mechanic origins of the music) were the result of an entirely new challenge: to do something completely different from anything else he's ever created. To facilitate this end, Prekop implemented a series of strict guidelines for the recording of the album. No vocals, no guitar (though he slipped in this regard on one track), and no beats. Most of the sound material is generated by a modular synthesizer. By its very nature, it excels at some things and not at others. It's very difficult to play a conventional chord, while on the other hand, it excels at creating completely unanticipated sounds and is rather effective when it comes to "chance" composing strategies.
Each piece is in a travelogue form, all of them starting somewhere only to end somewhere else entirely. The means of transition between the elements purpose the compositions, often starting scrambled with agitation, then resting on a mechanical pattern that proves to be serenely predictable. The title track is a perfect example of this transition. "The Silhouettes" has perhaps the most tangible melodic arc to it, and the melody was guided in response to the rhythmic drone that's underlying.