Sam Prekop was formerly the guitar-player and vocalist with The Sea And Cake, a band which I never heard, but they were a Chicago combo released on Thrill Jockey and often mentioned in the same breath as Tortoise, factors which might qualify them for the “post rock” tag in some books. It looks like their albums have pretty much been in print all this time, one benchmark of their success.
Lately, Prekop has been honing his skills on the modular synth, and that’s what we hear on The Sparrow (TAL MUSIC TAL27) – a set of five synth instrumentals, including the long (17:00) title piece at the start. Besides the modular synth set-up, he’s also got a Prophet 5, which when it was first released by the company Sequential in 1977 was the very first polyphonic and programmable synth. Polyphonic meaning that you could play more than one key at a time – you can see how prog-rock keyboard players would have taken to such a device, and imagine the fast-moving and complex melodic solos that would follow in the wake of that development. The music on today’s record is not about soloing though, and instead Prekop has carefully built each composition “piece by piece”; without knowing much more detail, I’d assume this refers to a painstaking process of overdubbing and assembly. Certainly he’s able to construct sequences, but he also likes the possibility of notes and harmonies that don’t quite match, and he celebrates the erratic behaviour that a modular synth is capable of.
On the surface, what results is in fact quite accessible, listenable, tuneful even; but listen in a little deeper and you’ll detect a certain austerity and precision in the way that everything fits together, leaving tiny gaps where the listener doesn’t expect them, and the tiny notes perform tiny dances with irregular intervals, like fairies around a charmed circle. The sounds here aren’t perhaps especially challenging, but probably aren’t meant to be; he’s torn out the page of the synth manual that instructs the user on how to program “cold and alienating” settings, and replaced it with a page from a travel brochure taking us to sunny, tropical climes, where a cool drink of fruit juice awaits the voyager. Vinyl edition also available; are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? (20/09/2022)