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Sam Prekop, "Old Punch Card"
If I could think of any condition that exemplified life today, it would be distraction. Even the most contemplative life is arrested by a thousand nagging interruptions. For my part, I was especially distracted while reviewing Old Punch Card, constantly turning away from the work to read some random article or watch some Internet video. Nothing peculiar about that, I’ll admit, but then I realized how well the album evokes distraction as a state of mind. It’s the sound of our own attention scattering into the ether.
The ponderous nature of Old Punch Card is apparent right from the beginning. Thin sheets of static flow from the speakers, pitching up and down. Lopsided gurgling loops appear, and then a buoyant, appreciated synth melody, which drifts lazily for the remaining length of the piece. All of this happens within the first few minutes, creating a pleasantly disorienting mood that lasts throughout the entire album.
Old Punch Card is full of musical non-sequiturs, bits of sound disjointed from the sounds that preceded it. This makes it difficult to describe without going on endlessly about its particulars. It resists any sort of general categorization. Ambient? Sort of. Noise? Yes, but not really. Conceptual? Who knows?
Part of the difficulty is that Prekop never stays with one sound for very long. While the tempo stays leisurely throughout the album, each fragment sounds so distinct that the music always seems in a state of constant flux. In "November December," for example, crackling loops are replaced by gentle guitar picking, which is followed by a growling synthesizer drone, which is followed again by ascending synth arpeggiations. And so on and so on. None of these transitions are violent, but taken together over the album’s length they have a curious, mind erasing property. After I’m finished, I’m always at a bit of a loss to explain what I’ve listened to.
While Old Punch Card is engaging, there is something a bit too heady about its musical circumspection. Every song is like a Zen koan set to music, with the listeners being some kind of metaphysical detective. Prekop throws in all sorts of stylistic U-turns, and it is this playful misdirection that evokes being distracted so well. Yet the whole thing feels more like a puzzle than a mystery, with about as much drama and danger as a day spent browsing the internet. As for me, I prefer my pleasures to be a little more earthly.
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