It’s been awhile since Sam Prekop last played in Orlando. The jack-of-all trades musician reckons the last time was with his unpredictable Chicago indie-rock band The Sea and Cake in the 1990s. There will be a lot of mutual catching-up betwixt audience and performer in order when Prekop plays an intimate gig at the Casselberry Arts Center Saturday.
The Sea and Cake, for the uninitiated, were something of an alternative supergroup, consisting of Prekop, Eric Claridge, Archer Prewitt and John McEntire. And they were a band that never failed to innovate and expand rock and pop tropes. But these days Prekop plays solo, eschewing guitars and vocals for mysterious modular synth consoles and cables. With these arcane electronics, Prekop creates buoyant, lush and oft-playful synthesized soundscapes. He’s coming to Florida for three shows, and it’s an essential event for the musically discerning.
Prekop’s two most recent releases, Drawing One Two and The Sparrow, are elegant and concise, and yet unafraid to get glitchy and propulsive. As Prekop likes to keep live work loose and improvisational, you might not hear these exact pieces live, but he mines largely the same tones, pacing and “sonic territories.”
“It’s one really long piece that evolves, sort of like a seamless series of five or six songs or movements,” says Prekop of current live sets. “They meld into each other and it’s a form that I’ve been working with for quite a while now that makes sense live. Just keep the flow going.”
“One thing I’ve learned is that a lot of stuff has to happen for people to stay engaged, or for me to be engaged while I’m doing it,” he adds. “I’m dealing with, usually, four or five separate synth voices at the same time, and sort of juggling them. … I just feel it out. If I feel like one thing is really working well, I’ll continue on in that direction for a while, until I exhaust it. But it’s very intuitive choices on the spot that make sense in the moment. A big part of the show is not knowing exactly what’s going to happen.”
Prekop has been working in modular synthesis for about 15 years. It’s an obsession he says is down to a longtime bandmate and just “getting tired of playing guitar all the time.”
“I blame a lot of this on John McEntire, who’s the drummer of The Sea and Cake. He’s a super hardcore synth-head and has amazing gear. He introduced those sounds to The Sea and Cake. And it’s through him that I also became obsessed with what [modular synths] can do. And I think a big appeal back then was that they were so much more rarely used in the rock band context, especially compared to now. In terms of modular synth stuff, I don’t think it’s ever been this approachable or available to people as it is now. It’s a golden age for this type of stuff.”
When asked about his current compositional practices, Prekop draws a surprising throughline to another of his longtime creative outlets, photography.
“A big part of my process is just to gather ideas. I’m also a photographer and I walk around a lot and take photos of whatever catches my eye or makes some sense to me on whatever level. And when I’m working with the synth stuff, I’m often just throwing out really random, quick ideas, hoping that something clicks and stands out as better than something else. And then I choose that as the direction to take.”
“It’s a challenge, as well, to break certain habits that I have formed,” Prekop concludes. “So to get things going, I try to break the rules and see what can happen beyond what sort of preconceptions I have about what might be interesting, or what might be beautiful or what might be odd.” Join him for some beautiful and odd Saturday.
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This article appears in May 7-13, 2025.