Sam Prekop Releases ‘Oblique’ Music Video in Advance of New Album

To help promote his forthcoming new album, Comma, indie singer-songwriter Sam Prekop (The Sea and Cake) just released a music video for the album closer “Above Our Heads.” Directed by Tim Sutton (Dark Night, Pavilion, Donnybrook), the video opens with the camera soaring over the Colorado cityscape at sunset, “perfectly capturing the track’s weightless yet melancholic overtones with a distinctive yet oblique sense of narrative,” as it’s put in a press release.

“‘Above Our Heads’ started as a suite of quite disparate parts that I just couldn’t get to work or make sense of ultimately, but this section which would become ‘Above Our Heads’ kept pulling me back into it,” says Prekop. “Every record needs just the right last track, so I decided this would be it and thinking about it as the final piece solidified it’s direction for me. To me it feels quite celebratory and mournful simultaneously, a quality that seems difficult to pin down; this dichotomy is something I’m always hopeful of achieving.”

Sutton says Prekop’s music speaks to him on a deeply emotional level, making it easy to collaborate with the veteran singer-songwriter. 

“In both direct and abstract ways, for years Sam’s music has helped me describe how I see the world — these strange days we live in are no exception,” he says. “Like when we made  the video for ‘Pavilion,’ the simplest idea came to me, and that’s always what I try and explore without allowing it to get over complicated. I asked Mo Shane to collaborate virtually— me in Brooklyn and him in Colorado— and the result feels much like his music to me. Weightless and heavy at the same time.”

A modern minimal pop records that taps into the experimental heritage of the synthesizer, Comma finds Prekop working extensively with beat programming for the first time; it comes in the tradition of electronic music pioneers like Brian Eno and Yellow Magic Orchestra who brought together the unrestrained ambition of the avant-garde with the immediacy and accessibility of pop music.

Photo by Barry Phipps