The Sea and Cake: Art Ensemble of Chicago

For all the snobbery handed to them across the pond, Americans often manage an assured urbanity that we irreverent, repressed Brits fail at. Walnut furniture, expertly-mixed cocktails, monograms, abstract expressionism, Tom Ford – they’re good at elegance, and at not being ashamed of it. As a nation based on reinvention, from industry to personality, they wear modernism well; and while their individualism can undermine social cohesion, it’s encouraged some of the most unique art of the last hundred years.

The Sea and Cake, perhaps unwittingly, draw together some of these attractive American traits to create some of the most elegant, modern, individual pop music of recent times. Theirs is a tasteful but knockabout sound, oscillating between serene and playful, with a seam of mystery and even danger running through it. “What moves me is somewhat elusive, and I get glimpses of it, and that’s what keeps me working,” says singer and guitarist Sam Prekop. “What it is, I’m not sure, but I’m attracted to an unexpected, rare, damaged beauty.”

They formed in Chicago in 1994 after Prekop and bassist Eric Claridge’s previous band Shrimp Boat broke up. “I got some money from a record label to do a new project, so Eric and I started that,” remembers Prekop, who met drummer John McEntire in the studio, and recruited guitarist and former art school buddy Archer Prewitt. “We started out as a thrown together studio project, but through that experience we decided to give it a go and make it a band. It was just an accident, one of those situations where the right people were in the right room.” Their personalities matched up as well as their music. “We’re all quiet, sober individuals with sardonic wits,” says Prewitt. “We don’t annoy one another, which has a lot to do with our longevity. Everyone’s mature, and maturing rapidly.”

Four albums in three years followed, plus five more since including 2011’s The Moonlight Butterfly, which introduces some new textures: the title track’s arpeggiated electronics sound like Isolée or even Paul Van Dyk. Was this as a result of Prekop continuing the electronic experiments from his recent solo record Old Punch Card? “Actually John did that track, but I told him I wanted him to do something along those lines,” Prekop says. “I don’t think he would have done it of his own free will. But we’re both really interested in that music, and I wanted to test the limits of the record. We wanted to expose some of our more experimental leanings. It’s a blessing and a curse, our familiarity – keeping it fresh, trying not to repeat ourselves.”

Prewitt has also released solo records and comic books, and he and Prekop are both artists working in painting and photography. “I had a gut feeling we would work well together,” says Prekop of his fellow guitarist. “We’re both very self-taught, we don’t know the names of any guitar chords; it’s good to be on the same level of musicianship so you can invent a language and a new music for yourself.”

McEntire meanwhile also plays drums for Tortoise. “John has brought a lot of stuff to the band that I hadn’t heard,” says Prekop. “Way back he was like, ‘you should really check out this Beach Boys stuff’. Really basic stuff – I thought I couldn’t stand the Beach Boys, and I was wrong in my ways.”

Prewitt explains the songwriting process: “When Sam brings a skeletal idea to the table, Eric will add this really odd bassline, which in a lot of cases we scratch our heads initially, and in the end it’s the thing people hum and sing. They’re the oddest basslines I’ve ever heard in many ways. And that’s what I love about a good dub track – if you can let the low frequencies carry a tune, especially in a locked groove, it gives so much more sonic space to get lost in and not be unmoored by. We don’t want a lot of high-end information, at least on record.

“Sam’s vocals sit in a very unique place: seemingly detached, both lyrically and in delivery, but loaded with a lot of emotion, which I believe is him in a nutshell. He’s a very complex person but puts himself across as amiable and easygoing. Listening to these lyrics, as oblique as everyone says they are – and they are – they to me read as a poetry of frustration and longing, but always couched in optimism. It’s optimistic, sunny-sounding angst. That dichotomy is very interesting to me. The work of Morandi comes to mind – he assembled bottles that interested him and did very quiet paintings of these bottles in different configurations.”

Prekop continues: “I’m drawn to pattern, repetition to a certain extent, micro-details – those kinds of ideas are interesting to me visually as well as musically. It feels almost like second nature to be drawn to repetition and pattern, and to make it your own is an interesting challenge; all that stuff exists naturally, so it’s a feat to point out or illuminate the most interesting aspects of it.”

Live, the sometimes placid nature of the band is played down in favour of cranked volume. “There’s a lot of shredding going on!” laughs Prewitt. “We definitely enjoy rocking out. When we started to use prerecorded drums which John played along with, the audience was folding their arms. It especially didn’t go over well in Germany, where I thought it would be embraced – they’d heckle you a little bit, ‘take your canned music home!’ Now we don’t even use a keyboard player – it’s just the four of us on stage, and the more we do that, the more we connected we are to the people.”

Their cosmopolitanism is clear: during our conversation, Prekop praises The Velvet Underground, Sandinista! by the Clash, Sublime Frequencies and a recent Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy gig (“I don’t even know how to deal with it yet, it was incredible”). Prewitt meanwhile cites D’Angelo’s Voodoo and classical guitar music, the latter influencing The Moonlight Butterfly “to the chagrin of the other members who were thinking ‘that’s enough with the acoustic guitar’. I said ‘it gives the track some air’, and in the end they were like yeah, good choice. Enough with all the noise, let’s put a little sweetness in there.” That’s The Sea and Cake in microcosm: amid the noise of modern life, they administer a much-needed sweetness.

Words: Bea Beaumont-Thomas