VA - A Rhythm Protects One (2025)

New album by Call Super for Dekmantel, honouring the classic mix CD format with 12 exclusive tracks all produced by Call Super using different monikers. Call Super revives the endangered art of the mix CD with a fluid, technicolour hour of elegantly advanced club music featuring a striking assembly of emergent artists. Since their first releases in the early 2010s, Joseph Seaton has been a many-sided artist balancing expressive electronics with organic instrumentation. Their background in jazz has informed ambient and experimental albums, but theyve proven to be just as comfortable tackling all shapes and speeds of impactful club music. This extends to their practice as a DJ, regularly surfing the slipstream of the club and festival circuit with a sensitive, seductive instinct for the movement of a dancefloor. Seaton set out to make ARPO an acronym for A Rhythm Protects One to honour the meaning of mix CDs in a world drowning in online DJ streams. Part of the generation raised on seminal series like the metal-tinned fabric and fabriclive (which Seaton themselves contributed to), they cast back to the lasting impression of landmark sessions like Coldcuts 1995 opus Journeys By DJ: 70 Minutes Of Madness. These were mixes to absorb over and over again, where every deeply considered track and transition became lodged in your psyche. As a DJ, producer and composer with a reputation for distinctive, head-turning musicality, Seaton puzzled out a selection for ARPO that bristles with invention. Every track feels like a moment, loaded with motifs and loops that gently impose their presence across an ever-shifting, intricately woven tapestry of dancefloor psychedelia (not to be confused with any genres with psy in the name). As well as exclusive new material under their Call Super and Ondo Fudd aliases, Seaton uses multiple new monikers to present their creative vision. In terms of slinky 4/4 groove and mid tempo pace, you might locate the likes of Conny Slipp, Scarletina and Clam1 on the wilder fringes of minimal tech house, but their productions teem with textural depth and melodic subtlety that reach past that scenes typically functional tendencies. Curveballs abound, and Seaton relishes in the chance to divert into dramatic workouts like their own Limelight and Mothertime or strip everything down for the striking, swooning poetry of Malgo & KVS The Argosy. Way beyond neatly boxed-off club styles, the individual tracks have their own unique qualities that hold space within the mix as a whole memorable hooks that burrow in deep, sequenced as a complete and immersive whole to carry with you through life. As Seaton puts it themselves: There is a line in the Malgo & KVS track that goes, I must be the place where the storm catches breath. The line captures that feeling of the best of times in a club, where everything slips away in terms of time and you feel like youve reached a place beyond the outside world, a place of your own that is somehow communal with those around you. The mix was meant to be an honest reflection of those moments for me as a DJ. The zones that somehow encapsulate the physical and mental harmony you feel in that place. This is a mix for that zone.