Even in Berlin, techno is never quite the monolithic entity that it might seem. The formula may be dead simple—a four-to-the-floor beat plus a handful of shadows and metal shavings—but the proportions are always in flux. And as they shift, so does the music's relationship to the dancefloor; so do its imaginative possibilities. Last September, the British producer JR Seaton told Red Bull Music Academy, "I can probably see myself making stuff that is less to do with clubs in the future." He had been living in Berlin for four years, and while the city's techno community had drawn him to the city, he was circumspect about the way that club music's strictures can hinder an artist's development. Just a year later, his prediction is already coming true: after a string of EPs that established him as a clever, capable techno producer—part interpreter, part torchbearer—his debut album as Call Super turns sharply away from dancefloor functionality and towards headier expressions.
It's still body music, particularly if you turn it up loud enough that it gets ahold of your ribcage. But it's not so much party music, necessarily. The first thing you may notice is the relative scarcity of four-to-the-floor kicks; there's plenty of pulse running through Suzi Ecto, but it moves in fits and starts. Seaton's obvious affinity for classic electro is a factor, but these aren't the textbook whipcrack rhythms of Kraftwerk and Drexciya. They're softened up and sanded down; there are few grooves here, just bursts. Many of the drum sounds, like the dry, boxy toms of "Okko Ink", sound like they come from a Wurlitzer on the fritz, and even the most regular beats come across like metronomes buried deep in a pile of leaves. In "Fold Again at Last", an unsteady rhythm of glassy, conga-like tones is all but drowned out by metallic locust buzz.
Ah yes, that buzz: the whole album is alive with it. Seaton has talked about the way his creative process puts the signal chain front and center—that is, his compositional style is less a matter of putting beats and notes in neat rows than generating electronic sounds and sending them careening through a series of effects. It's part alchemical reaction, part Rube Goldberg contraption, and one side effect of his method is the omnipresent crackle and hiss. Not all hums are created equal, however, and it's a sign of Seaton's careful approach to sound design that his buzz sings in a way that's very different from, say, the flat, affectless hiss of Actress. Indeed, while his gunked-up machine aesthetics relate to contemporaries like Actress, Lukid, and the L.I.E.S. stable of basement-rave noiseniks, what distinguishes Suzi Ecto is its sparkling clarity. There are tiny chirping noises everywhere, like a forest full of birds and crickets, all made out of metal. Gloomy, abstracted electronic music rarely sounds so insanely detailed; for all its haphazard qualities, everything feels carefully, even obsessively, crafted.
It's a wonderfully penumbral set, sumptuously grayscale in a way that gives its rare bursts of color all the more impact. In "Okko Ink", a snippet of saxophone seems to have been rolled out on waterlogged tape and tacked up in the background, and in "Sulu Sekou", there's a melancholic clarinet melody that faintly recalls Djivan Gasparyan's "I Will Not Be Sad in This World". It's almost incongruous, this Fourth World outburst nestled among the metal shards, except that it's not, and that, in turn, is a testament to the breadth of Seaton's vision for techno. He's created the most evocative sound world that the genre has seen this year, and the peak-time dancefloor's loss is our gain.
