The DJ mix CD is not yet dead, but it’s time to call the priest. As an enfeebled relic from a mistily remembered past, the format is now passing into its museum era, even if a plucky few cling on honorably. (DJ-Kicks, for one, is still kicking.) Obituaries for the mix CD—popularized by series like Global Underground, fabric, Northern Exposure, and a slew of also-rans—have run regularly since the mid-2010s, when online mixes, often self-published, allowed DJs to sidestep onerous licensing and marketing hurdles. The mix CD’s imminent demise has loomed so long that even those death notices have by now expired.
But hold the phone. Call Super’s spectacular new album, A Rhythm Protects One, is essentially a mix CD, and a welcome reminder of its once-formative power to mold tastes and bend minds. Its praise for the bygone medium is not only implicit in its own format and deluxe, gatefold 2CD package design; the album’s release is accompanied by a zine “celebrating CDs, routines and rituals.” In one essay, Call Super, a.k.a. Joseph Seaton, writes lucidly about what’s been won and lost in the SoundCloud soup. Though that hyperdigital realm facilitates squishy abundance and easy access, they argue, the cost is the inability to grasp history as it unfolds, much less get a decent view of it. In that spirit, the piece asks, “Where are the hills to the flatlands?” The mix answers that rhetorical question via the west-of-Scotland sesh riddle of “The Argosy,” a spoken-word piece that intones, “Noise convinces the future to forget.”
The fluidity of the net, the solidity of the canon—as it happens, those are useful ways to think about the music on A Rhythm Protects One. In the flutters of woody clarinet and digital scree of the opening track, “Blue Sun I,” it’s as though Seaton pits their own ambivalent thoughts about the past and present of DJ culture in cautious conversation. But the rest of the album is striking in its self-possession. As a DJ mix produced by Seaton in its entirety (in the guise of sly aliases like Clam1, Louis Lupin, and DJ Flowerdew), A Rhythm Protects One casts a glance toward a handful of old masters—particularly, Ricardo Villalobos and his timelessly strange and spiky fabric 36. (Seaton has their own entry into the fabric series.)
What fabric 36 and A Rhythm Protects One share is a mercurial minimalism whose extracurricular clicks and pops follow a strict internal logic. If Seaton’s music is more viscous—itself squishily abundant—than minimal’s avant-garde, it’s also capable of breaking out of itself. When the mix shifts from “Lululu” to “Limelight,” Seaton invites a braying crowd of percussion: door slams, bell chimes, droid chat. Once they’re sent spinning on merry-go-round spirals of bass and melody, the whole thing unscrews into deranged life.
In the last decade, club music has been marked less by innovation than recalibration. One way or another, a prolonged reckoning with—or plundering of—the past has clogged up what many of its artists do now. If a handful of disparate producers—Two Shell, Lanark Artefax, aya, Proc Fiskal—have responded with the extreme-HD sound of the digital sublime, Seaton’s embrace of 4K sheen on A Rhythm Protects One and recent albums is equivocal. One of A Rhythm Protects One’s strengths lies in its uniquely compelling sense of uncertainty, in which many ideas circle the point and hesitate to commit. In “Milkways,” unresolved piano chords and synthy mouthwash swirls dribble in irregular intervals through a bassline of unerring steadiness, not uncommon to the skewy thrum of early ’00s Thomas Melchior.
In these moments, Seaton is at once familiar and ungraspable. One of their other signatures, the uncanny compound of human touch and hijacked hardware, surfaces again and again. A hand slapping what sounds like plywood on “Same Battles” beats against muscular voice modulation and veins of micro-digital FX. Even as these cyborg gestures circulate through A Rhythm Protects One, the mix draws its vitality from an archaic truth: The progress of culture depends as much on the ability to make out its forms as it does the imagination to recast them. There’s no clearer example than on the fantastic closer, “Mothertime”; it resembles a theoretical Groove Chronicles classic, but it also can’t help sounding like Call Super—in dialogue with club music’s archive, in touch with the pulse of now, but beholden only to a polyphonic self.
