FR 136: Call Super Is Tweaking Old Tools for a New Era
JR Seaton on zines, fan clubs, and their ambitious new mix CD, A Rhythm Protects Us
“What is the DJ mix in 2025?” asks Call Super in a new zine celebrating the art and culture of the mix CD. “It’s online. Online it’s every form of mix, the live recording from the festival you went to, the renowned club you didn’t, the imagined space a DJ wants to channel, it’s radio, podcasts, the calling card, the anniversary celebration of a magazine’s series, and we haven’t even got to a Boiler Room or Twitch-cast yet.”
I suspect the assessment will sound familiar. I’ve been covering the online mix beat for nearly a decade now, and the everything-and-nothingness of them—combined with their mind-boggling ubiquity—sometimes makes the very enterprise feel like the most foolish of fool’s errands.
Call Super, a.k.a. London-based JR Seaton, has good reason to be asking these questions: Next week, they’ll release a new mix album, A Rhythm Protects One, on Amsterdam’s Dekmantel label. It’s their second commercial mix CD, following 2017’s Fabric 92, and it’s meant very much as a mix CD, full stop. (Two CDs, in fact: one containing the mix, and the other unmixed versions of all the tracks in the mix.)
It’s an ambitious undertaking: In the tradition of classic mix CDs from Ricardo Villalobos and Shackleton, the set is composed exclusively of Seaton’s own work—with a twist: The tracklisting is peppered with tracks from a host of new aliases including Conny Slipp, Louis Lupin, and DJ Flowerdew. When I first saw the tracklisting, I had my suspicions these curiously obscure entities, and once I heard the mix, there was little doubt that this was a Call Super affair from start to finish.
Just as impressive is the package itself. Jan Tomson handled visual artwork and graphic design; Daniel Mason, who worked on the pill-container box for Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, came up with a die-cut digipak that includes a rotating wheel—inspired by medieval volvelles—to indicate the position of each track in the mix. ( The package design makes an impassioned argument for the importance of physical objects; so does that complementary zine (available separately), which features writing from Ogazón, Eris Drew, Batu, and DJ NORTHERN on the mix CDs that made an impact in their lives, and further pieces from Shanti Celeste, Kilopatrah Jones, Darwin, Skee Mask, and Parris on the rituals and rhythms that govern their days.
Seaton has good reason to be thinking about rituals, too: They recently moved back to London after 15 years in Berlin, compressing a decade and a half of life in Germany into a harried, month-long whirlwind of packing, moving, and all the assorted logistics involved in disentangling oneself from the Haupstadt. (I still shudder to think of the bureaucratic gauntlet I was forced to run when I left Berlin after just four years there.) They recently posted a brief but fascinating goodbye to the city on their Substack, Arpozine, and also a farewell mix, “Auf Wiedersehen Stadtkind,” to NTS.
I remember meeting Seaton when I still lived in Berlin; Seaton and TJ Hertz, a.k.a. Objekt were putting down roots and getting their careers up and running. (On my hard drive, I’ve still got some early Call Super demos dated 2010, which they must have passed me after a conversation at a club somewhere.) So it was a pleasure to speak with JR recently and compare notes on life as an ex-Berliner.
We talked about the glut of online mixes and the importance of mix CDs; why a certain amount of precarity is essential for a thriving club culture; the linguistic underpinnings of Call Super’s web of aliases and track titles; fostering true community in the era of social media; and more. (While the transcript does an adequate job of capturing just how thoughtful Seaton is when it comes to club culture and dance music, I wish text could more accurately represent just how funny they are.)
The first half of the interview is free to read for all; the full thing is exclusive to paying subscribers, as thanks for your support. Call Super’s A Rhythm Protects One is out October 3 on double CD, with the individual tracks also available on 2xLP. For fans of the artist’s liquid, meticulously detailed approach to house and techno, it’s a must-hear. And on October 17, they’re throwing an all-nighter in London; check their Substack for a link to buy tickets.
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How are you?
I’m fine. I’m feeling a lot better this week after a very exhausting move.
Yeah. You’re back in London now?
Yeah, back in London. And just kind of recovered, I think?
Logistically, how was the move?
It was very, very condensed. We had this situation where the last few years in Berlin we really felt like we were done, we wanted to get out of here. Talked about it a lot, and then started to pin some details down and set the date for summer 2026. This is not just our own fatigue with Berlin and where it’s at, but we also have a son who’s seven, and neither of us wanted him to grow up German. Nothing wrong with that, but I think being inside a system that you know, and you feel like you can fully support someone who is maybe struggling with something or going through something, and they have your trust—the only thing we could do was to move back to the city that we knew and were from.
Then alongside that, my cousin was having a rough time over the last few years and ended up in hospital, and she had to move out of her place. We had discussed moving in there, and so the whole thing was kind of sped up because the local school, just like all the schools in London, they don’t have many spaces that come up if you don’t start in the first year. We’d put an application in and a place came up this summer, so we suddenly had to turbocharge the whole thing. We had four weeks to do the whole move. Long story short, it was hell—compressing 15 years worth of life into a four-week move. We’re actually living in a flat now that I left before I moved to Berlin. So the whole thing, 15 years of my life there, feels like this fever dream, and I’m suddenly back in the place that I was.
It’s like Narnia, right? You step out of the wardrobe and there you are.
Literally, I’m back in the house, and, you know, did I meet the witch? Did I meet Aslan?
That’s intense.
Yeah. And I think just creatively, I’ve had a very intense few years. I’ve kept my studio in Berlin because I was like, I can figure out what to do with our apartment, but I can’t figure out what to do with the studio I rent, so I’m just going to keep it and I’ll come back. It’s very, very cheap, cheaper than storage. I’ll just come back every month or something for, I don’t know, six months, 12 months, until I figure out how to build or make one or, whatever, move one here.
So all the gear is still there?
Everything’s there. All my records, all the gear. I have a Bluetooth speaker here and a laptop.
Since we’re talking about leaving Berlin, that makes a good segue into your “Auf Wiedersehen Stadtkind” mix for NTS. You read a passage from Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights at considerable length in the mix—some 15 minutes’ worth. What about that passage speaks to you?
I’ve always adored her work. The way she uses language is something I feel a deep kinship with. In that passage, she’s writing about being on the periphery of a circle that Billie Holiday moved in, and she captures something of the New York night at that moment in time in that city. The parallel era in Berlin is probably the end of Weimar. If you want to read Isherwood, and look back at a more obvious [trajectory], like: Oh, this is what Berlin was, and then the National Socialists took over and the city changed a lot, but then started to return to that in West Berlin once the Wall had gone up and money was being pumped into it from the West, and it was a place of dissolution and decadence again. These are all very—if you’ve lived in Berlin, these are tropes, stereotypes, archetypes.
What I like about the Elizabeth Hardwick piece is, for me, it captures something that I felt in the first few years I was in Berlin, that kind of gorgeous, beautiful dishevelment of somewhere where there’s a lot of people leading quite frayed lives, or lives at the edges of something, creatively and socially. I always find it more interesting to find a way into something that I see or I experienced through something else, somewhere else. And for me, [Hardwick’s book] was something that always took me back to that moment of time in Berlin. It’s not a story that’s being told about Berlin, it’s a story about somewhere else. To me, that is more interesting than reading about Kreuzberg in 1988 or whatever.
I was really struck by the ending of the passage, especially the part about “the expensive martyrdom of the entertainer.” She writes, “Her work took on gradually a destructive cast, as it so often does, with the greatly gifted who are doomed to repeat endlessly their own heights of inspiration.”
That, to me, that’s it. It really captures so much of what it means to lead a life in the arts anywhere. I think when you’re younger you’re just swept up in making stuff and the dream of making stuff, and as you get older you think about that more reflectively: Why am I actually doing this, anyway? And what do I want to say? I feel like most creativity is driven by curiosity. And curiosity should be vociferous in the young, but in middle-aged and older people, it’s something that has to be nurtured. It’s very easy for cynicism to encroach. And if you’re not pushing back on these things and pushing yourself to feed the fire, I think people become cynical and stop making anything that’s really of much value to me.
And I suppose dance music, club music, is particularly susceptible to burning out, for various reasons. You’re not at liberty to create whenever you want; you’re up all night, and that’s physically taxing the older you get. Obviously, there are frequently substances attached, which for some people becomes a problem. And then there’s the financial precarity that seems particularly endemic to nightlife. The passage that you read begins with—I don’t remember the quote exactly, but it’s talking about the huckster venue owners, bartenders, thieves—these are all things that don’t lead to long, fruitful careers.
In a way I feel quite romantic about those figures and the scene being built around those issues and those figures. Because I think the alternative to that is this much more anodyne professionalization of the industry where clubs are washed of something that, yeah, I romanticize. I don’t want this to be a job that’s full of corporate gym bunnies who are fit and healthy and sober. I think the same goes for most of the arts. I don’t want theaters and actors and writers who are all optimized to be the most financially efficient producers of whatever—whatever it is, I think I’ll find it insufferable and kind of washed. I guess this comes back to, “artists should be poor and suffering and make work out of experiences that are painful.” But I do think that so much of the magic that happens in nightlife and in what we do, it ends with the morning. And that night should have been a release, it should have been an explosion of energy and emotion and feeling and experience. And it should be something that you maybe then need to recover from and go through something to. I don’t quite know where this thought is going, but I am a romantic to that end.
You’re saying that you need that renegade quality.
Yeah, it should be messy and—the word I’m looking for is precarious. If anything, one of the things that have drawn me back to London is that London is a bigger, richer city than Berlin, but in a way it feels more precarious. I mean, Berlin has got its fair share of problems, rents are very high and a lot of people don’t work in a kind of techy corporate sector like so many of the more recent influx do. You know, the people who’ve been there a long time don’t. And this is creating this divide, this inequality that’s very painful to see. But it’s also a smaller city, and it still has a thriving left-wing political scene—that I personally find very frustrating in lots of ways, because it’s very divided. Particularly since the war in Gaza, it has been hugely frustrating and painful. But overall, because it’s a smaller city, there are still ways to survive in Berlin without [earning] a huge amount. Whereas in London, the precarity is jacked right up, and people work so hard to live here and make ends meet that they really do let loose in the weekends in a way that, I dunno, I still find quite messy and inspiring.
Do you feel like in Berlin people have come to take that sort of nightlife for granted?
If I was to be a bit cynical at this moment about Berlin, I would say for a long time it felt like people who arrived in the city had big creative dreams or ideas. And if they didn’t, they just wanted to have a good time. They didn’t really have much of a professional idea of how they’d get by, but whatever, they’d find that out. And in recent times, the people who I have predominantly observed move to the city and fill the spaces that I work in have come because there’s been a nice job at the end of the journey there for them to do. And that job is not one that contributes much creatively to the city, but they came because they love what’s going on and they want to have that at the weekends. Now that’s OK, but unfortunately, when you scale it up, it has a vampiric quality on the creative life of the city. It means they are taking from something and they’re not contributing to it. So that quality is being diluted. And you notice that because it’s actually not that big a city for a capital city. It’s not a New York, it’s not a London, it’s not a Paris. There, that stuff gets washed away. You can’t generalize, it’s too big. Whereas in Berlin it is easier to generalize because of the size. And I definitely felt that.
That’s interesting. I’m thinking back to when I must have met you and TJ there, probably about 2010, when I was going to Horst a lot. I think that’s my first memory of meeting you. And that was an era in which, yeah, probably you could say a much larger proportion of the people in the club had something to do with music. They were working in music or making music or hobbying in music, but they weren’t, as you say, working at Zalando and just clubbing for the weekend.
Sure. I mean, we need people to be in the club. If you work at Zalando, it’s great that you’re going out to the club. But if we’re talking about something that’s very particular about the creative fabric of a place, it changes something.
I was curious about some of the selections you put in that mix. I take it they’re mostly Berlin specific for you.
Yeah. I first went to Berlin in the late noughties. I had a partner who I’d met one summer there. I was living here and I would go over and stay in their apartment; they were working in a cafe, and I would kind of sit around in the winter. I remember listening to those Alva Noto songs. And then, at that time, I guess, people like Barbara Morgastern I found very interesting because they were very of the city. There was lots of music I didn’t like that was coming out of the city at that moment—a kind of, I guess, Bar 25, slightly washed out, minimally tech house, very formulaic sound, but there was lots of really interesting stuff going on as well.
What’s that Christopher Cross-sampling track toward the beginning of the mix? Is that Terre Thaemlitz?
Yeah, it is. I guess that period was when I was really discovering Terre’s work for the first time. And yes, it was around the time that her most famous crossover house album came out, Midtown 120 Blues. Which, yeah, it’s a great record, but it wasn’t the work of hers that I was really captured by. That work, I dunno how to describe it, but it had an arts narrative around it, more than a club narrative. I think her filmmaking and her web design often get sidelined, because people talk about club records of hers that they love, but she really is a kind of complete visionary, from writing to film to design—the total presentation and conceptualization of her work. And that to me was just incredibly inspiring.
And you put your own “Vertigo” in there as well—which, if I’m not mistaken, was your first record, right?
Yeah. So I got to Berlin and had brought some speakers with me. I went for three months. That was the idea. I’d finished university. I had an opportunity in London to take an internship at a magazine that I really didn’t actually particularly like. I’d been working for a magazine I did love called Granta, a literary magazine. It was actually bought by one of the Tetra Pak heirs, and most of the people in the office felt like it was just going to turn into a vanity project. Actually, in the decade and a half since then, she’s still there, and I think she’s done a good job. But she was moving the office from one side of the city to the other to be closer to her house, and we all just thought her intentions were going to be poor. Leaving there, finishing university, applying for other stuff was very depressing. And the thought of trying to carve out a life in London, basically working two jobs so I could do an internship in the day and make my rent at night, was not very appealing. Like I said, I’d gone to Berlin a few times through university and I knew that I could basically live there on working one or two days a week and just buy myself some time.
I took a couple of bits of gear, because I always made music and DJ’d odd gigs. Didn’t ever really pay my rent in London, but suddenly in Berlin it did start to pay my rent off a couple of bar gigs. I met the Sameheads brothers quite quickly. I finished that track after a few months, and a friend of mine thought it was great and was like, let’s put it out. He took it to Hard Wax and played it to Torsten [Pröfrock, a.k.a. T++, Traktor, Dynamo, Various Artists, et. al.) And Torsten was like, yeah, if you make these records, we’ll distribute them. And so my friend, Jakob Gehring, said, OK, I’ll pay for the making of it. He was a c++ programmer and had some money. So we kind of started this little label. Hard Wax sold a couple of hundred copies of that. And then I got an email from Jack Revill who was distributing for Rubadub at the time, and he said, these have sold really quickly, can we make more? And I said, yeah, if it’s OK with Torsten. Rubadub offered to pay for it, and we did loads more with them. I’d never really gone back to that record. In my mind it was just kind of forgotten. But in the move, I was having this gig at Weekend. I took the gig because I’d never been to Weekend since that time. And I just thought, oh, it’s so mad to be going back to this club.
That’s the one on Alexanderplatz?
Exactly.
I don’t think I knew it was still there.
I only knew it was still there because Multisex had done a party there last year and I was like, what? It still exists. So I took this gig. I really wanted to just go back and see what it was like. I was listening back to music from that time in the weeks leading up to it, and I listened to that record and I thought, I’m so proud of this record. It’s better than I remember. And it captures a lot of what I was trying to put into my music in the years after that. It has a slightly more polished quality. I think in the year or two after that, living in Berlin, I had wanted my music to reflect that slightly battered, frayed, disheveled quality of the city, and I accordingly developed a sound that was maybe in dialogue with the city. But this wasn’t. I was fresh off the boat and it had this kind of clarity to it that was really interesting to hear. So yeah, I had to put that in.
I loved it. I don’t remember that track. I honestly don’t know if I’ve ever heard it before.
I mean, it was washed away. The first few years in Berlin I also just partied a lot. I was writing music. With TJ, we were very much helping each other finish bits of music; we always have done. But he was then in the process of having finished a few things, and that connection I built with Jack Revill from my record then served him. Jack was like, send me any other music you’ve got. And I was like, well, I don’t, but let me put you in touch with my friend. And so Jack then distributed the first white labels for TJ, which were meant to be anonymous. That’s why Objekt was stamped on there, and they blew up and people wanted to book this person who they thought was called Objekt. So he went out and had to DJ under that name.
So he wasn’t meant to be called Objekt at the time?
No. We had been putting on a night together as JR Seaton and TJ Hertz, and that’s what he wanted to DJ under. But having done these anonymous white labels, people didn’t want TJ Hertz, they wanted Objekt. It was stamped on the record, so he had to start DJing under that name.
That’s hilarious. I didn’t know that. Where were you doing those parties?
The first parties we did were at Kleine Reise, called the Hourglass. And then later on, we started doing stuff at Sameheads and then we kind of needed somewhere bigger and we did a party at a place called the Greenhouse on the top floor that was out by Mariendorfer Weg. That building was all studios, but they had this top floor with a kind of circular glass turret that looked out over the city. So it had a nice quality. Eventually we moved the things to Backsteinboot, which is where they’ve been ever since.
Let’s talk about the new mix album, A Rhythm Protects One. What are the origins of the idea for it? What made you want to do this particular project?
After the last album, I’d written a few clubby things to play, but I’m not particularly inspired by the idea of putting out a club music album. And I feel generally a little dismayed at the landscape of what a DJ mix is.
