Joseph Richmond-Seaton, who was born and raised in London, moved to Berlin in 2009 in search of a more creative way of life. In the years since, he has released half a dozen EPs on various labels – most notably Houndstooth, the in-house label at London nightclub Fabric – under the name Call Super (and one as Ondo Fudd) and developed a singular, crate-digging approach to DJing.
In 2014 he released Suzi Ecto, his first album. It's a remarkable record that initially seems abstract before slowly giving up its secrets. It's a warm, playful and highly personal record.
“The point of the album, and in a way most of the work I do in the more expansive, personal sense, is just to be parts of me,” says Seaton. “I gave it a name and I may give all my albums names because they are characters of mine. The oboe and clarinet are instruments played by my dad, which I grew up hearing him play, so it was important for me just to express that, to take it and remake it in my own way.
“It’s an extension of me and my upbringing and my experiences . . . I’m not interested in technology or new bits of kit, I’m interested in constantly refining my relationship with the kit that I have accidentally accumulated. That, to me, is the story of me and my little creations.”
Dumb and straight
The opportunity for exploration on an album excites Seaton more than the singles and EPs he “makes for clubs” (these, he says, are “usually fairly dumb and straight” by comparison). Making something just for yourself does not make much sense in the relatively functional world of club-focused techno.
“I’ve got so much more scope on the records, where I’m not thinking about the club,” he says. “I would hate to fall into thinking about the club with an album. It would defeat the point of doing it for me. There is a new Ondo Fudd record that has one of the most personal things I’ve ever recorded on there, and it really has nothing to do with the club. It just stands alone, it’s not part of a bigger body of work.
“Thinking about making an album, though, for me it’s like I can suck in so much more of the world. I don’t have to suck stuff in just from the idea of what will work in a club. I can forget about all of that and actually go out and completely be myself.”
In the past, Seaton has referenced John Cage’s “delta theory”. It suggests that instead of radically new and different sounds emerging, music would become a series of ever-more-refined splits from existing ideas, moving from several big streams to smaller, more plentiful rivulets.
This theory fits neatly with Seaton’s music, which seems more like a confluence of existing sounds, a “sucking-in” of the world, than an attempt at creating something shockingly new. He says it is as simple as acknowledging that your work has a foundation in the work of others who have come before you.
“It’s impossible to be radical in this day and age, but maybe you can be radical with yourself and your own rejection of certain things and developing your own ‘language’ of sound through that,” he says. “If you’re taking the path of trying to come up with something aggressively different for the sake of being aggressively different, there are just so many traps that you can fall into that fast become cliches.”
He reckons that such new sounds rarely stay new for long in the age of the internet.
“Things become formalised so fast now that I almost think this is a discussion that makes no sense, because no sooner has something emerged than lots of people are beavering away on that thing. Look at the speed of UK funky, the way it emerged and became a really defined thing within the space of, like, 18 months.”
Diverse ingredients
Suzi Ecto saw Seaton take musical elements as different as cool jazz, musique concrete, new age ambience and pulsing techno and meld them together into something unique. It's something he also does in his DJ sets, moving comfortably between genres and musical eras, finding the links between sounds and bringing them together. It is, he says, the 21st-century way: to reference, to pull together and to enjoy difference as much as similarity.
“I think what we saw across the 20th century was ideas being taken to an extreme, understood and then moved back from,” he says. “It was a century of extreme ideas and that definitely applied to music. I think we’ve seen, over the last 20 years, people go, ‘Okay, I don’t actually want to listen to telephones ringing randomly for 62 minutes; I’d like to retreat from that.’
“Maybe ‘retreat’ is the wrong word, but go back to something that is more classically recognised as a pleasant listen. Musically, we’ve recognised all the things we like in the different ages and we cherry-pick and we put them together in the most satisfying way for the end consumer – or fan, as they used to be known.”
- Call Super plays Out To Lunch at Bar Tengu, 28-29 Lower Ormond Quay, Dublin 1, on Friday
