On his third album as Call Super, Joe Seaton’s compositions feel more casual, introverted, and low-stakes than previous efforts.
For fans mapping the output British-born, Berlin-based producer Joe Seaton, his Call Super handle was slotted for his pummeling house and techno output, while the Ondo Fudd alias was reserved for his weirder excursions into electro or ambient. But the club-ready Eyes Glide Through The Oxide 2x12" from last year as Ondo Fudd found that legend now inverted, his Call Super releases now more on the low-key end of the spectrum. His third album (and first for Anthony Naples’ Incienso label), Every Mouth Teeth Missing continues along a trajectory first laid out in a Red Bull Music Academy chat where Seaton envisioned “making stuff that is less to do with clubs” and it feels more casual, introverted, and low-stakes than previous efforts.
Truth in advertising, “An Unstable Music” opens with a jumble of disconnected sounds that jostle around with no attempt at coherence: distorted guitar, jackhammering noise, hushed piano, ponging electronics, and a sound like rummaging through a drawer of costume jewelry. Even when the sound palette is more coherent, a sense of restless skittering remains. The title track builds its rhythmic foundation from ever-shifting, rather dissimilar, elements: closed hi-hats, squelching electronics, crisp snares, a shutting door, chimes, distant rustling. The rhythm never quite coheres into something sure-footed or tactile, but something slippery as quicksilver, the commingled sounds closer to a mosaic, disparate yet all of a piece.
Zooming in, the craftsmanship is nuanced and highly detailed, but when you pull back, some of Missing’s tracks flow by without commanding too much attention or notice. On 2017’s Arpo, Seaton was already favoring twinkling sounds over bombast, drums that sound the size of contact lenses rather than oil barrels. But on Missing, he retreads similar ground to diminishing returns. His father, painter and Dixieland player David Seaton, again contributes clarinet and oboe. These woodwinds have become an earmark of many of Seaton’s productions –either as Call Super, Ondo Fudd, or in collaboration with Beatrice Dillon– the clarinet making a track like “Pay As U Glow” feel whimsical and light. But charming as it is to have father and son collaborating in the studio, it’s become such a common feature of his tracks that one wonders about Seaton casting a slightly larger net. What would Call Super’s circuitry sound like in dialogue with cello, harp, or saxophone (as when Joy Orbison grappled with reedman Ben Vince on a Hessle Audio 12")?
A glimpse of dramatic strings comes in on “Mouth Bank Bed,” a track that finds Call Super turning over new stones and taking a few risks. A garbled, disjointed voice emerges and recedes, with bits of electronics slithering around the edges. If Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing was just two minutes long, it might sound something like this. “Sleep All Night With Open Eye” draws from a similar sonic palette, the mood tipping towards the brooding and anxious, full of fidgeting little sounds. Even with the appearance of handclaps, they feel less celebratory and more like nervously picking at your cuticles.
For as often as Missing teems with a dizzying array of little glints of sound, the most effective track is also the simplest. “Welcome New People” is centered by little more than a slow arpeggiation lazily rising and falling, with flickering, ghostly chords hovering around the edges. There’s no obvious peak to it, no discernible melodic figure, but Seaton gives its atmosphere just enough of a charge. At a time when there’s no hope of safely entering into a claustrophobic, stale-air warehouse space, it makes sense that Seaton instead crafted something strange and insular, with nothing whatsoever to do with the clubs.
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