The DJ mix CD isn’t dead yet—but you can hear the priest clearing his throat. Once a cornerstone of club culture, the format now feels like a relic from a dimly remembered past, fading into its museum phase. A few holdouts—DJ-Kicks, for instance—still carry the torch, but most have long since been replaced by online mixes and streaming platforms that freed DJs from licensing headaches and label constraints. The mix CD’s obituary has been written so many times since the mid-2010s that even its death notices feel outdated.
And yet, A Rhythm Protects One, the new album from Call Super (a.k.a. Joseph Seaton), offers a resurrection of sorts—a reminder of what made the format so vital in the first place. Functionally, it’s a mix CD: two discs, mixed and sequenced as one continuous narrative. Even its packaging—a gatefold 2CD set, paired with a zine celebrating “CDs, routines, and rituals”—feels like a love letter to a bygone era. In that accompanying essay, Seaton reflects on what’s been gained and lost in the age of digital abundance. SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and endless online mixes have democratized access but dissolved context; music now flows without borders, history flattening into a continuous stream. “Where are the hills to the flatlands?” Seaton asks—a poetic way of wondering what’s been sacrificed in the name of infinite accessibility.
The album answers that question through sound and structure. In its opening track, “Blue Sun I,” Seaton lets acoustic clarinet phrases flicker against digital static, like two temporalities colliding—the warmth of the past rubbing against the cold glow of the present. That tension defines A Rhythm Protects One: it’s a meditation on DJ culture’s evolution, caught between tactile memory and networked fluidity.
Seaton constructs the mix entirely from their own material, recorded under aliases like Clam1, Louis Lupin, and DJ Flowerdew. In doing so, they nod to earlier masters of the form—most notably Ricardo Villalobos, whose fabric 36 remains one of the genre’s most enigmatic high points. Both works share a mercurial minimalism, full of tiny, deliberate gestures—clicks, pops, microscopic shifts—that form a hidden logic. But Seaton’s world is thicker, more organic. Their rhythms seem to breathe and bend, evolving like biological forms. When “Lululu” slides into “Limelight,” the mix erupts into a strange, joyous frenzy: door slams, bell chimes, metallic clatter, synthetic voices. What begins as precision minimalism mutates into something wild and ungovernable—order giving way to exuberant chaos.
In the last decade, electronic music has been more reflective than revolutionary. Much of it feels like a long negotiation with its own past—plundering archives, reworking old tropes, re-polishing old sounds. While artists like Two Shell, aya, Lanark Artefax, and Proc Fiskal chase hyperdigital extremes—what some have called the “4K club aesthetic”—Seaton’s approach feels more ambivalent. A Rhythm Protects One glimmers with the same HD sheen, but its clarity is unsettled, haunted by indecision. The record is full of ideas that hover in suspension, never fully resolving. On “Milkways,” for example, stray piano chords and synthetic swirls drift around a steady bassline, evoking early-2000s microhouse while refusing to settle into nostalgia.
That balance—between familiarity and mystery—is where Seaton thrives. Their music often feels human and alien at once. “Same Battles” opens with the sound of a hand striking wood, layered over digital modulation that splinters and reforms like circuitry shorting out. These tactile and mechanical gestures coexist, neither dominating the other. The result is a dialogue between man and machine, analog memory and digital process.
Ultimately, A Rhythm Protects One draws its strength from a very old idea: that culture moves forward not just through innovation, but through reinterpretation—by seeing the past clearly enough to reshape it. You can hear that philosophy crystallize in the album’s closer, “Mothertime.” It could almost be a lost UK garage anthem, but it’s unmistakably Call Super—reimagining the pulse of the past with a restless, contemporary intelligence.
In resurrecting the spirit of the mix CD, Seaton doesn’t simply mourn its loss; they remind us what it meant. A good mix once told a story—one rooted in curation, continuity, and care. A Rhythm Protects One revives that practice for an age that has forgotten how to pause, sequence, or look back. The hills might have flattened, but in Call Super’s hands, the horizon still hums
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