Call Super on Laurent Garnier and Having a Career in Reverse

“What I like about music is you cannot escape – you are chained to yourself.” Ensconced in the far corner of a noisy Soho pub, Joe Seaton is discussing his production process. “I might record [a track] in a week, but then spend four months painstakingly balancing certain [sounds]. I often think most of that work is kind of in vain. But then I don’t. I swing. And I can’t really help myself.”

Seaton’s inability to focus may not have always worked in his favour. Back in 2009, he made a splash with Yphsilon, a 12-inch of luscious deep house released on his own Nocturnes imprint under the name JR Seaton. By early this year he was the flagship signing of new Fabric imprint Houndstooth; The Present Tense EP, as Call Super, explored a densely textured techno sound that cut across contemporary trends. And while he has often been lauded for his versatility, Seaton’s propensity to flit between styles might go some way to explaining why he hasn’t achieved greater success in the past four years.

When I put the idea to Seaton, however, he’s unconvinced. “Frankly I can’t think of anything better for me in the long term. I listen to lots of different music and I make lots of different music. And that means, hopefully, that I can wake up in five years’ time still interested.” This, it becomes clear, is a typically robust response from a producer with a healthy independent streak. Seaton grew up in London, and was fending for himself by the age of 17, after his parents moved abroad. He followed in the family footsteps by enrolling at art school (there are three generations of painters on his mother’s side, and his father taught at Central Saint Martins). But he soon dropped out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he is quick to criticise the formal education systems for both art and music in the UK (he experienced the latter studying piano and guitar as a child).

Instead, his education came from club-going. The underage Seaton spent the early 2000s sneaking into now-defunct clubs like The Drome and Turnmills. There he developed a taste for “parts of the UK tech house scene that were the best bits of techno and house – people like Halo & Hipp-E and Peace Division.” His single greatest teacher, though, was Laurent Garnier, then holding down a residency at The End. “I would go every single month, pretty much,” he recalls. “Laurent Garnier was the guy where I finally realised: it doesn't matter what style of music it is, you can play it all. That’s the power of the DJ.”

Seaton moved to Berlin in 2009, the same year that The End closed; he vowed never to see his hero play again. “Garnier is playing as much as ever, but I have an idea of the kind of sets he’s playing,” he explains. “I don’t need to go and have that sense of profound disappointment. I think this is going to be the same with lots of the DJs who are big right now. You have these golden years where you really do things with your sets that count for something. And then the time passes, and you try and recreate that endlessly but your touch isn’t there.”

Isn’t he worried that the same fate awaits him? “There are musicians out there whose careers I’d like to have in reverse, and I don’t think that’s impossible. These are people who made quite interesting music when they were younger, and as time has gone on, they’ve gotten swept up in house and techno, and they’ve had this linear progression that’s followed a very respectable economic curve. But I don’t think their music’s got any better for it. Arguably it’s got worse. I’d like to get by doing this as long as I can, but I don’t actually need that much in life. I can probably see myself making stuff that is less to do with clubs in the future. Who knows.”

Seaton’s attempt at a retrograde career path has met with reasonable success so far. Following his debut single and brief dalliance with label management (Nocturnes foundered after two releases; as Seaton says, “It kind of died when we thought, ‘what next?’”), the producer’s career stalled when an album deal turned sour. His way of breaking the impasse was Call Super: a collaboration with Matt Waites (AKA Nightmoves) which, in 2011, yielded an EP of sophisticated house and techno for Five Easy Pieces. And when Waites lost interest in the project and Seaton decided to carry it forward alone, his music began to grow ever-richer and more ambitious, clearly catering to the dancefloor but questing beyond it, too.

Seaton’s latest record for Houndstooth, Black Octagons, is his finest achievement to date; an intoxicating journey through techno’s gloomy hinterlands that in places reflects the scene’s recent turn for the aggressive, but seems to follow its own rulebook entirely. As with much of Seaton’s output – and, for that matter, the work of fellow British expat, close friend and RBMA alum Objekt – the compositional detail is dizzying but unerringly precise. It’s tempting to imagine that a wealth of meaning lies beneath the surface of these productions, particularly when taking into account their evocative titles (“Dewsbury Severance”), and the record’s press release, a cryptic latticework of allusions taking in the work of Japanese photographer Yūkichi Watabe and formative events from Seaton’s own childhood.

But Seaton – who several times during our conversation opens a sentence by apologising for its pompousness – is clearly all too aware of the limitations of his form. “I mean all dance music is disposable. I’ll slave away for a year on a record, and then it doesn’t really matter six months down the line – that razor is blunt now. But you want to think, ‘Please God, can I look back at this in 30 years and not feel like my life was in vain?’ I think you’ve got to aspire to something more than loop techno. Even though I love lots of that stuff.”