Call Super - Fabric 92

Pitchfork 76

At its best, a nightclub can be a scale model of utopia, a shared hallucination, an alternate reality that lasts as long as the house lights stay dark. The same holds true for mix CDs. Most merely operate as calling cards for the DJ making them, or flyers for the club promoting them. Occasionally, though, they aspire to be something more ambitious: a postcard from that imaginary place that the best club nights conjure into being out of sheer force of collective will.

That’s the context in which Call Super’s Fabric 92 comes to us. The London DJ, aka Joseph Richmond Seaton, says that he intended the release as a snapshot of the late hours of his sets, when consensus floor-fillers give way to stranger, more personal selections. That’s one unusual thing about the mix; another is that it was born in the wild, but raised in captivity, as it were. His choice of theme and mood reflects a careful study of Fabric’s mix series as much as it does his time in the booth at the London venue. Noticing that the late hours seemed “strangely under represented” within the series, he writes, “I thought it would be good to start there instead of using this opportunity to add another peak-time chapter to the collection.”

Commercial mix CDs have lost the central role in DJ culture that they enjoyed in the ’90s and ’00s; thanks to the internet, mixes are everywhere now, and free. But, perhaps precisely because no one has time to listen to even a fraction of them, Fabric’s series is more of a canon-maker than ever. Fabric 92 is, above all, a testament to digging widely and without prejudice. Beneath house and techno’s broad umbrella, it’s as diverse a set as you’ll find, spanning multiple eras, styles, and scenes, and boasting a final 14 minutes that veers way out into the deep end, from drone to country blues to polemical dancehall reggae.

Seaton’s selections are spellbinding, as every track presents a self-contained world of its own. Some, like Don’t DJ’s polyrhythmic “Pornoire,” are wildly complex; others, like the flickering electro of Shanti Celeste’s “Strung Up,” are relatively tidy. The cumulative effect of the way he layers and strings them all together is akin to moving through a series of wormholes, flashing from landscape to landscape while standing in place. His mixing is never ostentatious, but it generally emphasizes action. It’s rare that a song is left to play out unaccompanied; far more often, he’s got two and even three tracks running in parallel, resulting in a dynamic, shape-shifting fusion that’s far more than the sum of its parts. Early on, he combines muted, shuffling cuts from Jan Jelinek and from Wolfgang Voigt’s M:I:5 project to mossy effect, as though burrowing through underbrush, while using the doleful trumpet of Beatrice Dillon and Rupert Clervaux’s “The Same River Twice” to draw bright, silvery streaks overhead.

A few tracks later, following an early climax brought on by his friend Objekt’s “The Stitch-Up”—whipcracks, shrapnel, a heart-in-mouth ostinato—he turns to relatively obscure, mid-’90s cuts from Photek and Two Full Minds to create a subaquatic atmosphere. That relative calm sets up the mix’s most white-knuckled passage, in which Flanger’s head-scratching “Spinner,” in 10/4 time, is teased in and out of Carl Craig’s epic “A Wonderful Life” for three minutes of tug-of-war. At several points, it feels like it could all collapse into the mud at any moment, but it’s precisely that sense of risk that’s so exhilarating.

On the downhill slope, Seaton switches into a more sentimental gear, leaning heavily on melodic IDM and electro from Marco Bernardi, Jega, Shanti Celeste, and Bitstream; concluding with a fleet-footed Detroit techno skip from Convextion, this might be the set’s most satisfying segment. But Seaton has one final trick up his sleeve. As Convextion’s beats fade away, a pair of ambient drones from Karen Gwyer and Thomas Ankersmit & Valerio Tricoli shimmer brightly in the darkness, and a lilting, sing-song speaking voice rings out: “Well I’m just walkin’/I’m trying to find the end/But every time I stop/Look like my trouble just begin.” It’s Walter Brown's “Keep on Walkin’,” an a cappella country blues recorded in Mississippi in 1981 by a pair of German ethnomusicologists.

It’s hardly the first time that archival blues has turned up in dance music—Moby, you may recall, built his empire on wringing as much authenticity as he could out of vintage recordings of black Americans’ voices. But Seaton’s approach, which sets Brown’s rueful blues in an imaginary summer night, lit only by stars and fireflies, is far stranger. And in the context of a club set, it’s nothing short of audacious. Eventually, Yves Tumor’s woozy, soulful “The Feeling When You Walk Away” takes us by the hand and leads us back toward the light, and Speng Bond’s “Cutbacks,” a dancehall reggae tune about economic austerity policies, sends us home feeling righteous. But for just a moment there, at the tail end of the set’s spellbinding denouement, everything falls silent as Walter Brown’s plaintive voice carries on unaccompanied: “On my knees, I’m gonna just/Keep on walkin’.” In a journey full of left turns and switchbacks, this calm, quiet testament to faith and fortitude speaks the loudest; it’s a moment when absolutely anything feels possible.