DEKMANTEL

Call Super revives the endangered art of the mix CD with a fluid, technicolour hour of elegantly advanced club music featuring a striking assembly of emergent artists.

Since their first releases in the early 2010s, Joseph Seaton has been a many-sided artist balancing expressive electronics with organic instrumentation. Their background in jazz has informed ambient and experimental albums, but they've proven to be just as comfortable tackling all shapes and speeds of impactful club music. This extends to their practice as a DJ, regularly surfing the slipstream of the club and festival circuit with a sensitive, seductive instinct for the movement of a dancefloor.

Seaton set out to make ARPO — an acronym for A Rhythm Protects One — to honour the meaning of mix CDs in a world drowning in online DJ streams. Part of the generation raised on seminal series like the metal-tinned fabric and fabriclive (which Seaton themselves contributed to), they cast back to the lasting impression of landmark sessions like Coldcut's 1995 opus Journeys By DJ: 70 Minutes Of Madness. These were mixes to absorb over and over again, where every deeply considered track and transition became lodged in your psyche.

As a DJ, producer and composer with a reputation for distinctive, head-turning musicality, Seaton puzzled out a selection for ARPO that bristles with invention. Every track feels like a moment, loaded with motifs and loops that gently impose their presence across an ever-shifting, intricately woven tapestry of dancefloor psychedelia (not to be confused with any genres with 'psy' in the name).

As well as exclusive new material under their Call Super and Ondo Fudd aliases, Seaton seeks out uncanny talent from breakthrough artists in tune with their creative vision. In terms of slinky 4/4 groove and mid tempo pace, you might locate the likes of Conny Slipp, Scarletina and Clam1 on the wilder fringes of minimal tech house, but their productions teem with textural depth and melodic subtlety that reach past that scene's typically functional tendencies. Curveballs abound, and Seaton relishes in the chance to divert into dramatic workouts like their own 'Limelight' and 'mothertime' or strip everything down for the striking, swooning poetry of Malgo & KVS' 'The Argosy'.

Way beyond neatly boxed-off club styles, the individual tracks have their own unique qualities that hold space within the mix as a whole — memorable hooks that burrow in deep, sequenced as a complete and immersive whole to carry with you through life. As Seaton puts it themselves:

"There is a line in the Malgo & KVS track that goes, 'I must be the place where the storm catches breath.' The line captures that feeling of the best of times in a club, where everything slips away in terms of time and you feel like you’ve reached a place beyond the outside world, a place of your own that is somehow communal with those around you. The mix was meant to be an honest reflection of those moments for me as a DJ. The zones that somehow encapsulate the physical and mental harmony you feel in that place. This is a mix for that zone."

Of course, the importance of a mix CD is also rooted in its physicality. Seaton thought back to some of their favourite CD packaging, landing on the iconic pill box that housed Spiritualized's 1997 space rock opus Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. The original designer and manufacturer of that packaging, Daniel Mason, was sought out and enlisted to collaborated with Dekmantel's Jan Tomson. They created a triple-gatefold digipak that centres on figures and a typeface created from dance notation, and a volvelle — a rotating circle dating back to the middle ages originally used to calculate the phases of the sun and the moon. In ARPO's packaging, it acts as a key to detail the artists and track names that feature on the mix. It's a lovingly thought-out, unique piece that further cements Seaton's offering as a memorable entry into the mix CD canon.

アルバムについて In a continuation of his devotional celebration of the dance, Shed arrives on Dekmantel with Rave Echoes — a supple, mesmerising album of angular techno caught between the heat of peak time and the time-blurred hours after the club. Few artists have nailed the intersection of the intellectual, emotional and physical in techno as evocatively as René Pawlowitz. For more than 20 years and across scores of aliases the Frankfurt/Oder-born, Berlin-based trailblazer has pushed a distinctive strain of machine music in thrall to the functional demands of motion without ever sacrificing subtlety, space, intrigue and expression. While his vast catalogue of work touches on many different moods and energies, on his Dekmantel debut Rave Echoes he shrouds eight forthright workouts in a blanket of misty melancholia to evoke the enchanting afterglow of the party. "It's not nostalgic," Pawlowitz explains. "It's about that feeling that remains for a day, a week or even years after celebrating a rave. I still have that feeling for about 30 years now. This record tries to describe it." The vaporous pads that soar over 'Password (Techno Mix)' certainly come charged with a bittersweet sentiment. Meanwhile the rhythmic locomotion comes on like the rumble of the first train back after leaving the club. The insistent bell loop up top rings out like the hook of the last track that rang out over the soundsystem. It's a sensation familiar to anyone who has spent their last drop of energy at the altar of dance, where exhaustion meets with satisfaction and disorientation as you recalibrate back into the real world. This approach — dreamlike atmospherics and rugged propulsion — takes on many guises across Rave Echoes. It's submerged and restrained on 'Loot 25', speckled with sharply sliced breaks on 'Everybody' and scattered across a sparse, steppy soundscape on 'Rave Predator'. Emotive, swooning strings collide with tough, squashed breakstep drums on 'Double Scoop' and 'Taking You Home' thrusts with urgency even as Pawlowitz softens the spiky transients to make space for pure rave romanticism. There is even space for 'Rave Echoes' itself — the last groove before your eyes finally close, as the beat slows to a weighty trip hop roll and the ambience blooms out into a dense blanket across the frequency range. Bursting with the nuanced production, rugged UK-school soundsystem pressure and Berlin-school techno momentum that makes him such a celebrated producer, on Rave Echoes Shed offers a perfect impression of those wild, indescribable sensory overloads that leave their mark on anyone devoted to the dancefloor.

In a sharp-angled, fiercely inventive reflection on the nature of club culture and digital fatigue, Simo Cell and Abdullah Miniawy reunite to deliver their new album, Dying is the internet, to Dekmantel's UFO series. French producer Simo Cell has blazed a singular path from his dubstep-influenced origins to become a leading light in contemporary leftfield club music, twisting up adventurous rhythms and flamboyant production in pursuit of a perpetual freshness for the floor. Egyptian singer, poet, producer and composer Abdullah Miniawy has become equally omnipresent in the past 10 years, straddling the arts world and leading with his piercing Arabic lyricism while maintaining an eternally curious spirit that leads into open-ended, experimental music from the abstract to the propulsive. Following up on their 2020 EP for BFDM, Kill Me Or Negotiate, Miniawy describes their sharply focused new album as "a playful prophecy about the triggers of a new global revolution." Cell considers the title, Dying is the internet, to be a mantra about "how the internet lost its soul," becoming "less about sharing ideas and more about surviving in a digital business ecosystem." Deliberately at odds with the reel-ready two-minute attention span of the average social media surfer (i.e. everyone), the pair set out to make an album that takes its time to reveal nuanced ideas and expressions. Rather than one-note despair for the modern malaise, Cell and Miniawy offer a philosophical reminder that this present moment in the human experience is a temporary phase, no matter how overwhelming it feels. Dying is the internet finds Miniawy experimenting with auto-tune across the record, while Cell has developed his voice design chops and compositional instincts, moving closer to fully realised song structures without losing the fundamental 'clubbiness' of each track. The result is a cohesive, wildly original kind of heavyweight dance music that slings out hooks left right and centre, from Miniawy's laconic trumpet looming through low-slung 'Reels in 360' and 'Travelling In BCC' to the persistent handclaps that bring 'Living Emojis' to life. Miniawy's poetry explores the power of insistent, repeated phrases in a break from his more typically structured form. Kenyan powerhouse Lord Spikeheart adds extra snarl to stripped-back, slow-burn opener 'I See The Stadium', but otherwise Dying is the internet is purely the work of Miniawy and Cell casting their considerable chops out into unexplored territory. The results are electric, bound together by a consistent economy of sound that burrows into a shroud of bass-heavy minimalism barely masking Cell's incredibly detailed studio flex. Even the beatless flourish of the Miniawy-produced 'Tear Chime' comes loaded with physicality — a sensory rush at the mid-section of the album bookended by some of the most idiosyncratic club music in recent memory. Both Simo Cell and Abdullah Miniawy have already proved themselves as fearless innovators across different fields. The strength of their partnership lies in their ability to make space for each other while letting their distinctive sonic identities ring loud and true. Dying is the internet has immediacy and physicality to translate over a soundsystem, but its intricacies are purpose-built for repeat visits and contemplation, unveiling hidden dimensions the deeper you dive into it.

Bringing together two distinct yet complementary forces in electronic music, Zohar and Nymfo join for their first collaborative release on Dekmantel.

Zohar’s sound is defined by razor-sharp precision and pulsating percussive energy storm-like sonics that disorient and excite in equal measure. With a background shaped by years of commanding dancefloors, she has carved a diverse and eclectic path, where rattling low-end and rhythmic tension form the foundation. Known for her technical refinement and mixing wizardry, Zohar intuitively seeks unexpected connections, always pushing her listeners into new territory. Following several contributions to Dekmantel compilations, this marks her first full-length release on the label.

Nymfo has been an essential figure in drum & bass since the late ’90s. Starting out in Eindhoven’s rave and jungle scene, he quickly became known for his fierce DJ sets and later, his productions. His catalogue spans acclaimed labels such as Metalheadz, 1985 Music, Commercial Suicide, Hospital Records, Critical, Dispatch, Shogun Audio, and many more. With two albums and a steady output of singles and EPs, Nymfo has consistently balanced raw dancefloor energy with a deep, refined production ethos.

Their paths crossed countless times in the scene, yet it wasn’t until Dekmantel invited them for a special Dekmantel Connects performance an ambitious setup with eight CDJs and four mixers that they shared the decks for the first time. The synergy of that moment carried into the studio, where their collaboration took shape. This release now returns them to the Dekmantel family, presenting their joint vision: a dialogue between low-end weight, rhythmic intricacy, and forward-thinking club sonics.