Label
FEELYRHEAD / FEELYRFEET
- A vulnerable return to the dance floor from Call Super.
- "Unstable Music," the name of the first track from Joe Seaton's last album Every Mouth Teeth Missing, reads (and sounds) like a manifesto for their work as Call Super over the past few years as the once-club focused alias has abstracted further into the ether. "bodiesinheaven 1" from Cherry Drops I continues this trajectory, dramatizing the tension between Seaton's experimental tendencies and unadulterated club bliss.
We start with mechanical synth bleeps before a wash of trance-ish chords, only for the drums to drop out as a Spanish guitar line flirts with the edge of entropy. And then for thirty seconds Seaton gives us the trance melody in its platonic Tomorrowland main stage form. This moment is fleeting as the song unspools over its remaining run time. These two EPs, Cherry Drops I and II, land at a turning point in Seaton's career. The UK producer has taken a more personal approach to their music, focusing on pain and loss in their songwriting. The pair of EPs builds towards this individual narrative of redemption through the friction of "bodiesinheaven 1" as Seaton reaches for a dance floor catharsis that seems to remain just out of reach.
In a remarkably candid interview with Emma Robertson, Seaton opened up about how they've often held their lived experiences at arm's length, preferring to describe their music with the narrative distance of the "third person" (e.g., the fictional nurse Suzi Ecto). They've now moved away from the shadows, looking for ways to use music to present themselves as fully present. We hear this when Seaton steps out from their usual studio wizardry. "Cherry Drops" hits you right in the gut. It's as good a piece of dub techno as you'll hear anywhere and the harp strums in the break add to, rather than disrupt, the groove. Likewise, "bodiesinheaven 2" is a more confident reprisal of part one. Instead of the suggestive whispers of the trance chords, Seaton strings them boldly across a UK garage bassline in all of their melancholy beauty.
The rest of the songs on the EP split the difference between Seaton's sound design and his return to the club. Take "Tree Song" from Cherry Drops II. Across nearly 10-minutes, we hear a similar structural tension to "bodiesinheaven 1," as Seaton oscillates between the body and the mind. Instead of trance, Seaton's weapon of choice here is funky tech house filtered through robotic jazz interludes. Likewise, the lovely arpeggio at the center of "Eye Flow Wide" is quantized to the point of breaking, where the hits of bass that drift in and out feel like stumbling upon an oasis in the desert (a feeling I no doubt share with the music video's protagonist). These are dense and complex dance floor tracks, but as much as they are love letters to the club, Cherry Drops I & II is also the most personal and intimate record Seaton has ever written.
Lista de sequência de músicasCherry Drops I
A1 Eye Flow Wide
A2 bodiesinheaven I
B Cherry Drops
Cherry Drops I
A Tree Song
B bodiesinheaven II