Who was the best DJ at Primavera Sound 2026? Most people I asked said Call Super. Which didn’t really surprise me because Call Super, aka Joseph Richmond Seaton, is perhaps the perfect example of a DJ who knows how to walk the line between the professorial and the party-starting, capable of playing both Circoloco in Ibiza and the brainier corners of Dekmantel. And killing it at both.

Seaton is also an excellent producer - I listen to Chiseler’s Rush with Parris just before doing the interview and it gave me chills - with both sides of their personality combining on last year’s A Rhythm Protects One mixtape. So it was a pleasure to speak to them at Primavera Sound this year, where conversation ranged from Basement Jaxx to Ivy Compton-Burnett - not something you can say of every producer. 

You can watch the video of the interview here; but I thought it worth bringing it to you in text form too, lightly edited, starting off with my new initiative of tipping the DJ.

Ben Cardew: Welcome once again to Line Noise, coming to you from the second full day of Primavera Sound. It gives me great pleasure to be here with Call Super. How are you doing?

Call Super: I'm absolutely wonderful, thanks.

Ben Cardew: Now, I believe in a job well done being well rewarded and I believe I'm going to do something new. I'm going to tip you one euro because the last time I saw you DJ, you played the Stanton Warriors remix of Jump N' Shout by Basement Jaxx, which is an amazing tune. It's also a tune I've not heard a DJ play in about 20 years, so when I was thinking of you coming, I thought, right - 

Call Super: Was this at Gala a couple of weeks ago?

Ben Cardew: No, this was in a festival just on the outskirts of Barcelona a year ago.

Call Super: Wow, that's funny, because it's about a year since I played that, and I played it again at Gala two weeks ago and I don't think I've played it since the one here. Amazing.

Ben Cardew: Well I wanted to ask about how you order your DJing, because I was reading that when you're categorising music in rekordbox, you don't use genre names, but you use emotional words that have connotations, like “Environmental pause”?

Call Super: Yes, that is a folder. "Environmental pause" is tracks that have little or no drums; they might be quite percussive in terms of the melodies, but there are times in a set when I want to give myself some space and that's what those tracks do.

Ben Cardew: What folder would Jump N' Shout be in?

Call Super: That is probably in a folder called "Ladbroke Grove”, which initially started off as a folder that held a lot of tech house that was made in West London in the late 90s and the early noughties. Then the few new-schooly break things I have ended up in that folder too.

Ben Cardew: Doesn't that system make it impossible to find things?

Call Super: No. Why would it make it impossible to find things?

Ben Cardew: Well, just because whenever I DJ - and obviously that's very irregularly and no one's paying me to do it - I need to be like, "Okay, a house song.”

Call Super: I see what you're doing. You're looking for something that's like, "I just need something in a particular style," not a particular track. If I need a particular track, I just type it in on search. If I'm looking for a particular style, it's more important for me to not have a premeditated thought about what I want. The idea for this came as I was trying to shift from playing on vinyl only to more on CD - and then eventually just on CD - and I wanted to try and recreate what goes through my mind and what kind of sparks fly when I flick through a pile of records. 

Obviously, online, if I'm just going through a folder of tracks which are quite similar genre-wise, there are less sparks flying. Whereas if the genre is taken out of the equation and we're just looking at tracks in terms of emotion and vibe and feel, I get many more of those strange interconnections, which is what I'm looking for myself to stay very present in the moment when I'm DJing.

Ben Cardew: Let’s talk about A Rhythm Protects One, your mix CD which came out last year - all your own tracks - why did you want to do something physical?

Call Super: It started off that I had made a load of tracks to play out just as a DJ. I don't release that many 12-inches and I feel like when I do, I need a very good reason to and I didn't want to just put out a series of twelves with these tracks. I also don't really, as a listener, listen to dance music albums that much and I feel like the DJ mix as a medium has gotten to quite a strange, disposable place with the abundance of the internet. So I wanted to kill all of these things with one shot and doing it as a mix on CD seemed to do that. 

Ben Cardew: Do you still buy mix CDs?

Call Super: I do occasionally buy mix CDs, not that often, because again, as a medium, it's kind of disappeared. There are very, very few series left and I wanted to say that I think this is a valuable thing that should still be engaged with, disseminated, and hopefully... I mean, the nice thing about it is that the label that I did it with [Dekmantel Records] felt really, really good about how it went and off the back of it were like, "Yeah, we would definitely do more of these with more artists." I have spoken to other labels who feel the same way and that was a large part of the intent behind it.

Ben Cardew: I wonder sometimes when you get someone who does a mix CD like DJ-Kicks these days, the question is how you make it different from all the others... If you're a successful DJ, how many mixes are floating around on SoundCloud? And one of the things you did was obviously that it was all your own tunes, all unreleased until then, and also you made beautiful packaging.

Call Super: I think packaging was so important to me buying mix CDs growing up  - and again what you can't do online is the physical dimension. It was so important to me to tell a story about the mix through the packaging as well because this isn't an anti-online mix series or podcast statement. That's great - it's great that we have such a wealth of music and it's so easy for people to get their mixes out there but I just wanted to say this still has a place. I see the DJ mix as a valid expression alongside albums and singles and all the rest of it and online sets don't really capture that.

Ben Cardew: And you worked with Daniel Mason, who also worked on one of my favourite ever CD releases, the Spiritualized pill container box. I presume you bought that back in the day?

Call Super: I did, yeah. I was a huge fan of his work. He was my number one person to do the packaging on the album and he was really up for it. He did so many other things as well. I knew him through that - I was a huge Spiritualized fan - but he did the packaging for the Prince Batman tin and the Pet Shop Boys' orange plastic anthology. That was a really crazy bit of packaging. The people he's worked with is just insane and the ideas that he's come up with are all very inspiring.

Ben Cardew: And for you, he did a rotating wheel.

Call Super: It’s a volvelle - it is the earliest maps of the sky. In the Middle Ages, some of the very first things that were printed, before we'd mapped the Earth, we mapped the skies and these sky maps were printed on hand-drawn circles. People navigated their way around the Earth using the sky and these volvelles are incredibly beautiful. Some museums around the world have volvelles.

Ben Cardew: What is your favourite ever mix CD? Or one of them.

Call Super: There's so many… There are so many clichéd ones, the Coldcut one, of course, and I've talked about the DJ Rupture one a lot, so I want to talk about one that I haven't mentioned. There's one by Layo & Bushwacka! [All Night Long] - it's a double CD and I don't know if one of them mixed one and the other mixed the other, but the packaging is like flight cases and lots of the stickers you get on your baggage when you fly.

Ben Cardew: Oh, that rings a bell. Yeah.

Call Super: And I listened to that mix solidly for about two years and I think it taught me a lot about how much you can actually fit in. The other one that I would mention is Laurent Garnier's Excess Luggage, which ended up being a five-disc mix because they had a bonus of two sets: one from the Rex Club at a birthday party and the other one from Detroit. Anyway, those mixes I listened to for years and years and years.

Ben Cardew: Good choice. Was this before you were DJing?

Call Super: Yeah, I mean, I started DJing when I was quite young, probably about 14, and this was... no, I was probably DJing.

The first mixes that really knocked me for six were  Carl Cox Fact mixes, which my friend's older brother had. We just nicked them out of his room and were like, "What in the Lord's name is this?”

Ben Cardew: I think some of the mix CDs or mixes I like most were from when I had no idea what DJing was. I didn’t understand how they were doing it. Now I kind of understand how it's done. Whereas before, it was like sorcery.

Call Super: This is the other thing: when there were loads of CD series, there were also like a bajillion tapes of every rave - every big rave ever, it felt like. You could access these things through markets and sometimes secondhand music shops, so you still had this kind of hierarchy that maybe you have today between the internet and a physical mix but then it was between the cassette and the physical mix.

Ben Cardew: Are you quite a nostalgic person?

Call Super: No, not in the slightest. 

Ben Cardew: So it doesn't make you feel nostalgic when you think back on those…

Call Super: No. I think there are lots of things that are really vital now and I love that present. I think the music we make and everything we do should exist in this moment. I'm also not someone who believes that we need new genres to validate dance music - like the shock of the new is always through a new genre. I think the shock of the new is often through refinement and the kind of refinements that are happening in the present are numerous and incredible. I feel like sometimes things die because licensing is a faff, it's expensive and putting stuff out in physical format... if people aren't buying CDs, it's hard to justify. 

But actually, I feel like this is a moment where there's a lot of people who are sick of DSPs and would like to have more physical music and we definitely felt that in the sales last year of that CD. I think other people are seeing this -  and I'm going to make more CDs, like a kind of a fan club. Off the back of that, they will get a CD mix this year because people seem to be responding to it really well. There’s Arpozine, which is a Substack as well - 

Ben Cardew: It's the newsletter - 

Call Super: It's the newsletter and I kind of didn't really know how to... The main idea was to have a fan club. Again, this isn't a nostalgic thing but when you had fan clubs 20 or 30 years ago and people paid that money each year and got stuff in the post, that is a very, very pure expression of fandom, which I feel again has been really changed through social media. But I feel it has a place. People still feel the same way about the things they love and I have noticed through certain things I've done offline that energy from people, and I wanted to have a clear expression of it. And so Arpozine is one of the places where that hangs from.

Ben Cardew: Were you in any fan clubs like that?

Call Super: Actually, I wasn't, sadly. It was slightly before my time but I have read a lot about them and I'm very aware of how they existed.

Ben Cardew: And how have you found the experience of having the Substack?

Call Super: I really enjoy writing and I have kind of missed it in my life for many years. I didn't want to do something which felt... basically, I only write when I have something I want to say. I'm not trying to get something out every two weeks or whatever, so it's utterly sporadic. I think initially I thought I would do more kind of linking of things that I'm into but as it's gone on, I've been less inclined to that and more inclined to just try and say something when I have something to say.

Ben Cardew: You used to work for Granta, right?

Call Super: I did. Wow, you've done some research. Yes.

Ben Cardew: Oh, so you were a journalist?

Call Super: No, I wasn't. I was just like an office tea boy who was cataloguing at the time. They were building the back end of their first website and they needed basically everything they'd ever published somehow archiving for that and I did a lot of work on that. I did the very entry-level reading submissions and filtering out things I thought maybe an editor would be interested in.

Ben Cardew: It's very high level, Granta.

Call Super: I mean, it's a quite small office [laughs] but yes, I loved that job.

Ben Cardew: And what are you reading at the moment?

Call Super: At the moment, I'm reading a woman called Ivy Compton-Burnett, who wrote in the end of the 1800s about... Okay, we're in Spain. I don't know if you've read any Lorca but the way that Lorca writes about the interior life of a family, that's very much her. She's like a kind of late Victorian English version of that - everyone hates each other.

Ben Cardew: Good to know.

Call Super: Yeah, it's very sassy. Late Victorian sass is a genre I love.

Ben Cardew: I can’t think of any other examples of late Victorian sass!

Call Super: This isn't late Victorian but someone like Beryl Bainbridge, who writes later, a kind of female eye for the domestic and more working classes and the interpersonal relationships. 

Ben Cardew: You moved back to London from Berlin last year, right? Has that changed your music?

Call Super: I don't know yet. I've just been finishing my first ideas since moving back and I don't have a studio, so I'm working in strange, odd spaces here and there. I don't know. I feel like my music is slightly resistant to my geography - I've written things in different places before and I don't feel like the sound of the place is really so present. I did a lot of my first album in New York. I did a lot of my third album in Mexico. I hope that I'm influenced by my life generally but I don't know how much that's got to do with geography.

Ben Cardew: Was there a moment when you were moving home where you started to think, "Actually, all these records are…"

Call Super: They're all still in Berlin. I basically just left my studio; I walked out, I still have the keys. I just didn't have the bandwidth. I will slowly get to it.

I'd also used a lot of that gear for quite a while and I was quite looking forward to starting again and starting in the box and then slowly growing it out. If there's a particular bit of kit I want, I do bring it back.

Ben Cardew: You're playing Circoloco in Ibiza later this summer. I've never been, neither to Circoloco nor to Ibiza. The image I have of your music doesn't fit with the image I have of Circoloco. Maybe I'm... well, I must be completely wrong because you're playing there, but how does your music fit in with that? Do you do the same set you might do here?

Call Super: I kind of play into where I am but in the way that I play, if that makes sense. So it's a bit of give and take. I’ve been playing at Circoloco for quite a while now and through the winter, when I'm not playing there, I might come across a track and I'm like, "That'll work well on the terrace," and it just gets tucked away for later. It's a nice other dimension to what I do and I love playing that.

Ben Cardew: You released your first record 15 years ago. How does that feel? Does it feel a bit weird?

Call Super: I don't really understand time. I feel like there are things I've figured out as I've gotten older and there are things that are ever more mysterious and time is one of those ever more mysterious things, for sure.

Ben Cardew: I believe one of the current theories is that time doesn't actually exist and we just perceive it, or something like that.

Call Super: Yeah. I mean, I feel very... When I was a kid, I was friends with people that were much older than me and as I've gotten older, I feel like my friends just go in both directions. I've got lots of much older friends and lots of much younger friends and I've never really... I don't know, it's not something I dwell on too much, to be honest. I think it's also why I'm not really interested in nostalgia and the past so much. It's a thing to sometimes be inspired by but only because it says something about the present.

Ben Cardew: Do you ever go back to those first records and listen?

Call Super: Of course. I've always done a thing before I start writing a new record: I'll listen to either an old record or the previous record and it usually makes me feel quite depressed because I'm always like, "How did I do all that?" Quite daunting, like, "Oh my god, I don't even know where to start." But then it just happens again.

Ben Cardew: I suppose the other way of looking at that is being impressed by yourself, like, "I can do this. I've done this once. I did this thing that was good.”

Call Super: Yeah, I think somewhere inside of me I know I can do it. I don't feel impressed but I feel like I can. I'll get there; just keep turning up each day and I'll get there.

Ben Cardew: This is a slightly cliché thing to ask, but do you feel you've grown as a musician?

Call Super: I don't know. In some ways, I've got worse because I used to play instruments much more and practice much longer each day and I don't do so much of that. I do lots more knob-twiddling and I sometimes feel like I've gotten worse as a musician, but I never really know. My ear has sometimes gotten better or worse. It depends on the day of the week.

Some listening

Karizma - Around

Karizma’s Around is a rude and clanking take on house music, full of sass, bass, swing and a vocal hook that wraps its claws ever closer around the unsuspecting listener until escape is impossible. The song, taken from Soul in the Horn Act 4: Remixes & Bonuses, a new compilation from the titular New York label, is like basement house music, if the basement was full of nasty sharp objects, tetanus nails and the greatest DJ you ever heard.

Aquarian - A Rush of Fat To The Head

TraTraTrax aren’t f*cking around: A Rush of Fat To The Head (FABULOUS title BTW) by Canadian-born producer Aquarian is, they say, “our candidate for anthem of the summer” and goddamnit if they might not be right.

A Rush of Fat To The Head is totally ridiculous, in the best possible summer anthem / TraTraTrax tradition, a growling, clanging, surging 303 beast that is simultaneously terrifying and welcoming, in the line of Josh Wink’s own anthem, Higher State of Consciousness (which I was just writing about the other week) or Aphex Twin’s Didgeridoo, both of which A Rush of Fat To The Head vaguely resembles. If I hear A Rush of Fat To The Head in a club, then summer 2026 will be epic indeed. 

Radie Peat - Still I Love Him

It’s not that Radie Peat could sing the telephone book and I’d still listen; it’s that the Lankum singer could sing the telephone book and I’d be on the floor bawling my eyes out and thinking about life choices. Still I Love Him, Peat’s debut solo single, does more with sparse guitar chords, a simple song structure and her bone-chilling voice than most bands could do with several stadiums worth of pyrotechnics and amplification. A master class in minimalism.

Carmen Villain - Entre Nosotros

Entre Nostotros - “between us” - is well named: there is something intimate and unsettling to Carmen Villain’s new single. A beat rises out of the dub dust, too slow to be enjoyable; there’s the smallest suggestion of melody, like a band tuning up next door, and everything fades back into dust. Entre Nosotros feels like watching time lapse footage of your childhood home disappearing under the rising sands: intriguing, contemplative even, but not really something you’d celebrate.

Kyla Kilzer and Max Noir - Break Through (brekkyt remix)

Break Through, in its newly-remixed form, is one of those dance music songs that sits just on the edge of unpleasantness, its Broken Beat drum lines sharpened, its bass notably corpulent and the original song’s soulful warmth hanging on by its finger nails over what sounds like chilled electro pan pipes. Out of this near nastiness, though, arrives a fantastically honed piece of dance music, buffed and re-tooled for maximum impact.

Nikki Nair - Odd Sympathy

Listening to Odd Sympathy you can almost picture a veteran bassline producer shaking their head in poorly concealed frustration. “Nikki,” they’re saying. “You almost had it. A heavyweight bassline banger perfect for the club. And then you just had to go and add a load of stupid whooshing noises. Who’s going to DJ that?” And Nikki Nair slopes off in silence, an inscrutable smile lighting up his face.

Starcleaner - Never Odd or Even

You know why more bands don’t sound like Stereolab circa Sound Dust? It’s because they can’t. 

Springfield’s Starcleaner can, though, and more pertinently they do on Never Odd Or Even, a song that splits the difference between early, drone-y Stereolab and the trombone-jazz-Brazilian influences of Sound Dust. (To be clear: I don’t think there are any trombones on the song. But you know what I mean.) And, my God! Do Starcleaner do it well. They have the drive, the swing, the intricate dual vocals, the chiming guitar, the adventurous spirit and the incredibly songwriting of vintage Stereolab and you will love them for it. 

Inland Years - Morning Train

Parents will perhaps remember the moment that an entrepreneurial switch flipped in their kids’ minds and they realised that they could charge you €1 for a garish friendship bracelet or pair of paper earrings; and you would buy them, not just because you wanted to support your kids but because these simple creations have an intimate charm and spirit of life that brings you almost to tears.

In a strange way, the work of Brooklyn’s Inland Years reminds me of this; not because their music is childish in any way, but because it is small and intimate and unassuming and full of joyous life, a pocket-dose of Teenage Fanclub, whereby 13 songs whip by in 15 minutes and each is sparkling and brilliantly written and each feels no need to elongate their time on earth just to try to impress you.

Morning Train, from the new album Nowadays, is 62 seconds of chiming guitar, slide, folk harmony, psychedelic touches and fantastic songwriting that turns on an emotional dime and it WILL make your life that little bit better.

Things I’ve done

Kelela - new avatar, the One Minute Review

Cocteau Twins with trace elements of Crazy Town’s Butterfly? Yes please! It’s 

my One Minute Review of Kelela’s third studio album, new avatar.

Pixies - Complete B Sides: 1988-97 

I reviewed Pixies Complete B Sides: 1988-97 for Pitchfork. It’s one of the Pixies albums I listen to most and I totally adore it. “Pixies are arguably more Pixies in their flip-side freedom, four eternally loveable weirdos with one foot in the punk gutter and one eye way out in the oddball universe of the avant-garde, looking for clues.”

The playlists

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest