- Calling on friends and their own past selves, Call Super makes an adventurous but homespun record full of surprises—and easily their best.
- Call Super's new album is named an alter ego—one in a string of aliases that includes other whimsical monikers like Elmo Crumb and Ondo Fudd. But Eulo Cramps is a little different. Accompanying a multimedia exhibition called Tell Me I Didn't Choose This, Eulo Cramps is a storing house for Call Super's many selves. The LP is both of a coming-of-age and a retrospective piece, nostalgic and forward-looking in equal measure. Musically, it follows on naturally from Call Super's three previous albums, each of which had one foot in dance music and another in something like free jazz. Only this time, the stitches that held everything together come gloriously undone. It's a lovingly slapdash blend of rustic minimal techno, spoken word, lo-fi house and Fourth World beauty, continuing Call Super's collaboration with their clarinetist father and debuting a new homemade instrument called an e-harp that adds a sparkling, clarion quality to their busy compositions.
Opener "Ondo Helps Us Hear The Splinters" first appeared as the closing track on an excellent Cav Empt mix that introduced Call Super's newest era. That tape blended hypnagogic drum & bass with shimmering, mirage-like beatless material, ending with this four-minute jam that lands somewhere between Jon Hassell and the B-side of David Bowie's Low. The e-harp plays a spidery melody, with glissandos slipping gleefully over double-tracked clarinet lines that hum and dance underneath. As an introduction it's both silly and beautiful, like being welcomed into someone's ornate mansion decorated with oddities and curios.
From there, Eulo Cramps veers between (to put it glibly) dance and not dance. "Fly Black Stork" is a hop-scotching dub techno track with zany percussive accents, like if Pole took a pinger. "Glossy Bingo Stain," meanwhile, is more like a slowed-down Perlon record, its uneasy, samba-like shuffle holding up a duet between clarinet and the e-harp. It's free jazz, it's fusion, it's wafty. In between, Call Super calls on friends to help spruce things up. Eden Samara offers some sun-kissed vocals on the buoyant but deceptively glitchy "Sapling," while Julia Holter ahhs and oohs over the footwork-y "Illumina." Here, the drums percolate and twirl around shrill blasts of clarinet that add more texture than melody. It harkens back to the earliest Call Super tracks, which were extended, improvisatory club tunes that exploded the idea of techno into something jammy and endless.
But Eulo Cramps is not particularly jammy. If anything, it's tight and concise, with no idea sticking around too long and a contrast always around the corner. Take how the sterling textures of "Glossy Bingo Stain" decay into the fuzzed-out "Coppertone Elegy," a slo-mo dirge of buried vocals and wrong notes that meanders into an excitable clarinet climax. The woodwind stands out from the scuzz like a beam of sunlight into a darkened room. And the hypnotic incantations of Call Super's neighbour Elke Wardlaw feel rigid next to the following "Clam Lute Wig," whose strangely onomatopoeic title gets across the brittle, almost chewy textures on display, with a hint of medieval thanks to Call Super's strangely timeless-sounding e-harp. And closer "Years In The Hospital" does away with rhythm entirely in favour of a bleak, barely-awake atmosphere inspired by Call Super's sickly formative years.
Getting to know Eulo Cramps, I kept going back to that Cav Empt tape and its stunning blend of straight-up club records with sound baths and other sonic detritus. Call Super has always been a preternaturally skilled DJ in this way, putting together disparate material and dissolving the edges without turning it into an amorphous soup of sounds. And while their past albums have been excellent, adventurous affairs, Eulo Cramps is their first studio record that truly gets across how Call Super expresses themselves while DJing: herky jerky but immaculate, smooth yet unpredictable. In a way, with all their collaborators and so much of their father's clarinet playing, the LP almost feels like a group effort. I'm sure Call Super would be okay with that term too. Working in influences and ideas from every past iteration of the project, and every past version of Call Super the person as well as the artist. It's almost a reset, but it's also comfortingly familiar: the sound of community coming from both within and without.
Tracklist01. Ondo Helps Us Hear The Splinters
02. Fly Black Stork
03. Sapling feat. Eden Samara
04. Illumina feat. Julia Holter
05. Glossy Bingo Stain
06. Coppertone Elegy
07. Goldwood feat. Elke Wardlaw
08. Clam Lute Wig
09. Years In The Hospital