On October 3, 2025, London producer Joseph Richmond Seaton released A Rhythm Protects One on Dekmantel Records, catalogue DKMNTL110. It is the label's first physical DJ mix. The release arrives in a triple gatefold digipak designed by Daniel Mason, the designer behind Spiritualized's packaging in the 1990s, working alongside Dekmantel art director Jan Tomson. The typeface printed inside the gatefold was constructed from photographs of dancing bodies.
A Mix CD in 2025 Is a Format Argument
The DJ mix on physical media had its dominant run from roughly 1994 until streaming made continuous mixes freely and infinitely available. Pressing one to disc and designing elaborate packaging around it in 2025 is not nostalgia. It is a claim about what listening conditions do to music.
Call Super, who also records as Ondo Fudd, has made records built for sustained attention since his 2014 debut Suzi Ecto on Houndstooth, the label run from London club fabric. Pitchfork placed it among "the most evocative sound worlds that the genre has seen." His 2017 follow-up Arpo earned DJ Magazine's Album of the Year and a review from The Guardian calling it "outstanding."
Neither record aimed at mass discovery. Both accumulated reputations slowly through repeated listening and circulation in the club rooms where Seaton plays most often: fabric, Berghain, DC-10, De School. A Rhythm Protects One is built in that same spirit and adds the additional friction of a physical format that requires ownership rather than access.
The Artists Seaton Chose
The mix draws from a specific circle: Conny Slipp, Scarletina, Cleo, Louis Lupin, Clam1, Malgo and KVS, Eye Gritt, DJ Flowerdew, and Seaton's own Ondo Fudd productions. These producers work at the outer edge of club music, circulating through Berghain's Panorama Bar, fabric, and De School rather than appearing on algorithmic recommendation lists.
Seaton made no announcement distinguishing his Ondo Fudd tracks from the others in the sequence. That decision collapses the distinction between curator and contributing artist. The mix functions as a single hour of sound attributed to a single listening sensibility, not a compilation with guest slots attached.
Mixmag Asia described the mix as "elegantly advanced club music." That description is accurate but incomplete. The elegance is in the restraint: transitions happen without announcement, individual tracks emerge and recede without drama, and the hour moves with the logic of something that has been thought through very carefully.
Sharon Eyal and the Sadler's Wells Commission
In the same year as the Dekmantel release, Seaton composed music for ROSE, a dance work created by Israeli choreographer Sharon Eyal and her creative partner Gai Behar, staged at Sadler's Wells in London. The two projects, a physical club mix CD and a commissioned contemporary ballet score, are not as distant as they appear.
Seaton's longest DJ bookings are marketed as all night sets, meaning he constructs listening experiences across several consecutive hours. The structural logic is consistent: extended duration, tension managed carefully over time, no cheap resolution. ROSE and A Rhythm Protects One operate from the same premise. The difference is only in the architecture of the space.
The typeface on the gatefold, built from photographs of dancers, connects the projects visually. Bodies generated the letterforms. The packaging is not illustrating the music. It is made from the same reasoning.
What Mason and Tomson Built
Daniel Mason built packaging for records designed to be kept and studied as objects. His Spiritualized work from the 1990s, produced before he was widely credited, is still cited as a benchmark for album design that treats the physical artifact with genuine seriousness. Bringing him onto A Rhythm Protects One, and working with Tomson to develop a typeface derived from dancer photographs, is a statement about what kind of object this project aspires to be.
A triple gatefold digipak costs significantly more to produce than a streamed file costs to distribute. That cost differential is not an oversight. It is evidence that the people making this record believe the format earns its price.
The First Mix in 110 Releases
Dekmantel's catalog runs past 100 releases. DKMNTL110 is the first mix CD in the sequence. The label has released studio albums, EPs, and compilations, but no physical DJ mix before this one. That gap across 109 prior releases is not an oversight. Choosing to break the sequence with Seaton's project is a deliberate decision about whose curatorial vision deserves that specific format.
The label operates a festival in Amsterdam each summer and has spent over a decade building a reputation for careful, genre-rigorous releases. Their willingness to commit manufacturing resources to a format most labels abandoned after streaming took over is a position about what the format can still do.
Patience as Strategy
Call Super's discography moves in one consistent direction: toward more specific audiences and more demanding formats. Suzi Ecto in 2014, Arpo in 2017, A Rhythm Protects One in 2025: each release requires more patience from the listener than the one before. None of them optimized for instant discovery or algorithmic placement.
The bet behind A Rhythm Protects One is that the people who care about this music will treat the format with the same seriousness the format extends to them. A triple gatefold digipak with a dancer-built typeface, designed by the maker of Spiritualized's most celebrated packaging, is a record that assumes its own audience rather than trying to manufacture one.
The slowest route to a durable record is to make the record that assumes the audience already exists. Seaton has been making that bet since 2014.
