Track by Track: Call Super – Eulo Cramps

It’s certainly eclectic and free from the restraints and constructs of style and genre – playing with instrumentation in a ethereal, whimsical fashion which makes for a remarkable listen and offers food for thought.

The album is part of a bigger project titled ‘Don’t Tell Me I Didn’t Choose This’ intertwining poetry, painting, and music to create a powerful exploration of self.

We invited Call Super to guide us through their new record…

Ondo Helps Us Hear the Splinters

“I wanted something to open the record that was about listening to yourself, about seeing the people within you. In that way this is a meditation. The pauses, the flourishes and the recordings of the mouth and fingers on the holes and reeds are the most obvious tools I’m using to try and express that. The title captures much of that for me – another version of the self listening out for the parts of us that flash past in certain moments and helps us remember them, hold on and maybe magnify them.”

Fly Black Stork

“A track in simultaneous different time signatures was another way of trying to summon the idea of differences within. I wanted this to be percussively very graceful, like a stork! This is actually a kinda half finished version of this but having recorded this fairly quickly the hard disc I’d recorded it on died and I had no back up. The versions I remade kinda never hit quite the same so I thought let’s just include this version. I’m getting better at letting go of a certain preciousness I’ve had around these things I guess.”

Sapling

“Here Eden took phrases from an early draft of the text around the project and sung them over the drum track. I wanted this to be very positive, about growing and growing and accumulating the layers life gives. Holding on to things because they really add something to who you are rather than accumulating experience and stuff for the sake of it. I guess it’s a kinda maximalist track for me in some ways.”

Illumina

“Julia wrote this, the form is like a sung poem. It blurs something between song and poetry and is for me about light and place and memory. The basis for the composition was really just to use a drum kit and clarinet and to see if something complete could be written with very little in the clarinet. Also the way the clarinet was approached was to really leave out what would make up a melody and just have the passing notes, the things which embellish.”

Glossy Bingo Stain

“This is about the precarity of my body, about bleeding uncontrollably and remaining calm. About learning to appreciate one’s unevenness and find beauty in everything that you struggle with. I have spent a great deal of my life in the mountains near Ronda in Andalucia and I guess the rhythms here are rooted in the syncopation of flamenco, but the I wanted the urgency to be very different, to connect to a lot of mid 20C American music that I grew up listening to. It’s very much the story of me in the music that I have always had in the background through no choice of my own. In a way that is the stuff that cuts the deepest, it is what you are born into and forms you long before you make conscious choices about what you like or who you would like to be. This is a special one for me.”

Coppertone Elegy

“This is about trying to connect to those others inside of us. How many of you are there in there? Again it is a poem sung rather than a traditional song structure. This record focuses a lot on my early teenage years in the overall sonic approach and the themes being explored and hear the layers of guitar say a lot to me about those years.”

Goldwood

“The poem is about the slaying of the people past in order to move on and become the person waiting for you. It begins with this idea of puffs of smoke which made sense to me. Elke is someone who I’ve seen in my stairwell for a decade or more and she always cheers me up but somehow we’ve barely spent any time beyond those passing encounters together. I don’t know why but she made total sense here.”

Clam Lute Wig

“A dream track, not much to say other than I wanted a space for the mind to wander before the end. The title i think is a picture, to clam up, to wear a wig and lutes are maybe an ancient version of some of the plucked strings I wanted to form the core of this record.”

Years in the Hospital

“As a child I spent years in the hospital, trying to make the clock turn faster, trying to heal myself by drawing and reading and staring out of the window and just waiting. And the time did pass but that child waiting is still there when I stop and stare at things. I feel like there are parts of us that are always steady and there should be parts that are always breaking and maybe reforming. I wanted the final voice on the record to sound connected to that, a voice on the edge, maybe it’s been awake for a long time, or perhaps asleep for too long. Overused or underused. In need of something.”

Photograph courtesy of Kasia-Zacharko. Buy the album HERE.