footwork

Especially weird and spacey footwork. Some disorienting openings, lots of doubling and halving tempos, smearing kicks into basslines, cohering and decohering. But there are also a lot of catchy moments, even in some of the chaos, and plenty of the frantic stuff is well offset by surrounding calm atmospherics. But yeah, it is still a punchy frenetic footwork album, so expect plenty of 160 BPM madness even if it’s easy enough to see it as 80 also.

RIYL: DJ Rashad (Teklife in general), Kid606, Amon Tobin

1. descending old arcade game blips, quick rubbery bass hits and twitchy snares, bass tones and swirling synth pad after a bit, then snares and a bit of something more hollow. starts a bit manic, but bassline and pads tie it together and give it a bit of calm. feels a little twitchy again when it gets stripped down for a bit in the last third. 5:18
2. urgent tumbling springy high notes, stuttery rattling kicks. undulating mid-range melody comes in, kicks clean up timbre/texture and get tuned, and also get a bit less spazzy, and it gets a bit more of a groove going. things strip back, rise up again. subtle 808 cowbell accents throughout. 3:15
3. bouncing buzzy midrange, rapid low res synth strings, punchy kicks. languid springy synth bells come in around 1:45, buzz and strings smear a bit, things chill out a bit without any tempo change. pares back, eventually to just drums, plays with tuned kicks for a bit, then synths wash back in. 4:39
4. high pitched moog all cut to hell, the same sample used in dre’s “high powered”, settles down and gets into a groove similar to the dre version for a bit, slow swagger, then that bouncing sub bass enters. fidgety cymbals slowly fold in. the rapid drum machine kicks get pitched up a bit, increased in volume a touch. starts getting chopped up double-time after midpoint. dreamy midrange burble gets added, decays to something dimmer, comes back intermittently. 5:22
5. sub bass rumble, frantic fuzzed out high end coheres and decoheres. cymbals and kicks slowly come in, cowbell accents. Lasers and squelches. That bassline rumble is high BPM, but drums strut slow. Much pitchbend later on. 3:58
6. creepy crawly, squelchy bassline slowly expands pitch range. skittery cymbals, something springy, intermittent kicks take off later. high pitched electric piano shimmer later mellows it out as other stuff goes off the rails a bit. 3:39
7. chopped jazzy piano, claps, boomy insistent kick, tambourine, shouts. kicks blur to a rumble and spacey synth line weaves in and it feels chiller at points in the middle. synth line gets all swirly, and drums blur in and out of indistinguishable density. 5:12
8. (FCC? “dat ass look swole” repeated throughout) dark pulsing bassline, intermittent jungle snares turn into steady jungle rollage. hollow high floating synth swirls in and out, low whiny synth whir accents, other bleeps/bloops. footwork/idm/ghettotech/jungle. so crazy it just might work. 4:15
9. (FCC: “motherfucker”) descending female soul syllables, “dis motherfucker” repeated throughout, punchy rolling kicks, snares after a while. synth atmospherics wash in after a couple min. rather ascetic, in its own way. 4:20
10. “let me see you juke” over irregular punchy kicks, switches up to more swung thing with buzzy effected 8-bit synths, almost some bmore club flavor, “let me see you juke” comes back in after a bit. pares down a bit/gets a bit loopier after 2 min. 3:39
11. long decaying kick on the one, steady claps, then loop of classic mario bros them comes in, kicks get tuned, start mutating, shifting patterns, getting hectic. kicks drop out then come back in w/ cymbals, funky roll for a bit after 2:00. melody flips to maybe one of the castle themes and tense sfx for last half. 4:51
12. mellow soul loop, slow shuffling drum machines, a bit quiet, gives way to boomy shuffling 808, vocal slowly chopped in till it coheres to “roll a blunt, light it up, and let’s get high”, then chopped up throughout. drums get hectic later, but that main loop keeps it true to the title. 5:17
13. (FCC? “work dat fucka”?) squelchy midrange synth bounce and complimentary bassline, unintelligible syllables give way to something mellower and more tentative, vocals might cohere into “work dat fucka”, but it’s all pitched up and warbly and hard to decipher. save for safe harbor out of caution. 4:29
14. big curtis mayfield-type soul sample, lush strings and choral vox, rapid snares and rumbling bass, intermittent funky cymbals, rapid thumping kicks. “dj clent/magic mike” looped and played against “low life” looped. feels like classic soul-sampling NY hip-hop on the melody, vocal chops and drum programming are classic footwork madness. 7:00

recommended: 6, 1, 12, 4, 3, 7, 8