The rise of footwork as a formidable sub-genre of electronic music over the last few years has raised an interesting question: How do you listen to the stuff? On one level, the Chicago-borne sound is purely functional; its high-BPM tempos, disorienting bass lines, and hypnotically repetitive approach to sampling form the perfect soundtrack for the juke-derived footwork style of dancing, which favors fast feet and athletic skill. Near the top of this decade, footwork caught the collective ear of the always-hungry-for-something-new UK dance scene: Forward-thinking label Planet Mu delivered a smattering of footwork-associated releases near the end of 2010, including the first volume of the scene-surveying Bangs & Works compilation. Much of the footwork music created around that time was fascinating, inspiring—and, as home-listening material, maddening.
Footwork’s relative inaccessibility suggested that it would become a niche concern in the constantly changing realm of dance music, but it stayed in the conversation, as solid releases from veterans of the sound, boundary-pushing newcomers, and canny genre-fusion outsiders pushed things in more musical and distinctly individual directions. All these roads lead to Double Cup, the new album from Rashad Harden, who produces as DJ Rashad. A gorgeous, invigorating collection of tracks that places equal importance on melody alongside rhythmic texture, Double Cup is unquestionably the strongest footwork-related LP since the genre was introduced to a wider audience. This stuff would kill on a dancefloor, but you don't have to watch anyone’s feet to appreciate what’s on display here.
Double Cup closes out a particularly fruitful year for Rashad, a two-decade-plus veteran of the scene who started dancing juke at 12 and began honing his DJ and production skills just a few years later in the early ’90s. In March, he made his debut on Hyperdub with the Rollin’ EP, an expressive collection that featured the astounding “Let It Go,” a game-changer of a tune with rolling, hyperspeed drums and an evocative vocal sample; in July, he dropped another solid EP, I Don’t Give a Fuck, the title track of which appears on Double Cup, too. (“Let It Go,” a superior cut and arguably Rashad’s strongest track to date, is conspicuously absent here, but the record’s overall high level of consistency makes its exclusion a negligible gripe.)
Ironically, Double Cup achieves a new level of musicality previously untouched by footwork by jettisoning much of the genre's rigid formality. This stuff is practically in Rashad’s blood, so his ability to dismantle the sound he’s lived with for much of his life and reassemble it in a fresh and exciting way is expected as much as it is impressive. For instance, he splices in other elements of beat-fixated music—jungle’s frantic mania, bass music's oblong structures, the glowing synths of vintage house and techno, West Coast hip-hop’s honey-slathered haze—to fit a more footwork-indebted framework. I've heard a few people compare Double Cup’s dizzying sampledelia to J Dilla’s masterwork Donuts; while the former lacks the latter's cohesion and singularity of purpose, both records possess the similar thrill of hearing a master of an existent genre taking their sound to new, exciting heights.