Footwork as a mode of musical expression has been bubbling up from Chicago’s South and West sides for decades. It was only until 2010 many of us were even exposed to the now legendary staples of the scene through Mike Paradinas’s stellar Bangs and Works compilations.  In those five years we have seen an arc of excellent and seemingly endless productions finally surfacing into release form.  Two of those notable legends of the Planet Mu roster have since released new material this month, RP Boo and DJ Roc.  This increased interest in physical editions has risen evidenced by the increased presence of Chicago footwork in many a budding dj’s vinyl collection.  Both releases successfully present themselves as building blocks in the puzzle that has become Chicago Footwork as a genre and more importantly as a worldwide underground movement. 

          Fingers, Bank Pads and Shoe Prints is an apropos title for a music built entirely by the total symbiosis between machine, human being and the varied floors they battle on.   RP Boo aka Arpebu has already graced the runways of Paris scoring with fellow label mate Jlin the transgressive fashion of Rick Owens.  And while these types of pairings and venues may shock many when listening to the sounds of one Kavain Wayne, it’s multiple listens of FBPSP that reveal the self assured and space age swagger inherent in this music.  At the heart of this sound fans have come to love is the dynamic of low end and distorted harmonization equally matched with bu’s signature choppy vocal flow.  Bu’s voice is the key to his command over the floor, the speaker and the rhythms produced for both.  At once never quite narration and never just a chorus, Bu’s cadence melds with his own production much like expert footworkers naturally click into place with his insanely complex rhythms.  It’s no wonder Kavain is also a dancer in the legendary House-O-Matics, a crew founded by Dancemania pioneer DJ Deeon.   

          “Banging on king drive” might as well be cruising a virtual soundscape of Chicago’s south side Englewood.  The very same King Drive where Daft Punk descended in the nineties on a roller rink upon it’s intersection at 66th Street.  It was also at the rink I would first see Dancemania pioneers like Deeon, Funk, Slugo and others play side by side.  Kavain’s landmark production is at once a nod to the nostalgic with tunes  like “Your Choice” which mutilates a Loggins and McDonald riff across sonic gravel with shakers in tow.  But as future and as experimental as the sound can seem in the confines of the genre of footwork, tunes like “Freezaburn” are a return to the future on the floor.  In fact Boo’s message and impact are much more close to home than the outer space or ghost imagery laden in his mythology and the dance lexicon.  Beyond the upfront decree “Motherfuck your favourite DJ” to the simmering heat of “Daddy’s home, “Let’s Dance Again is a hypnotic almost more cursory accusation at the state of dance music.  “I’m Laughing” is the record’s most abrasive taunt with it’s point blank delivery.  The release sounds confident and raw dripped in percussion, style and bravado brought to life on the cover photography by Wills Glasspiegel. 

          DJ Roc, also an alumni of Planet Mu, shifts his attention to Switzerland’s Duck N Cover established back in 2011.   The imprint has already released vinyl from the likes of Teklife, Tekk DJ’z and Geto Dj’z Inc. own Traxman, EQ Why, and the low end legend DJ Clent.   Roc’s release comes in the form of a mini LP with eight heavily battle ladened tracks.  “Low End Unity” acts as the album’s call to action tucked away in a stripped down floor burner.  Deliberate in it’s rhythm, it calls to mind the pattern on the iconic floor tile that Roc tends to every Sunday in Chicago’s far south neighborhood of Chatham.  “It takes two” and it’s juke percolation is the closest footwork approximation of early uk jungle on the release in it’s execution but clearly Chicago by design.  “Practice What U Preach” switches from V103 dusty grooves to pure dirt fairly quick with it’s competitive mantras and title acting as a promise to burn all competition.  “Ready or Not” marches onto the battlefield with backmasked horns and a juke swing and is easily a stand out with it’s clean drum programming breaks for irregular flow.  “Destruction” is as gutter as you get in terms of footwork battle tracks.  And if "I Make Gutta” isn’t any indication that this is the message behind the Crack Capone’s production, the LP’s stark, confrontational and unexpectedly smooth agenda reveals itself after multiple listens.  Roc’s production is a close imagining of drill on acid with tunes like “Ain’t Got No Crack” where space and sub pair perfectly with vocal pitch to let the snares do most of the work.   

          With the growing amount of flagship releases for dj’s, producer, and fans to collect, both Bu and Roc create material that sits at the top of the genre if not electronic music as a whole.  The immediacy of both releases can be already felt on the speakers at battles and competitions all over the world.  Chicago Footwork’s influence has already been felt in the most unlikely places from Al Pacino movies to the busy streets of Tokyo.  It’s quietly crept it’s way into club consciousness with crossovers and hybrids.   DJ Rashad’s presence even lives on in the seat back of your Virgin airline commuter flight.  But what does the world actually know about Chicago footwork in 2015?  Planet Mu and Duck N Cover Records deliver two solid vinyl collections from two of Chicago’s legends to act as a roadmap to the future of this now global Chicago dance movement.

Article by: Violet Systems

Muslimgauze’s Legacy: Radical Politics, Post-Orientalism, and Electronic Music

          If you were to hear a Muslimgauze track for the first time without context, the political message of the music would not likely to be clear to you. Muslimgauze, real name Bryn Jones, was a one-man instrumental electronic music project in the 1980s and 1990s. Jones, who passed away in 1999, released over 90 albums on various labels. His music is diverse, but generally stands at an intersection of hip-hop, dub, garage, house, and heavy influence from Southwest Asian and South Asian music. Yet perhaps most prolific about Muslimgauze was his political views and the ways they affected his art: his very moniker was chosen as a protest of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

          Muslimgauze’s releases were typically titled with references to conflicts, liberation struggles, and indeed the “Middle East” in general. Jones was known to obsessively research the histories of imperialism throughout the region. He named his releases titles like “Zulm,” “Hebron Massacre,” “Iran,” and “Vote Hezbollah.” In the 1990s, as today, in many circles the very mention of Southwest Asia let alone shows of solidarity with its oppressed peoples was particularly controversial. Even more so in the 1990s, the entire Muslimgauze project is fascinating to consider as the brainchild of someone who was not only British, but born and raised in the U.K.

          In recent years, interest in his work has resurged, particularly as interest in the “Middle East” and perhaps any country with a vaguely Islamic history has reached an all-time high. A book was recently penned about him, and his music continues to be released, re-released, and compiled. However, evaluating his legacy and his work is complicated, maybe in a different way from the original controversy. How do we evaluate Jones’s corpus of work? In what ways was it important, and in what way was it misguided?

          It is perhaps easy to consider Jones and the Muslimgauze project as visionary or ahead of its time in a certain realm. While he had academic and activist contemporaries who were engaged in a similar political project to Muslimgauze, in the realm of music Jones’s project was undoubtedly unique. While recent music history has had its share of half-baked overtures towards “peace in the Middle East,” Muslimgauze went beyond such simple politics espoused a complex and principled anti-imperialist ideology. While he generally noted in interviews that he was hoping to change people’s perspective on the region, the way he responded to criticisms that he never visited the countries he covers reveals a particularly revolutionary perspective:

          “I would never go to an occupied land, others shouldn’t. Zionists living off Arab land and water is not a tourist attraction. To have been in a place is not important. So you can’t be against apartheid unless you have been in South Africa? You cannot be against the Serbs killing Muslims in Bosnia unless you have been there? I think not.”

          In many ways, Muslimgauze had engaged in solidarity with oppressed peoples in a principled way that many are still struggling to do, decades later. While his support for oppressed people occasionally angered some people as he occasionally seemed to condone violence against civilians, it is almost astonishing that an electronic musician first and foremost could exhibit that kind of fearless and principled support for justice in the Middle East.

          At the same time, Muslimgauze’s work is not without its problems. In particular the visual aesthetic has not necessarily aged well. While the idea of naming songs after regions or conflicts as a way to counter stigma or raise awareness is perhaps admirable in some sense, this practice is sometimes hard to distinguish from a boring post-orientalism at this point in time. Naming an album “Iran,” as Jones did, perhaps does more to reproduce notions that Iran as a concept is scary or edgy, rather than actually unpacking that issue or moving past it. Similarly, the artwork often utilized orientalist art without clearly presenting criticism or a sense of satire, and similarly falls back on the common misstep of meaninglessly mixing and matching symbols and ideologies from different cultures: an album with an Arab title is almost randomly adorned with Ottoman calligraphy. Even his live performances now seem comical and nearly disrespectful as macabre performance art: his shows often involved him performing live and seemingly amateurish percussion over his tracks.

          Yet on a sonic level, the music holds up on its own as a spectacular moment in experimental electronic music. While generally quite avant garde, at times it even seems like a darker, deeper, and more honest precursor to acts like Thievery Corporation. While less glossy than electronic music that has tried to create similar mixes of music, Muslimgauze as a sonic project is still something to be treasured. Whereas some artistic projects seek to critique orientalist and essentializing views of Islamic and Southwest Asian cultures struggle to produce something new beyond critique, in many ways Muslimgauze created something new. Samples of darbukas and zurnas come together over bass music and experimental percussion in a sound that cannot fit into any one box. It is not simply recycled “exotic” samples with an electronic makeover, nor is the Middle Eastern influence simply a musical adornment.

          In a recent conversation with artist Michael Tolmachev about Muslimgauze’s legacy, he advised me to understand the musical project by “evaluating Muslimgauze in his own time, in his own era.” In such an approach, it still remains that activists and artists (particularly who actually hail from the region in question) also created important works with political projects similar to Muslimgauze. He was not so unique as to deserve a free pass for his artistic missteps. Yet particularly for his era, Jones and his project are a fascinating miracle of international solidarity and consciousness, especially considering the limited means of technological connection in the 80s and 90s when this music was being produced This is not to say that it was impossible to meaningfully connect across borders at this time, but it was considerably more difficult to intimately acquaint yourself with the nuances of a region where outsiders’ perceptions are political capital. For his ability to do this and translate it into a new sound, Jones was quite special in his ability to avoid musical and political cliches.

          Perhaps the best way to make sense of Muslimgauze is to approach his music and his legacy with the artist’s own dreams of global justice in mind. It would be a disservice to his memory to praise his music without continuing his project of radical political and anti-imperial change in the Middle East. When Jones was interviewed by Elephant Weekly in the mid 1990s, after a short discussion about future Muslimgauze various releases, he was asked about his “future ideas, ambitions” for the future. Rather than give a typical response about touring, gear, or even future collaborations, his first answers were political, not musical: “freedom to Afghanistan from Soviet oppression, and unity of the two German lands.” In that same spirit, if we could somehow ask him about the future of Muslimgauze’s legacy, what would he have answered today?

Article by: Kamyar Jarahzadeh

Nausicaa Sound (A Footwork Comp for #Ferguson)

          Forgotten in the media frenzy and far ahead of the curve, St Louis resident Derek Yeager had devised a plan far back in August as the news first broke about the death of eighteen year old Ferguson resident Mike Brown. The footwork community had drawn closer already since the passing of Teklife’s international ambassador DJ Rashad, joining together on numerous fronts of social media displayed daily by coordinated avatars and underground promotion. This back alley communication resembled closely the strategies the protest itself would eventually adopt with its usage of new media mixed with peaceful protest. Reaching out to the internet at the time, Derek had assembled a robust collection of fifty tracks from thirty producers in support of Ferguson while donating the proceeds to St Louis’s Organization for Black Struggle. Daunting for those outside the familiarities of the genre, these sorts of large archives were typically common in the form of zips widely circulated by underground footwork producers. This preferred method of transport and distribution for many famous Chicago mainstays would soon after shift towards this same mode of content delivery via sites like Bandcamp. Still relatively fresh by contemporary standards, footwork tracks replicate at a feverish rate caught here just before surfacing as a tome full of very pressing musical responses to the tragedy at hand.

          As compilations go, Ferguson represents a collective meditation from all over the world in the gathering of underground producers under the banner of futuristic Chicago inspired urban style music. Easily the smoothest tunes come from Poland with Comoc’s “This way” and the duo Bennelux’s “Hold on To Ya” which points to the diverse cultures represented in footwork as it converges on the moment that was Mike Brown. “Requiem” by DJ Innes is a somber procession of horns, toms and dripping swells that culminate towards its midway vocal sample “it’s not fair to the kids” alluding to an uncertainty about the future even from as far off as Australia. Freezaburn conversely shifts the mood in “Drink Occasionally” with a dirge of psychedelic battle works from the Duck n Cover mainstay all the way from Switzerland. Filmmaker/Musician Michelange Quay’s project Haiti Ground Zero features the spectre of Billie Holiday’s scathing “Black Bodies Swinging in the Southern Breeze” over Haitian rhythms and archived news footage. While Japan’s CRZKNY also known for his sense of politics loosens a bit to offer a cavernous hispeed drift filled with zero gravity pirouettes in “HLYGHST”

          Representing closer to home, LA speaker maker and noise artist Tobias Renfro rounds off an old school breakbeat indictment with “Straight Fuckn Underground” that’s serve as a stiff warning to the powers that be with Ice Cube shifting in between time signatures. Other standouts include DJ Earl’s ever percolating “Scratch Live” along with DJ Rome’s “Do it” which takes takes a brave, weird spiral into a James Brown footwork run off. But very much fresh in its feelings and emotions towards the community’s collective rage, there are particular tracks that demonstrate the message painfully clear. The Chicago footwork community at its roots in the South and West sides have figured out their own method of conflict resolution and brotherhood in the midst of struggle. One of the most energetic and prolific footwork producers to date, Traxman represents the very core of Tekk Dj'z founded by himself and the late Dj Rashad with the call to arms “Save the World.” DJ Elmoe’s “Ferguson Rip Mike Brown” straight forward title is incredibly cinematic in its composition while still remaining hard enough for the toughest of dancefloors.. And Crossfire even in name alludes to the very heart of the matter channeling Syl Johnson’s melancholy rhetoric with “Because i’m Black.”  A difficult compilation to digest after months passed, Ferguson is a testament to the spirit of community that still exists at the heart of the footwork movement now some twenty years strong.

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Article by: Violet Systems

Trouble - Eye Of The Circle (Cult Trax)

          Trouble first appeared most notably as “DJ Trouble” on the Mike Paradinas curated compilation Bangs and Works back in 2010. Alongside a slew of Chicago staples like Traxman and RP Boo, Trouble though actually not a DJ had schooled foot workers worldwide with the title track “Bangs & Works.” Somewhere in the rise of footwork globally, Trouble had resigned from the movement to make hip hop at the time as Spacey Onit much like fellow producer DJ Nate. But still the muse of the Paradinas comp was resurrected by Melbourne based DJ, blogger, and owner of Gaming Cult Podcast Jake Innes.

          Jake’s digital imprint Cult Trax on Bandcamp has already successfully released a number of internet compilations with participants from both the footwork and the underground hip hop scene including Josip On Deck, Lil B, DJ Tre and DJ Manny from Teklife. Jake’s investigations led him to a year of internet exploration yielding the lost Trouble record with the help of fellow Tekk DJ'z Chicago footwork mainstay Crossfire. In some ways it is a refreshing return to the era that brought many of attentions to Chicago footwork in the first place aside from the late DJ Rashad.

          Rollerskating rinks have been long cited as one of the founding formations of the footwork movement. The same roller rinks most notably included are Englewood’s famous Route 66 at the corner of 66th and Martin Luther King Drive in Chicago. It was same roller rink that inspired Kanye West indirectly with the first sighting of Daft Punk in the city of Chicago. Ironically it takes tracks like “Mosh Pit” to invoke this type of revolutionary and transformative imagery. ‘Eye of the Circle’ in some ways reflects back to a time in the Chicago Rave scene was firmly nestled in the cradle of Chicago’s South and West Sides. If the title suggests anything, it’s that Trouble’s namesake lurks within the very eye of the circle. That’s a very ominous perspective to overlook judging by such standout tracks as “Crack” and “The Element”.

          But if this apocalypse is full of crisp 808 toms then the message is loud and clear. That is regardless if the echoes aren’t actually coming from Pompei.

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Article by: Violet Systems