If Footwork hasn’t exactly set the world on fire thus far, it’s scarcely the fault of Planet Mu Records who have been virtually the sole evangelical voice in the wilderness. Their curatorship of the genre over the past couple of years is certainly praise-worthy and it might be that one day Footwork makes in-roads into the mainstream in much the same way Dubstep did, after gnawing away at the edges for the longest time. Unlike Dubstep however, Footwork is very much a dance-centred music; given the appearance of a team on America’s Best Dance Crew it is more likely people have seen Footwork than heard it, and at that point dismissed it as too challenging a dance to adopt (it is a style that requires a strong pair of ankles at the very least).
Yet the music continues to exercise a fascination quite apart from trying to dance to it; as the Bangs & Works compilations indicated, Footwork (the music) is produced by musical magpies, artists who aren’t particularly fussy about where or how they grab their inspiration or samples from, so long as it can be crowbarred into their tempo and rhythm requirements. Lest you think that these are the worst kind of musical bandits, swiping chunks of other people’s songs without any recompense, it is worth pointing out that these producers aren’t really proprietary themselves – Mike Paradinas had to download and master tracks from various YouTube streams when putting Bangs & Works Vol. 1 together because that was the only place the artist had put their work into the public domain, not worried about keeping an original master.
Traxman (aka Cornelius Ferguson) is a slightly different proposition to many of the Bangs & Works guys – he’s been working around the Chicago area since the nineties and has seen genres come and go and his take on Footwork is very much influenced by all the music he’s made and played in the past. He’s still on the side of the magpies, plucking samples from places both obscure and incredibly well known, but from the opening “Footworking on Air”, with its Steve Reich-ian kalimba melody it is clear that he is one of the more inventive producers out there. The rhythm is agreeably woozy, leaping from half-time handclaps to double-timed kick drums in the space of a bar; a challenge enough for a Footwork practitioner never mind someone new to the style, but actually pretty good to listen to.
It is Ferguson’s source material that provides much of the album’s variation; the tracks will all end up with a Footwork beat at some point but can start off anywhere; jazz fusion, TV themes, old rock tunes… if Traxman can use it, he’ll grab it and the weirder it is, the better the outcome will be. “I Need Some Money” uses a slice of seventies soul of unknown origin to make a track as fizzingly brilliant as one of Hudson Mohawke’s. On the other hand, “Calling All Freaks” is all Footwork rhythm, bassline and cut-up vocal samples which makes it one of the more serviceable dancefloor tunes but offers nothing to the listener – if you can’t dance to it you’re likely to skip it.
Ultimately, Da Mind of Traxman works in much the same way the Bangs & Works albums did, except this time it’s all the work of one man – although such is the width of Traxman’s style and the scattershot approach to his tunes that one could easily believe that this was the work of twenty individuals. Coming a couple of years after the initial compilation, there’s equally a sense that this isn’t quite A-grade material; at least not all the way through. Like a multi-artist release, this doesn’t have the flow that albums need to raise themselves out of the mire; instead it’s a collection with a multitude of highlights, not quite enough to push Footwork to the next level of awareness but at the least this is a step in the right direction. (Jeremy Bye)
a closer listen 