Bang & Works: How Planet Mu introduced footwork to the world

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Thousands of kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean from its epicentre, as with many other listeners Mike Paradinas first encountered Chicago footwork through the internet, watching videos and streaming tracks from MySpace and YouTube. It was 2008 and Paradinas’ interest in dubstep was waning. The new sounds he was hearing from Chicago, in contrast, were thrillingly new. Others were discovering them too, and in 2010 a juke-inspired 808 track called ‘Footcrab’ by Bristol dubstep alumnus Addison Groove (who had appeared as Headhunter on Mu’s Mary Anne Hobbs-curated Evangeline compilation) started doing the rounds of the UK scene on dubplate. “Does a musician have to know why it is that he likes something? Sometimes it’s better not to,” Paradinas replies when I ask what initially captured him about footwork. “I used to have conversations with Aphex about that particular thing – how far do you analyse it? I sometimes don’t want to analyse emotionally what it is that I like about tracks. But with footwork, I think it was that there were a lot of young, inexperienced producers who had what to me seemed like fresh ideas. It seemed very unpretentious. It reminded me of early breakbeat hardcore, in its sample usage and tempo, and it had a similar pool of samples. There are a lot of parallels with jungle, and that made me look very kindly on it.”

The Chicago artist whose music Paradinas first became deeply interested in was a young producer named DJ Nate. This, he admits, was met with surprise and some indignation from many in the city, since Nate was an outlier from the scene proper – one of several teenage musicians crafting takes on the genre that were intoxicatingly weird even by footwork standards. Although consistent with Planet Mu’s characteristic ear for idiosyncratic artists lurking around the fringes of established scenes, he was mostly unrepresentative of footwork’s history and the established community surrounding it. Paradinas originally made contact with Rashad, Spinn and RP Boo but they were barely aware of Nate, and it ended up taking him “about a year” to track the latter down. Nonetheless he persisted, eventually releasing a 12” and then a full album, Da Trak Genious. The compilation of early Wiley instrumentals Paradinas had been working hard to release had recently fallen through, he remembers, and “almost to console ourselves, we decided ‘let’s get something else we’re excited about as much as that’. [Nate’s] stuff was just crazy and had this sentimental aspect to it, these little heartrending samples just sped up ridiculously, that reminded me of the early hardcore stuff. It just sounded so soppy and hardcore at the same time, and that’s what reminded me of the early days.” Several other producers with a similar outsider status, whom Dave Quam beautifully termed “internet mystics” in a 2010 article for The Wire, also appeared on Mu’s first scene compilation Bangs & Works Vol. 1. They included DJ Elmoe, DJ Yung Tellem and DJ Trouble – local bedroom musicians who’d grown up surrounded by the sound and culture of juke and footworking as it spilled over from clubs and venues into streets and school playgrounds. As Litebulb puts it: “If you’re from the south side and the west side of Chicago from the ’80s to the late ’90s, you’ve pretty much known about house music and Chicago footwork from the time you were growing up. People were doing it in the neighbourhood, there was battles all the time, the music was really going off. It’s a Chicago culture.”

Compared to older musicians with roots in club culture like Rashad, Traxman or Boo, however, the music these young producers were making and sharing via the internet was conspicuously hazy, dreamlike and disembodied. Hypnagogic tussles of bitcrushed textures and drastically re-pitched R&B samples, tracks like Elmoe’s ‘Whea Yo Ghost At’ or Nate’s ‘See Into My Eyes’ sounded like progressively fading Xerox copies of footwork originals, often abstracted beyond apparent concern for dance functionality. Even among his contemporaries Nate’s Da Trak Genious remains a singularly curious album, charged with unfiltered emotion, a space where maniacal floor burners in debt to RP Boo (‘Hatas Our Motivation’, ‘Footwurk Homicide’) rub shoulders with near-hysterical teen romance reminiscent of London grime crew Ruff Sqwad (‘Call Me When You’re Sober’). The album and its accompanying 12” were the first footwork documents that Planet Mu released in 2010, followed soon after by DJ Rashad’s ‘It’z Not Rite’ single, DJ Roc’s ‘The Crack Capone’ and then, late that year, Bangs & Works Vol. 1.

Looking with hindsight at that initial drip-feed of Chicagoan records over several months highlights some of the knottier challenges Paradinas faced in releasing footwork globally. As a UK-based label entering into a scene from the outside, predominant among them was the issue of representation: how to compile an overview of a complex community that was true to Planet Mu but remained faithful to the producers, DJs and dancers who had created and sustained it? This question was further compounded by the social and economic divides between Paradinas and the footwork community, whose protagonists were largely from poor black neighbourhoods and housing projects in underfunded areas of Chicago. Those first few single artist records offered only tiny, fragmentary windows onto a much broader, still living and evolving sound. So the release of Bangs & Works, with sleevenotes from Quam, felt like an important step in offering outside listeners a wider community-level insight. Its tracklist cut right across the scene, from originators like Traxman, Spinn, Rashad and Boo (whose electrifying ‘Eraser’ was among the compilation’s highlights) to associates of other dance crews like DJ Roc and DJ Diamond, to the insular sounds of the young ‘net mystics.

Although often remarkable music in their own right, many in Chicago had mixed feelings about Paradinas’ inclusion of those bedroom producers within Bangs & Works, just as they had about DJ Nate’s being the first footwork-rooted records to be released internationally. This exposure to the world beyond the footwork community would prove crucial, but its narrative was being imposed on their culture from an outside perspective. “Whether or not he wanted it to be representational, [Bangs & Works] was the first representation of a culture that had been operating on its own terms for 15 to 20 years,” says writer and photographer Wills Glasspiegel. “Mike took some tracks that the culture didn’t necessarily think were important, and made them important just by virtue of putting them on that record.” Originally from Chicago, Glasspiegel first became involved with the foot-work community as a journalist. He has since become close friends with many DJs and dancers in the scene, and was recently involved in establishing dance troupe The Era with Litebulb. Nonetheless, he emphasises, “it’s really tough for labels who come into a scene, in terms of trying to introduce a whole musical world to people that know nothing about it. It’s not an easy position to be in, you need to understand two different worlds, almost like beatmatching. Mike has done an extraor- dinary job with that in so many ways.”

Indeed, Paradinas has remained committed to releasing footwork records. Planet Mu’s ongoing release schedule has continued to paint a broader picture and offer space to individual producers: Bangs & Works Vol. 2; singles by Spinn, DJ Clent and Ghettoteknitianz; albums by veteran and younger artists alike including Traxman, RP Boo, Young Smoke, DJ Diamond and Jlin. Growing interest from elsewhere subsequently mobilised many Chicago producers to distribute their music through their own labels and online platforms like Bandcamp. “It wasn’t about the scene, it was about the sound,” says RP Boo of Bangs & Works. “Mike did nothing wrong with the music. People thought that he was trying to invade – no! We wanted everybody to hear it, but we didn’t think other people outside the country would hear it. And when they heard it, we said, why stop? We understood, hey, we got an opportunity. Let it be heard.”

In that sense, despite the imperfections inherent in the process, Planet Mu’s involvement with footwork has been one of the label’s most enduring achievements in its two decades of existence. The genre’s increasing presence in the global ecology of bass music has also highlighted that Paradinas’ tastes in footwork, as with everything else, tend towards the raw, the hallucinatory and the hard-edged. RP Boo’s Legacy and its follow-up album Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints showcase Boo as the cornerstone of the sound’s more nightmarish and minimalist aspects, and his influence audibly courses through DJ Diamond and Jlin’s albums. The former’s Flight Muzik has a weaponised, cyberpunk air, and is often reminiscent of both jungle and techno; there’s something fascinatingly geometric to the way its tracks – tightly-knotted bundles of glass-fibre synths and percussion that crackles like melting ice – perpetually rearrange themselves in front of your eyes. Similar threads are woven through Jlin’s remarkable Dark Energy, which feels like being given a full-body nerve hack, with your motor system hijacked by bolts of chrome-cool and white-hot electricity.

In contrast, the music of early genre innovator Cornelius Ferguson, aka Traxman, is most overtly anchored in footwork’s deep evolutionary past. A Dance Mania veteran from Chicago’s west side with a sharp ear for a sample flip, his work recalls Theo Parrish in its conscious collisions of the futuristic with the traditional; his virtuosic, sample-dense tracks always remind listeners of their origins in soul, house, jazz and hip-hop, even as he liquefies their rhythmic and linguistic structures via MPC and drum machine. ‘Footworkin’ On Air’ epitomises that balance; it dances on a knife-edge between past and future, with marimba notes sampled from Earth, Wind & Fire bubbling through battle drums and an acid line that oozes like honey. Even then, his second Planet Mu album, Vol. 2, bears clear traces of Paradinas’ curatorial tastes; it’s knotty and titanium-plated where its predecessor was organic.

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