DJ Rashad

It's easy to dismiss footwork as a flash in the pan, a product of the global hype machine that hungers for new styles to deconstruct, over-promote and then disregard completely. Footwork is the product of a musical lineage that stretches back to the warehouse parties of '80s Chicago, which gave birth to the whole house genre. Like hip-hop, its spiritual twin from the East, it takes its cues from the samples of the past, but has its eyes firmly fixed on the future. It's this very futurism that attracted Kode 9's Hyperdub Records, that bastion of emerging electronic sounds, to release footwork pioneer DJ Rashad's debut LP, Double Cup. All of the factors that make footwork great are present and correct: the skewed soul samples, the barrage of sub stabs underpinning a liquid rhythm of 808s, which sounds as if it could derail at any time and on occasion does, as in the dystopian "I'm too Hi," and then finally, the disjointed sense of rhythm that both disorientates and thrills in equal measure. But then there are the disparate elements of electronic music's past that Rashad and his crew of regular collaborators (DJ Spinn, Taso and DJs Manny and Earl) seamlessly weave into Double Cup's 14 tracks. from the junglist Amen breaks and synths that colour "Feelin'" and "Drank, Kush, Barz" to the pitched down hooks that wouldn't sound out of place on a Hypnotized Minds record to the straight-up acid of the Addison Groove-assisted "Acid Bit." You will be hard-pressed to find a fresher-sounding dance LP this year.