If you listen closely, you can hear footwork undergoing a transition that house and techno made before it: from a functional music created for dancers to a music made, at least in part, for personal expression. As with house and techno, this has resulted in tighter and more precise compositions, as producers—who have also gotten better at using their gear/software—are no longer rushing beats to the dance floors. If you compare DJ Rashad’s Double Cup or Jlin’s Dark Energy with the types of tracks—full of eerie ambiance and seams-showing production values—featured on the seminal Bangs & Works compilation, there is an uptick in both fidelity and personality.
The shift is apparent, too, in the work of DJ Earl, New York-based, Chicago-born member of the Teklife crew. The first set of new tracks released on Teklife’s eponymous label (the first release was a cull of Rashad’s archive), Open Your Eyes is eight tracks of knocking-but-composed footwork. Featuring several collaborations with Oneohtrix Point Never (as well as a host of footwork veterans) and artwork by OBEY founder Shepard Fairey, Open Your Eyes feels leagues away from the harsh digital productions on earlier Earl EPs like Teklife Or Nolife or Afrika Tek.
Earl is still working well within the purview of footwork, offering up the kind of tempos and chopped vocal refrains you’ve come to know and love. There are vocal samples about weed, and about ass, and one about fucking shit up. Little summer storms of snare drums come in fast and hard. But Open Your Eyes is an orderly and uncluttered album, even when working at higher tempos. The vocal bits never clash or confuse; there’s space in the arrangements for synthesizers to float in and out of the mix.
If you are the type of listener who generally finds footwork too manic and roughshod, Open Your Eyes may be for you. “Let’s Work,” a collaboration with Oneohtrix and MoonDoctoR, is almost elegant: a house vocal—“C’mon let’s work!”—deployed economically over electric piano and horn. (As with many collaborations in the co-operation friendly footwork world, it can be difficult to discern who is doing what, exactly.) “RacheTt” (with MoonDoctoR and OPN) threatens to whip itself into a noisy froth but stops just short. Even the more aggressive “Smoking Reggie” (again with MoondoctoR and OPN) has a kind of call-and-response logic to it, and a whinnying synth melody to anchor it.
It’s hard not to notice, though, that Open Your Eyes is also somewhat conservative. It features none of the wild juxtapositions or mayhem of, say, RP Boo. It feels labored over, and it sacrifices some of the form’s early magic But there's room for this, too, and we need look no farther than Jlin to see the potential in footwork as more heavily produced, personally expressive music. DJ Earl is traveling a different road than footwork’s pioneers, and he may yet find that magic on it.
