It is impossible to consider a given release by a footwork artist without confronting the long shadow cast by DJ Rashad’s catalog, particularly his magnum opus, Double Cup. The writing sessions for Double Cup started four years ago in San Francisco, after the producer Taso (Anastasios Ioannis Skalkos III) invited Rashad and DJ Spinn to the Bay Area. Taso appears four times on that album, and though it can be hard to discern an individual footwork producer’s idiosyncrasies, he leaves an indelible mark. He has a remarkable ability to smooth over the acidic edges that come with footwork’s inherent speed. This was especially true in the Double Cup’s introductory song “Feelin,” a revelatory musical moment that almost single handedly brought footwork to a larger audience. The three-man effort from Taso, Rashad, and Spinn was soulful and sensual, but also discombobulating in the way footwork often is. In other tracks like “Pass That Shit,” Taso helped break down the genre’s common barrier between dancefloor utility and home-listening. Overall, he was one of the architects of footwork mainstream jump, and he has returned with a solo effort, New Start, that extracts some of Double Cup’s best qualities.
New Start opens much like Double Cup, with a collaboration between Taso, Rashad, and Spinn. On the album’s first song, “New Start,” there’s an immediate sense of warm familiarity. When these three producers worked together, they generated a sound that is both pulsating and comforting; perfect for both club speakers and paltry headphone listening. There was a pleasurable universality and malleability to the music they made together. On “AM Track,” the second of the trio’s collaborations on the album, they perfect the formula for smooth and soulful footwork found on Double Cup.
Elsewhere, Taso works with other members of the Teklife crew, including DJ Earl, Gant-Man, Manny, and Taye. In all these collaborative works, he finds a way to locate and amplify the voice of another artist. For example, his track with Taye, “In the Green Room,” heightens Taye’s tendency towards a more hip-hop driven footwork by brightening it with elements of Miami bass. In “Da Capo Al Coda,” he is able to draw out the very best of Earl’s melancholic energy by slowing the beat way below 160 bpm, moving towards something closer to billowing ambient. Taso shows his individual voice just once on this album, in a track called “Murda Bass,” which surprisingly paints him a bit of a sentimentalist for vintage British dance music. He borrows freely from garage and UK bass, and it would be a stretch to call this track footwork. Here he showcases his versatility as a producer, able to accommodate and inhabit many styles at once.
Oddly, some of the very best tracks on this album are in their own way slightly retrograde and stuck. They copy and fine-tune the aesthetic of Double Cup, and do little to break the mold. If anything, some of the most forward-thinking footwork of the moment is being made outside of Teklife (take for example Foodman’s intense experimentation). Still, New Start proves that the prowess of footwork’s first family is intact, and Taso might just be the glue that holds it all together.
