Sonic Faction, 113–125

Chapter

Footwork/Dreamwork: On Recent Developments within the Hardcore Continuum

EXCERPT

On DJ Rashad’s 2013 album Double Cup, Mark Fisher heard an apparently new approach to the digital audio interfaces and dancefloors of the twenty-first century. But Rashad’s growing popularity throughout the 2010s also complicated the then-accepted temporality of dance music’s development. In listening to Rashad’s debut album, Fisher argued, ‘we are in the presence of something which scrambles the defaults of rear-view hearing’.

Today, the album is recognised for bringing footwork to the attention of a newly networked global ear, but the genre’s origins can be traced back to innovations made by the likes of RP Boo and DJ Godfather (among many others), in Chicago and Detroit respectively, during the latter half of the 1990s. Nonetheless, 2013 appeared to be the moment for which footwork had been lying in wait, as the affects it expressed better reflected and converged with the conditions of an even more digital world. Double Cup thus arrived like a subcultural manifesto belonging to an alternate rave universe, landing with a bold contemporaneity that simultaneously demanded the rewriting of history.…