18. RP Boo Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints
From its localised beginnings as an offshoot of the Chicago juke sound, footwork has gradually grown (through exposure by internationally respected labels like Hyperdub and Planet Mu) into an international style that is drawn on by everyone from Australians like Lil JaBBA to Brits like Addison Groove and dBridge. 2014's devastating early death of sound originator DJ Rashad shocked the transnational club scene, and his absence is still felt over a year later. One of the most influential footwork DJs, RP Boo, returned earlier this year with what is one of the best full-length albums in the style since Rashad's masterful and scene-defining Double Cup. Footwork is, at its heart, music to dance to. It is music to footwork to, basically, to reference the Chicago dance style that accompanies its rapid-fire hi-hat sounds. However, it is also incessantly experimental, a testament to the continuing need for weird and innovative new sounds to literally keep the dancers on their toes. RP Boo is perhaps the most avant-garde of the early footwork producers, incessantly aiming to create sounds that push the style into unique and exciting new directions, and Fingers, Banks Pads & Shoe Prints is the epitome of this approach. These tracks, taken from across Boo's career, are minimal to the extreme. Sometimes little more than a skeletal rhythm and an aggressively repetitive sample drive the tracks, effectively creating miniature structures formed from disconnected and abstract sounds. Footwork is noted for including cut-up vocal samples, looped and repeated ad infinitum, and Boo's music is no exception. The constantly recurring words and phrases quickly lose their initial meaning, instead becoming like surreal GIFs that never end, inspiring manic and uncontrollable dancing. This is like avant-garde electronica for the dance floor, and it is utterly compelling whether listening to its bizarre contraptions through headphones, or its pulverising rhythms on a club sound system. Footwork may have been around for some time now, and it may have lost arguably its most famous export, but the sound is continuing to expand. FBP&SP proves that RP Boo, one of the scene's founders, also remains one its most prominent trailblazers.