Timbral, Textural, and Rhythmic Stratification in Footwork Percussion
Timbral, Textural, and Rhythmic Stratification in Footwork Percussion
Jeremy Tatar (McGill) & Victor Burton (Berlin)
March 15th, 2023
ABSTRACT:
Footwork is a style of electronic dance music that emerged in Chicago in the late 1990s. Originally produced as the accompaniment for a distinctive mode of dance—also called footwork or footworking—Footwork is a highly kinetic genre that thrives in a liminal space of perception. Although the tempo of almost all songs in the style is nominally 160 bpm (an atypically fast tempo originally derived from playing 33RPM house records at 45RPM [Berlatsky 2021]), the rhythmic and metric features of the music vary widely and are characterised by heavy syncopation, skittering cross-rhythms, and the coexistence of multiple levels of metric dissonance (Krebs 1999).
For this collaborative project, we propose a close analytical study of the influential Footwork compilation Bangs & Works, Volume 1 (2010), curated by the UK label Planet Mu, which was the first release within this genre to reach international audiences (Brar 2016, 21; Lobley 2018, 59). Our core focus through these analyses concerns the relationship between timbral quality and metric function. The characteristic metric complexity of Footwork is primarily projected through its different percussion layers, which are stratified both timbrally and texturally. The sub-bass, for example, typically occupies the range beneath 100Hz in quarter-note triplets, while the hi-hats, closer to 10kHz, generally move in eighth and sixteenth notes. Drawing on work in auditory scene analysis (Bregman 1990) and orchestral grouping effects (McAdams et al. 2022), we argue that Footwork producers judiciously select drum timbres and allocate these elements across the frequency spectrum to generate a multistable metric space, one that affords several diverse possibilities for metric entrainment (Witek 2017).
As many of the percussion sounds in Footwork are often also drawn from digital instrument libraries with exoticist connotations (Lochhead 2021), this project further explores the semantic and largely racialised implications of the intersection between timbre and rhythm.
