9. DJ DiamondFlight Muzik
I was there when Mike got into footwork. Well, I mean we were dating and at first I didn’t get it. I just thought the vocals were really annoying; they didn’t make sense to me. But then I realised, ‘Don’t listen to the vocal as a vocal, listen to it as a musical instrument’, which was a bit of an ‘aha!’ moment. And ‘don’t listen to music as a positive, listen to the negative spaces’ and stuff like that. So with footwork, it makes you think how that changes: you can listen to each different layer and it builds up differently. DJ Diamond really made that click for me because he doesn’t use vocals that much. He’s super weird with it though, in a way that appeals to me.
This is a super important footwork album for me. I don’t know how well it did. There’s a lot of footwork albums that should have got more attention, more praise, but because it was a Black guy in Chicago who didn’t tour, it won’t get the same love. That’s what Rashad did well, because he was good at doing the interviews and travelling and the rest of it. He did a lot for footwork in general, but it’s sad that you have to do that, really. This was the album which made me really ‘get’ footwork and when I worked in London for a company called Medicanimal, I used to have to get the train to Harlesden, which was a two-and-a-half hour trip. So I’d really be listening to that, plus a few other things too. It would really gee me up; it was a good thing to listen to. I like music you can zone out to in various different ways. It’s just an all-encompassing, gorgeous album.
