Da Mind of Traxman Vol. 3

One of the sharpest tricks the best footwork producers have at their disposal is a distinct yet endlessly adaptable structure to work with. When the stutter-stepping, hyper-syncopated kick-rumble/snare-rattle momentum is prioritized over everything else, you can find an endless supply of source material to adapt to it if your crates are deep enough. And like all the best names to emerge from Chicago’s ghetto house/juke/footwork continuum, Traxman’s kept his options open, which speaks to Cornelius Ferguson’s history coming to the genre as a skeptic turned convert turned maestro. His breadth of source material pulls every bit as deep as the house pioneers he drew from and the hip-hop beatmakers he’s outwardly paid tribute to, a repertoire that can make even the most well-worn sample flips refract into startling new forms. Da Mind of Traxman Vol. 3 follows eleven years and a couple dozen self-released mixtapes after his previous Planet Mu release Vol. 2. And while it might seem reductive of the work he puts in over that time to state that this new collection doesn’t feel like a massive departure from what he was doing a decade ago — we’re looking at someone who’d already reconstituted his own mutations of Roy Ayers, Eurythmics, and Pantera on the same album back then — why reinvent when all you need to do is refine? It’s an endlessly modular approach that thrives on the simplicity of understanding its insistent gut-level velocity while acknowledging the complexity involved in moving your body to it. Traxman’s ability to slot just about anything into his rhythmic frameworks renders some of the most recognizable flips into needling little meditations on earworm ubiquity. It’s almost an irreverent purpose in itself to find out what surprises you can wring out of something as obvious as the hook to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” (“I Bet U Think This Track Is About U!!) or as nostalgically familiar as the kung-fu Foley sound palette from Mortal Kombat (“Round 1”) or as well-traveled as the Godzilla-caliber brass of Isaac Hayes’ “Ike’s Mood I” (“I’ll Write The Hook”). Those nods are a way in, those reference points acting guideposts through breath-snatching, knuckle-tightening buildups and let-it-fly breakdowns, recognizable voices guiding you through escalating patterns. And that’s the musicality that stands out, especially when it’s put to work on tracks that are more soulful than frantic — check out closer “Day and Night Time,” which turns Peabo Bryson’s 1982 adult-contempo R&B ballad “Give Me Your Love” into a slow-boiling geyser of a footwork track with immaculate tension-and-release drum programming.