Top 100 10s: 99. JANA RUSH - "??? ??" (Patreon)

Spotify’s best-known recommendation engine is its Discover Weekly playlist, but I’ve found that takes a long time to train up before it stops trying to tempt you into remaking youthful errors. The Discover tab is cruder but also more useful – a basic “if you like that, try this” system which creates paths into the untracked megaforests of music the service hosts.

Careful mapping and exploration is possible – I preferred to plunge into the underbush and trust to instinct. I would guess my path to footwork producer Jana Rush came via fellow Chicagoan Jlin: Rush’s surly, lean Pariah LP came out the same year as Jlin’s more experimental and lauded Black Origami. Rush – who got her first break in the mid-90s as a 13-year old and now makes music on the side of two day jobs – doesn’t waste much time on the conceptual. Her tracks are called stuff like “Beat Maze”, “Chill Mode”, “Frenetic Snare” and “No Fuks Given”. Her music is dark, fast, functional – percussive obstacle courses for flashing sneakers. At home I listen and try to keep up, a tortoise attempting to understand the leg muscles of hares.

“??? ??” cuts through the album with urgent joy – a trilling flute sample riding on murky rolls of sub-bass, then low, swinging horns, then those horns sliced up into a strobing pulse. No slower or less intricate than the rest of Rush’s music, it still feels like her world opening up, saying the quiet part – footwork’s debt to rave, funk, jazz – thrillingly loud. No wonder an arriviste like me digs it most.

A lot of this list will be these finds, torn by algorithmic whim from living context – which I work to reconstruct, once the music’s made me care enough. Singles only in the sense that everything is if the data slices it that way. This is how I listen now, often. Out beyond Jlin and Jana, the forest path goes on: I haven’t yet wandered down it.  

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_5gT3hxoy0