Traxman, a battle-hardened architect of Chicago’s percussive underworld, commands footwork’s volatile pulse. With his first major album release in over a decade, Da Mind of Traxman Vol. 3 isn’t just a comeback. It excavates footwork’s DNA, mutating past, present, and future into something that never stands still. The album is a masterclass in controlled chaos, where every sample and stuttering drum hit stitches together decades of Black sonic history, filtered through the fever-dream kinetics of footwork.
Traxman (Cornelius Ferguson) has always been an originator and provocateur simultaneously. As one of the ghetto house, juke, and footwork architects, his roots dig deep into Chicago’s cracked concrete while his vision stays locked on the next mutation. His music embodies the speed and pressure of footwork, but Da Mind of Traxman Vol. 3 also carries the weight of a culture in flux.
Chicago’s West Side hardened his instincts. While the South Side chased disco-laced euphoria, Traxman carved a meaner groove closer to Cajmere’s lo-fi stomp than Frankie Knuckles’ glide. This West Side sound was lean, tracky, and built for sweat and velocity. Traxman was there from the jump, shaping this future alongside Fast Eddie, Steve Poindexter, DJ Deeon, and the late DJ Rashad.
What makes Vol. 3 so relentless is archival excavation viewed through a cracked rearview at 160 BPM. Planet Mu affiliate Sinjin Hawke, who helped curate this record from Traxman’s massive vaults, has compared the process to piecing together a lost chapter of Miles Davis’ electric era. Like Davis at his most experimental, Traxman metabolizes, deconstructs, and flips history upside down. The album is full of mercurial energy, the past torn apart and reassembled in new but unstable forms.
Take Kill Da DJ, a track that flexes like a street fight outside the Dance Mania office. Featuring Bobby Skillz and Sinjin Hawke, its vocal assault and relentless trills lash out at non-juke DJs as if they’ve stepped into the wrong club ("If that DJ ain't makin' you dance, throw some bottles at his ass"). Similarly, I'll Write the Hook repurposes Benny the Butcher’s Bust a Brick Nick, flipping its aggressive verses into a dizzying footwork anthem over Akira Ifukube's Godzilla vs. Mothra theme. Here, and throughout, Traxman updates his arsenal without losing footwork’s push-pull between density and space in a way more kin to Detroit’s Theo Parrish than some of his footwork contemporaries. If Rashad’s Double Cup bled into hip-hop’s smoked-out haze, Vol. 3 brings it back faster, sharper, meaner.
But for all its brain-scrambling syncopation, Traxman still knows how to have fun (see the Carly Simon-sampled I Bet U Think This Track Is About U!!) and has a DJ’s sixth sense for sonic friction. Round 1 pulls from the 90s arcade, weaving Mortal Kombat samples into a hyper-syncopated war cry. Then there’s It Never Rains, where he reconstructs Tony! Toni! Toné!’s classic slow jam It Never Rains (In Southern California) into a storm of jagged beat structures. He stacks samples that feel impatient but also tactile. The hyperactive sleaze of Where They At and the classic R&B of Day And Night Time recall Armand Van Helden’s disregard for subtlety. Meanwhile, their warped micro-rhythms nod closer to Moodymann’s deep-digging.
Traxman is indeed a crate-digger at heart. His breakthrough, Da Mind of Traxman (2012), showed how jazz and soul could be shattered into footwork’s jagged time signatures, while Vol. 2 (2014) sharpened everything with extra precision. Vol. 3 is a culmination of those experiments and a hard reset, but with the BPMs cranked even higher. If there’s one thing uniting this album, it’s the sense that Traxman is time-traveling. He gives tracks like Trust Me an eerie timelessness, locked in a perpetual state of rhythmic combustion.
This is ultimately why Traxman matters. Da Mind of Traxman Vol. 3 is an archive and a provocation. In a genre that thrives on movement, Traxman is both historian and futurist, still sprinting ahead and rewriting the rules as he traces the echoes behind him.
