Image courtesy Planet Mu
Contrary to her name, Jana Rush seems to find solace in slowness. The iconic Chicago native DJ and producer (also known as JaRu) released her debut album Pariah in 2017, after twelve years in the game of Chicago footwork. It was a statement from a veteran; a debut yes, but fully realised in its scope and aesthetic that it could only have been the work of an artist who has honed in on their craft and distinct sense of identity. The slow and steady approach is as true of the music as it is of her release pattern. Her brand of footwork, while still thundering at rapid-fire pace, layers laid-back atmospherics and ambience to create a sense of languidness. Take Pariah’s Divine, for instance. The metronomic percussion on the track ticks along at upwards of 128bpm, but it’s the hypnotic and oscillating waves of synth that impart a sort of twilight meditativeness to the entire experience. It’s a style that has distinguished Rush as a visionary for the genre, one with the potential to significantly experiment with and, by virtue, evolve the form. Painful Enlightenment, Rush’s sophomore effort released on Planet Mu, is in her own words “not a footwork album.” In many ways, it transcends its classification as footwork through Rush’s re-formulation of the genre’s conventions toward her own thematic concerns on the album.
Those concerns for Rush are her mental and emotional health. Painful Enlightenment serves as an epitaph to a moment in her life marked by darkness; ideations of suicide, consuming depression. But it is also a vehicle for Rush to process this turbulence, a mapping of growth by way of her music. What ensues is an album that transgresses both Rush’s oeuvre as footwork at large. Painful Enlightenment is skewed toward the abstract and sinisterly metaphysical. Phrases of deconstructed samples, disparate beat work and twisted passages of electronic ambience paint Rush’s work with the shades of her emotional rollercoaster. Suicidal Ideation uses chopped and pitched vocal samples sequenced to echo a clipped cry for help, as warping mechanical noises and lurking bass snarl around in abstract disquiet. On opening track Moanin’, a whining sax is employed to impart irate vexation, growing impugned against a stuttering beat that unravels into improvised jazz syncopation. Jazz motifs become an adopted vocabulary for Rush across Painful Enlightenment’s first half, the improvisational textures of brass and startling piano riffs becoming a sonic lingua franca for the lilting state of Rush’s disorientation. On the title track, a casually plucked guitar takes on a destabilising quality against sharp, rushing hi-hats and syncopated bass kicks. This gives way to utter chaos on Disorientation, which marks a shift for Painful Enlightenment toward industrial noise collage and cut-and-paste experimentations in the vein of Total Freedom’s dichotomous DJ sets and the IDM sound art of Sega Bodega.
This makes for a much darker latter half, such as the alien screams of Drivin’ Me Insane (ft. Nancy Fortune). Here, the human voice is placed in a vacuum and stretched to impossibly psychedelic levels of insanity, creating a warped sense of tension. Intergalactic Battle (ft. DJ Paypal) uses the pump of pistons and hammering machinery as a backdrop for an extraterrestrial foley of laser beeps and taught, technological cacophony. Mynd Fuc is a polyrhythmic pastiche, a blender of time signatures and hulking electronic noises that turns the world sideways. A jazzy piano phrase enters midway, as beastly machine sounds whip across and pivot the track back toward delirious chaos. Yet always pulsing beneath the abstraction is the skeleton of footwork, sometimes spectrally. It’s here where Painful Enlightenment’s success lies, specifically in how Rush uses the breakneck patterns of footwork to construct a palette of tension and agitation. With it’s propulsive percussion designed for movement, it makes sense that footwork evolves decently into a style capable of supporting the sort of visceral self-actualisation that Rush does here. She recognises the potential of footwork to lend itself toward loftier conceptual ambitions, and it’s her mastery of the form that ground these ambitions for her on Painful Enlightenment. The album is a stunningly realised translation of state of being into sound, with Rush distilling her pain through the medium of footwork. Painful Enlightenment makes an intriguing case for the genre beyond a dance or club form, extending its contextual and stylistic range beyond the Chicago dance crew scene. With its layers of lopsided polyrhythms and truly disturbing industrial menace, Painful Enlightenment is a remarkably sophisticated turn for Rush and an evolution for footwork at large.
Listen to Mynd Fuck from Painful Enlightenment below and download the album here.
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