Bridging Dubstep and Footwork with Addison Groove

When it comes to Addison Groove, creating bridges and pushing boundaries is the name of the game. Known for his ability to flawlessly meld genres both in the studio and behind the decks, Addison Groove, or Antony Williams, is constantly searching for fresh and innovative sounds.

"For a DJ set of mine, you can have tons of different styles of dances, but they all make sense in my opinion. They all lineup with each other somewhere," explains Williams. "I try to do that when I play. I try to open minds to all the styles of music out there."

His early days were as the dubstep producer Headhunter, but Williams eventually found himself growing tired of the genre, and began a search for his next musical focus. By 2009, Williams had discovered footwork and began testing it out on his UK audiences. "I really pushed that music," said Williams. "I played at Fabric in 2009 and I started with footwork. I came on after dBridge and after 10 minutes I dropped a massive Rashad tune and it got a rewind. It was the first time I'd seen juke get a rewind in a club."

With his new discovery, Williams was determined to continue spreading the fresh Chicago sound throughout the UK club scene. By 2010, he released "Footcrab", a monumental bass music anthem that allowed him to bridge between dubstep's mid tempo shuffle and footwork's fast paced rhythms. This new musical direction called for a new alias, and thus Addison Groove was born. "I had a tune to propel a new name," said Williams. "Having broken free from dubstep and into a completely new world was so good, because I went crazy. I started looking at old music again, like old electro, and old hip-hop. I knew I could play anything because the crowd had changed."

Williams' ties with Chicago's footwork frontrunners, the Teklife crew, strengthened as his productions became more intertwined with the genre. With the passing of DJ Rashad in April of 2014, Williams not only felt the loss of a footwork pioneer, he felt the loss of a friend. It was about an hour before heading out to play a gig one night that Williams received the phone call. One that would shake both the electronic music world and his own. "I was playing back to back with my friend DJ Die. I get to the club and I see Die, and said, 'I just want to tell you that I've just been told that Rashad has died.' This was before it was on Twitter," recalls Williams. "And after about an hour of DJing, it started coming up. Everyone was talking about Rashad's death."

With one of the founding members of Teklife now gone, Williams watched footwork elevate to a whole new level. The rest of the electronic music world was beginning to realize what the genre had now become. "You look at the scene now, you look at footwork as a genre now, and you see someone like Spinn. Spinn's out there playing to fucking Prince! Spinn played at Low End Theory last night and Prince went. So like, what the fuck," exclaims Williams. "I'm not saying that Prince is a fan of footwork, but that is how far someone like Spinn has come."

Though footwork remains an underground genre, no one can deny that DJ Rashad left his mark as a leader of a new movement in electronic music. Williams maintains that although the legend is gone, his memory will never die. "He was always going to make amazing music and he always did," said Williams. "I don't want his death to seem positive, but all I can say is that what came out of Rashad's death was the magnification of the genre?one hundred times more than what it was before."

Like Rashad, Williams too has left his own imprint by testing musical parameters and linking genres. With his relentless focus on finding new sounds and bringing them to the public, Williams has played his own significant role in helping to elevate the sounds of the underground.

After several years of sojourning through various music genres and styles, Williams has even found himself returning to dubstep while playing under his current pseudonym. He never fully dropped his Headhunter moniker, and kept his dubstep alias tucked away, waiting for the right time to unleash the grimy bass beast he started with. "The funny thing is, some of the stuff I'm playing now in Addison Groove sets is some of that old dubstep," said Williams. "But the Headhunter stuff is very dubstep. You know what you're getting. You buy a Ferrari, you're getting a Ferrari."

I ask what it is you're buying, if you're buying Addison Groove. His response: "The front end of a Porsche and the back end of a horse!"

Today, Williams continues to move forward experimenting with different bpms, while keeping a permanent gaze on footwork. "I'm not tired of footwork 'cause I still find stuff on my hard drive that I've never heard before. I'm still discovering stuff that I've been sent years ago," he said. "The thing is, I could play you a footwork set from three years ago and it would sound like it hasn't been made yet. I have so much footwork that has been passed to me from Rashad. I can go into a set that sounds like it's from the future, even though it was probably made three years ago. That's how much I've got. That's how much they have made."

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