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Teklife (commonly stylized as Teklife57) is an electronic music collective and record label from Chicago, Illinois. The group was founded by Rashad Harden (DJ Rashad) and Morris Harper (DJ Spinn) in 2011 in the city's suburbs, but rapidly gained traction among international audiences for pioneering the dance music genre footwork (also known as Chicago juke), a sped-up derivation Ghetto house which itself had been local flavour of house music.

Etymology
As early as 2003, the group began releasing music as GhettoTeknicianz (shortened to GhettoTekz) with members identifying as Architeks, and only officially adopted the name Teklife in 2011 as some members of the group "feared losing opportunities from the word “Ghetto” in their name".

A 2006 study titled "The Sonic Ecology of Footwork" suggests that the term "Teknician" implies a desire for the music to be viewed "as a means of production for an “urban ecology” [...] that is manufactured in the relations between dance, sound, territory, race, and class".

The number 57 is often featured as reference to the longtime collaboration with French visual artist and close friend of the group, Ashes57.

History
The group's founders met as teenagers in 1995 during their time at Thornwood High School, when Harper had first noticed Harden mixing at the Markham Roller Rink alongside fellow Teklife veteran DJ Gant-Man. They bonded over music production with a particular focus on sampling on an MPC as much of the music they listened to at house parties was being released by Dance Mania Records, and whose artists (including Gant-Man) were particularly known for remixing popular tracks through a time-stretching technique of layering sampled vocals over a faster tempo averaging around 140 beat per minute, translating into what was the era's ghetto house movement. Rashad and Spinn became involved with other members in the late 1990s and early 2000s at the Battlegroundz on 87th street in South Side, Chicago, where footwork dancers face off against one another to the beats produced and played by the duo. Many members that later joined the collective like DJ Earl and DJ Taye ad been or continue to be dancers from the Battlegroundz. House had long been the music of choice played at these events until Ghetto House emerged on the scene as dancers expressed a desire for faster rhythms. Eventually, dancers requested something even faster, "something crazy, something unexpected", as DJ Rashad recalls in an interview with Red Bull Music Academy in 2011, so they implemented the syncopated rhythms and 160 BPM standard tempo; both qualities which have now become staples of the footwork genre. In parallel, the release of RP Boo's "Baby Come On" in 1997 is often cited as one of the earliest juke tracks; a sub genre of ghetto house and direct predecessor to footwork. Today, the terms juke and footwork are used interchangeably.

Then known as GhettoTekz, the crew gained international recognition in 2010 on the release of Bangs & Works Vol. 1 (A Chicago Footwork Compilation) on British record label Planet Mu, which served as a spark for the formation of Teklife in 2011. The spotlight shined on DJ Rashad whose debut album Double Cup (2013) was released on Kode9's London-based Hyperdub record label, and was met with critical appraise. Reverberations of the sound Rashad helped pioneer can now be felt across the world, with footwork becoming a popular style for producers and dancers as far as Japan and parts of Russia. The Battlegroundz format has also been replicated overseas, such as in Tokyo as Battle Train. The collective itself has subsequently grown to include members from outside Chicago like DJ Paypal, and from a variety of countries such as Slick Shoota from Oslo, Norway and Feloneezy from Belgrade, Serbia.

TEKLIFE Records was formed in July 2015, just a year after DJ Rashad's unexpected death left thousands in shock and mourning at the loss of a true innovator. The label's first release, Afterlife is a posthumous compilation of tracks by DJ Rashad and collaborations with other Teklife collaborators that had been either unfinished or not yet released by the time of his death.

Members
• DJ Rashad

• DJ Spinn

• Ashes57

• RP Boo

• Gant-Man

• Traxman

• Taso

• DJ Earl

• DJ Taye

• Heavee

• DJ Tre

• Boylan

• Lightbulb

• Feloneezy

• Jackie Dagger

• DJ Manny

• JP Durban

• TCJ

• Tripletrain

• DBK

• Mel G

• DJ Paypal

• Deejay Chap Teklife

• DJ Phil

• Sirr Tmo

• Slick Shoota