It’s a sign of the accelerated times we’re living in that a subculture as specific to Chicago as footwork has already mutated into an unfurling landscape of electronic producers all over the world. The genre has come a long way from its dance-off roots and, with each passing year its hyperactive DIY ethos seems to evolve further and further, splintering into separate factions that each take a different approach to footwork’s simple and freeing framework.The footwork sound is one of those magical things that’s hard to put precisely into words, but whether it’s in the scattered bass pulses of RP Boo (pictured), the schizophrenic loop madness of Foodman, or the cascading drum samples of Jlin, you just know it when you hear it. So take a stroll through our collection of the various faces representing footwork today, and see just how many different ways there are to move.

On paper, it might not seem like Ariel Pink has achieved anything drastic or revelatory with his lo-fi take on pop music. He’s certainly not the first songwriter to record smeared demo tapes on cheap equipment, or to reinvent AM-radio sounds from the ‘70s and ‘80s for the new millennium, or to tackle sexuality and gender fluidity with a theatrical flair. But it’s the way Pink combines these impulses—infusing his melodies with a terrifying, intensely antisocial sense of longing, and imbuing his ironic sense of humor with legitimate emotional release—that makes his music so insular and universal all at once. The man also has an innate ability for crafting snappy, gratifying songs that worm their way into your head, taking a little bit from every era in musical history while remaining unequivocally on his own trip.Whether he’s updating the vulgar antics of Frank Zappa and Ween for the 21st century, reinterpreting yacht-rock staples like Hall & Oates and Michael McDonald as gothy lords of the underworld, or evoking a Rocky Horror-like delight in sexual freedom and deviance, Ariel Pink is a truly unique voice in pop music, an experimental wizard as avant-garde as he is accessible. Hit play on our mix above to hear just what makes him tick.

Where oh where did all the dance-punk bands go? In the first decade of the new millennium, amid the countless other genres that looked back at older music through rosy glasses (chillwave, freak folk, neo-psychedelia), few dominated both the mainstream charts as well as the underground as heavily as dance-punk did. Though the sound’s essential properties came down to a fusion of punk and disco, its purveyors ranged from award-collecting pretty-boys (Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chefs) to aging hipsters carving out new territory (LCD Soundsystem, Le Tigre). Some groups leaned more heavily into their funk forebears (Electric Six, VHS Or Beta), while others embraced a pop-friendly mix of acoustic and electric instrumentation, shooting for the festival stages while riding a steady wave of blog buzz (Matt And Kim, Two Door Cinema Club).Though often fairly accessible (it is dance music after all), bands that practised the sound often thrived on an indie-schooled sense of cool, never straying too far from their rock roots as they attempted to bring guitar music into the 21st century. You can still hear the echoes of the sound in indie rock today, even if most of its original architects have been left by the wayside. But with dance-punk luminaries Franz Ferdinand returning in February with their fifth album, Always Ascending, we took the time to revisit some of the genre’s most definitive moments. Hit play, and bust out those MySpace moves.

It’s hard to describe exactly what it is that composer Daniel Lopatin pulls off under the ever-shifting guise of Oneohtrix Point Never. From his early days of programming minimal, evocative vistas of synthesizer dystopia to his newer interests in the gnarly, Kornier sides of our culture, Lopatin has managed to reinterpret his own vision time and time again without losing the essential, prickly feeling one gets from listening to his music. At the heart of all the uncanny manipulation of sound is a concept of the individual — disenchanted yet wide-eyed, obsessed with the psychedelic while hopelessly plugged into the minutiae of the day-to-day, the kind of mind that is restless even when surrounded by the dewiest, most calming of new-age tones. It’s ambient music made for headbanging, both frustrated and perverted and drenched in a nostalgia that always manages to keep its gaze toward the future. For all of the formalist structure that Lopatin imposes over his own chopped-up aesthetic, what he taps into in his work reaches beyond the realm of critique; it is a spiritual music of the self, relentlessly undergoing transformation, and attempting to discern exactly what it is.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Visible Cloaks’ Reassemblage is the latest in a string of recent electronic music to investigate the ties between Eastern and Western forms of music, connecting commercial and spiritual art forms to create a mélange of plastic textures and heavenly auras. You can hear a similar—albeit more disturbing—collision in the Internet diaspora of vaporwave, or the constantly shifting configurations of Oneohtrix Point Never. But this meeting of schizophrenic digital assemblage and tranquil meditation stretches back into the ’80s as well, through the extraterrestrial world music of Jon Hassell.In widening the sonic palette of what constitutes easy listening, these artists lead the charge in finding new ways to zone out as we step further into the future, creating a liminal space where film scores, computer start-up sounds, and video game music can all mingle together in the otherworldly deep end. This playlist seeks to piece together the fractured influences of Reassemblage, and to illustrate the lush history of music that pushes the limits of what ambient means.

One of the most elusive, confrontational, and downright bizarre artists to ever grace the pages of rock history, Frank Zappa staked his entire being on messing with people. To outsiders, his music can seem both needlessly intellectual and disgustingly immature, but beneath all his crude jokes and mind-bogglingly complex compositions lies one of the first true avant-garde composers to make major waves in the rock mainstream. His cynical tirades and knotty arrangements certainly have a way of testing his listeners’ limits, yet the magic of Zappa’s music is how much fun the man clearly had designing his eccentric sounds, fusing the worlds of classical music, rhythm and blues, free-form jazz, and comedy as if they were naturally meant to be together all along.As a young L.A. guitarist gigging in the city’s ‘60s freak scene, Zappa immediately stood out from his contemporaries with his staunch anti-drug stance and utter distaste for the entire flower power movement, backing up his satirical and sarcastic music with daring, genre-defying arrangements and serious instrumental chops. Early releases like Freak Out! (1966) embodied Zappa’s sense of humor, but it wasn’t until 1969’s Uncle Meat and Hot Rats that Zappa began to fully let his compositions run wild, incorporating long sections of free improvisation with performances so coordinated and tight that it’s almost hard to believe people actually played them. Zappa’s early phase reached a zenith with his two most popular records to date, Over-Nite Sensation (1973) and Apostrophe (1974), which mixed his juvenile sensibility with a bluesy take on classic rock, making for surprisingly hooky songs that still felt like one big joke.As Zappa’s career went on, he took every possible opportunity to use his music to express his political ire, none more prominently than the filthy-funk epic Joe’s Garage (1979), which envisioned a world where the government has outlawed music. He continued to approach his music from a more serious angle in his later years, commissioning orchestras to perform his work (as on The Yellow Shark) and even pioneering computer music in the late ‘80s on albums like Jazz From Hell. But even at his most academic and studious, Zappa was never one to keep a straight face. Though he died in 1993 of prostate cancer, his sense of irony and musical dexterity has lived on to this day, inspiring everyone from Ariel Pink to Phish.Zappa’s world is certainly a peculiar one, and reconciling his jokey disposition with his outlandish music requires a certain level of patience and adventurousness on the part of the listener. But his music represents a freedom in expression that one rarely sees in the mainstream, a win for the freaks whose legacy continues to endure. To crack the code on one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most mischievous maestros, hit “play” on our mix, and hold on tight.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!The effects the Internet has had on human civilization can’t be understated. You can see it in our industries, our social behavior, and our very psychological health. The Internet is an invasive presence in our society, pushing us toward the future whether we’re ready for it or not. It’s thanks to the Internet that I have a job, yet it’s also thanks to the Internet that I become intensely anxious about what dumb status I’m going to post on Facebook. Our entire culture has shifted to accommodate the presence of this connecting force that nonetheless seems to isolate us, and now it’s impossible to imagine a reality where we turn back from this road we’re on.Music has reflected these changes in splendid detail, giving us ample reason to be excited about living in such strange times. The possibility of directly reaching listeners all around the planet has paved the way for bizarre and exciting new formats to emerge, such as the hyper-saccharine pop madness of the PC Music collective, or the Chicago street phenomenon footwork, which has already sprouted fans and disciples as far away as Japan. If anything, it’s overwhelming how much incredible music we now have access to thanks to the Internet, the old guards of the industry cast away to make room for new ideas and artists capable of broadcasting to the masses from the comfort of their bedrooms.The music of the Internet era has defined itself through diversity, and there are common, shared ideas that emerge from the ethos of digital art. Much of our recent experimental music finds inspiration in the uncomfortable merging of opposing forms—artists like Oneohtrix Point Never and QT spin fantastic new shapes through the juxtaposition of uncanny sound manipulations and inescapably alluring Top 40 mechanics. A DIY mentality also pulses through a lot of music today, as with the gloriously simple and infectious Internet rap of Lil Yachty, or the barebones, anything-goes mania of DJ Paypal. But to paint the Internet as an entirely positive force would be closing your eyes to its strangely imprisoning nature, a dynamic deeply explored in the schizophrenic rap of Death Grips and the pained electronic distortion of Holly Herndon and Arca.All of the artists on this playlist share a common inspiration: picking apart the nature of society’s new favorite medium and the effects it has on our perceptions, memories, and experiences we subject ourselves to, given endless customization options. The old notion of genres has given way to an endless sea of individuality, where the mainstream has become underground and the underground has gone mainstream. The future is here, and it’s even more horrifying and beautiful than we ever could have imagined. Hit play to take a tour of the sounds emitted from our hyperreal, constantly connected world.