It’s not often in today’s hyper-connected, inter-webby world that a good band, let alone a vibrant scene, goes undiscovered for long. Yet somehow, for the best part of a decade, the world overlooked Chicago’s fckutasticly futuristic Footwork scene, and it took Planet Mu’s 2010 compilation Bangs and Works: Volume 1 to rectify this.

Footwork, the latest mutation of Chi-town’s Ghetto-House continuum is based around upbeat, 160 bpm tempos, Frankenstein-esq digital mutilations of the human voice, fat subbass and limb-confounding poly-rhythms with lots and lots of tom toms. It simultaneously sounds like all dance music smushed together and like nothing else before it. Volume 1 was all about showcasing this genre’s strangeness. Volume 2, its diversity.

Jlin goes in with two of the highlight tracks – ‘Exotic Heat’ with its N-Type-esque saw tooth wobble and militaristic drum rolls and ‘Asylum’ which hits with the epic force of Holst’s ‘Mars’. Traxman’s ‘Funky Block’ takes an old Funk lick and speeds it up, slows it down, plays it backwards and forwards to both hypnotic and maddening effect. Gloopy.

On ‘Bullet Proof Soul’, Boylan arranges his toms into a rolling breakbeat, layers them with jazzy piano and then throws some pitched up Hardcore diva into the mix, bringing to mind a deranged cousin of LTJ Bukem’s Jazzy Jungle.  ‘DJ Client #1’ sounds like a condensed history of African-American rhythmic experimentalism, drawing the links between Jazz, Funk, and now, Footwork. Young Smoke’s ‘Wouldn’t Get Far’s phaser-drenched vox and halfstep beat evoke the Housier-end of Joy Orbison. DJ Metro’s ‘Burn Dat Boi’ represents the olds-school Chicago sound with its menacing hip-hop vocals.

Unfortunately, the only sound missing is that which is most likely to win Footwork new fans. More melodic, rhythmically palatable, housey tracks like DJ Rashad’s ‘Nite Love’ or ‘Deep Inside’ are conspicuous by their absence. Such are the tracks that anyone could listen and instantly love, and importantly, know how to dance too. Their non-inclusion seems obstinate and elitist. Yet those who persevere will find an album for the mind and for the feet, to love because of, not despite, its weirdness.