Teklife

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[3] alongside fellow Teklife veteran DJ Gant-Man.

The label, whose roster included Gant-Man, had been 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.

[4] 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 faced off against one another to the beats produced and played by the duo.

Eventually, dancers requested something even faster, "something crazy, something unexpected"[1], as DJ Rashad recalled 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.

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.