Jlin - Black Origami
The Quietus
Radio 4 listeners tuning into Desert Island Discs on the morning of Sunday January 15 2017 probably weren’t expecting to be hit with the nuclear-force rhythmical intensity of Jlin, a producer from Gary, Indiana, whose 2015 debut album Dark Energy flipped the footwork template into daring new forms that were both mind-bendingly frenzied in their pace and incredibly elegant in their execution.
And yet, there on the British institution of light music and chat, alongside work from George Michael, Franz Schubert and Jim Reeves, was Jlin’s ‘Unknown Tongues’, a Dark Energy track that combines fidgety drum machines with the incessant jab of a pitched up vocal and a throbbing bass drum, the selection courtesy of that week’s Desert Island castaway, choreographer Wayne McGregor.
For all the incongruous setting, it made perfect sense that a choreographer like McGregor would find a kindred spirit in Jlin, a producer whose music is based around incredibly detailed rhythmical invention, where sounds seem to be employed for their metrical, rather than melodic, qualities and rhythms pile on top of rhythms in great shifting eddies of sound, creating beats within beats within beats. Jlin even named one track on Dark Energy ‘Black Ballet’.
Dark Energy may have been a riot in rhythm. But this rhythmical frenzy is even more marked on Black Origami, Jlin’s second album and one that is well named: the producer has compared composing her music to origami and you can hear over these 12 tracks how sounds, effects, samples, drums and other instruments fold into and over each other to produce work of incredible sonic detail.
Around half of the tracks here are made up almost exclusively of drums, which might be a bit off-putting if you were dealing with the limited rhythmic palette of most electronic music producers. But Jlin really throws the door open, using percussive sounds that range from marching bands to gongs to tablas.
A prime example of this is ‘Challenge (To Be Continued)’, which sounds like precisely that - a challenge, as if someone dared Jlin to combine the strident, none-more-American sound of a marching band with the jittering percussive lines of footwork. And combine them she does, into the kind of über percussive bombast that feels like a party going on just behind your eyeballs, topped off - why not? - with the sound of an elephant trumpeting. It is loud, frenetic, hugely exciting and yet also immensely subtle, an incredible piece of percussive programming that sounds like someone solving a Rubik’s cube in 5D stereo sound. ‘Hatshepsut’, ‘Challenge’’s near cousin, also features the tight, rattling snares of a marching band, to which Jlin adds a fantastically unexpected wobbling rave Hoover noise, which is chopped into triplets and thrown into the percussive mix in a moment of jump-out-of-your-seat joy.
This global game of kiss chase, joining the dots between disparate percussive elements, is one of the keys to Black Origami. Much of the album draws its inspiration from Jlin’s ongoing collaborations with Indian dancer / movement artist Avril Stormy Unger - Jlin has said that the lithe and writhing ‘Carbon 7’ is directly inspired by the way Avril moves and dances - while tracks like ‘Enigma’ and ‘Kyanite’ feature what sounds like Indian percussion instruments and patterns. The latter track is a particular highlight, as Jlin cuts up a vocal sample into micro syllables, then throws them back together to create brilliant pop hooks, a trick she repeats on the almost hip hop of ‘Never Created, Never Destroyed’, which features vocals from Cape Town rapper Dope Saint Jude.
Elsewhere, ‘Nyakinyua Rise’ plays off the sound of a djembe against a pulsing drum machine bass drum, shakers and flickering hi hats, while album’s title track and opening song lulls the listener into a false sense of security by kicking off with the relaxing sounds of a digitalised Japanese harp before explodes like dirty percussive bomb, spraying radiated hi-hats all over the mix.
By themselves these new percussive elements would be enough to make Black Origami as a significant development in Jlin’s already hugely original sound. But she pairs these brilliant rhythmic puzzles with a couple of tracks which show yet another new string to her bow, without breaking up the album’s overall feel. ‘Holy Child’, a collaboration with minimalist composer William Basinski, opens up space in the Jlin sound to let the light shine briefly through, thanks to a celestial operatic vocal, while ‘Calcination’ is one of the most beautiful pieces of music that Jlin has put her name to, an almost ambient number where percussion takes a back seat to a gothic vocal line.
In April 2016 when Jlin first announced the existence of her coming second album she said it would be “very far left of footwork”. If anything, this was underplaying things: Dark Energy was already a significant left turn for footwork and Black Origami is a leap into the future from that, with probably only ‘1%’ (featuring Holly Herndon) from Black Origami sounding like anything on her first album.
More than footwork, then, Black Origami feels closer to the spirit of Photek, Squarepusher or Aphex Twin in the mid 90s, when these producers took the rhythmic intensity of drum and bass and squeezed and contorted it into fascinating new shapes and it is notable that Aphex played a couple of Jlin tracks at his recent US DJing comeback. That might make Black Origami sound like an academic success, the kind of record to be poured over in gear-obsessed websites and drum machine forums. But it really isn’t. Sure, you could spend hours obsessing over the rhythmic detail on Black Origami. But you could also dance, drink and be merry to it, much like the best work of Aphex et al.
Such a comparison, of course, puts Jlin up against some especially heavy competition, three of the most respected electronic music producers of all time. But on the evidence of Dark Energy - tQ’s album of the year for 2015 - and now Black Origami, an astounding orgy of global polyrhythm, she deserves it.
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Fri May 19 07:28:32 GMT 2017Pitchfork 88
Jlin’s relationship with genre has always been complicated. For as long as she has been recording, the Gary, Ind. producer has been associated with footwork, the hyperactive post-house music spawned alongside the equally chaotic competitive dance style popular in neighboring Chicago. Superficially, the affiliation makes sense. She counts both footwork godfather RP Boo and its most revered son, the late DJ Rashad, among her mentors and made her earliest appearance on the second installment of Planet Mu’s genre-survey Bangs & Works. But she built these ties at a distance; not from weekend road trips into Chicago but from hand-me-down juke tapes and, later, through Myspace messages and extended phone conversations with her influences.
This is, of course, a uniquely 21st-century phenomenon: an artist situating themselves at the center of a culture, particularly such a socially oriented one, from the comfort of their bedroom. And this outsider/insider contradiction has long been a source of power for Jlin, giving her the means to master the tools of this potent style while still operating without any obligation to its conventions. On Dark Energy, her 2015 debut, this meant stripping footwork’s stuttered-triplet-everything model down to its skeleton and draping it in frigid industrial textures; her day job at a steel mill provided critics with a too-perfect shorthand for the project’s brutalist impulses. The follow-up, Black Origami, is more difficult to define, moving further away from footwork’s literal sonic qualities while reclaiming and amplifying the genre’s already imposing physicality.
Black Origami is a gorgeous and overwhelming piece of musical architecture, an epic treatise on where rhythm comes from and where it can go. The lone ping-pong synth squiggle that opens the album on its title track is misdirection because the 40-some minutes that follow are nearly absent of melody. It’s all perpetually escalating polyrhythmic tension, a time-stopping barrage of drum rolls and disembodied angelic voices. The only moments of calm come in the milliseconds of silence between songs.
Like her juke and footwork predecessors, Jlin tends to favor the stock digital sounds of ’90s drum machines to the warmer analog kits of the ’80s or the mutated grandchildren thereof, which now dominate contemporary urban/electronic music. This only adds to the disorienting effect of the record’s intensity, as there is nothing quite like being pummeled by hyper-vivid clavs and shakers grown in the heart of the uncanny valley. This creates a certain grace to this chaos. It’s not dance music per se, at least not in the way footwork originally was—it’s also not not dance music the way the gulps of 808 move against the many polyrhythms of “Nyakinyua Rise.” The martial undercurrent to the record builds from cross-firing drum lines and drill whistles, battle cries and elephant roars. It's like Jlin is less interested in violence than she is the precise motion and strategy of warfare. (This, too, might be read as a nod back to the battle elements of footwork.)
As listeners of electronic music have become so closely attuned to its many shifting micro-genres, their natural inclination may be to decode and map out these many moving parts. Fans of contemporary club music might try to situate it in the context of not just footwork but the similarly charged movements currently happening in Lisbon or Durban. Those more closely attuned to avant-garde corners of the electronic music world could invoke the data-dense sputtered beat structures of Autechre or Ikue Mori’s experiments in teasing humanity out of canned drum machines. An ear more rooted in traditional music might catch the strands of drum corps and school bands (c.f. the marching snares “Hatshepsut”), tribal seances, and gamelan ensembles.
The wonderful thing about Black Origami is that it’s all of these things and none of them at once. It’s a rhythm-spanning collection of contradictions and colliding worlds—the intensity of social music refracted through an introverted mind, the physical converted into digital and back again, the past told through future music and vice versa—all making the case that rhythm is too infinite, too forceful to be reduced to mere utilitarian functions. It denies listeners the question of, “What do I do with this music?” and forces them to react directly to what it does to them. It’s a pure exercise in sound-as-power, music that has no specific agenda beyond simply making itself felt.
Thu May 18 05:00:00 GMT 2017Tiny Mix Tapes 80
Jlin
Black Origami
[Planet Mu; 2017]
Rating: 4/5
There is a commonplace understanding that the true test of artificial intelligence lies in the 70-ish-year-old Turing Test, wherein a human is either able or unable to identify an agent of artificial intelligence as such. There exists another vein of criticism, however, which posits that perhaps artificial intelligence is of itself a form of perception that has only very little to do with the human perspective, and that the latter should not necessarily be litmus for the efficacy of the former. This is the perspective capable of acknowledging the Anthropocene and of conceiving of machine intelligence as something other than merely an oppressive, late-capitalist burden.
I saw Jlin perform twice at Montreal’s MUTEK festival last June: once in a field, once inside a museum gallery (respectively, a DJ set and a live set). In the field, Jlin spun footwork and juke to a crowd of eurotrash-chic teens and grayscale-clad art world adults alike, setting aside their differences to mutually lose their shit. Classic battle dance and hard-house tracks from Chicago greats — DJ Rashad, RP Boo, DJ Deeon — abutting Jlin’s own Dark Energy cuts prompted a palpable imperative movement within the Sunday-evening crowd, impacting and spreading out through groupings of bodies in observable waves. Jlin smiled through the whole performance.
Inside the Musée d’art contemporain the night previous, awareness instead squared to the atmospheric pressure of a crowd that arrived expecting to dance, bodies hanging at the midpoint between seizure and restraint, drawn close at each rhythmic turn to something uncannily distinct from the auto-propulsive stutter of footwork. Footwork music typically compels people (who don’t know how to footwork) to bop their heads around in double-time casually, like they’re vibing to a club-friendly hip-hop track. Jlin’s austere performance did not offer that channel for corporal processing: it was something unforgivingly locked-in, brash in its circumvention of the same old two-step mindset.
Gone was any trace of lighthearted juke bounce, in its place a cascade of nervous percussive ornates, at once brutally monolithic in how their crescendos landed unfailingly on the whole note yet iteratively complex on the syntactic level, never quite repeating the same phrase twice. Jlin articulated the massive mood of the rhythmic swells at the head of the room with zealous fist-pumps accentuating the whole notes. As the live performance developed, sounds more typically connoting footwork (rimshots, 808 bass and snare, that “whoosh” sound, vocals chopped beyond identification) slipped unnoticeable into the lexicon on a granular level, but they’d been redeployed into patterns allowing no refuge from its kinetic grip.
Although I assume most of the material has been altered dramatically from the inchoate strains audible in Jlin’s performance last summer, this same reorientation and reanimation of the footwork lexicon from within is what distinguishes Black Origami as a distinct stroke in the oeuvre of Jlin, Chicago (though the artist hails specifically from Gary, Ohio), and dance music lineage in general.
If footwork self-consciously deconstructed the established grammar of group movement and straightforward momentum that ghetto house and juke sought to unify, traumatically hollowing out the dance circle and exposing its center to a Promethean chain of iterations, Black Origami abstracts the discourse once again, moving from a semiotic matrix into a topographical one. The long-fermented grammar of life articulated in footwork reincarnates on Jlin’s latest record as pure, intelligent substance, imbibed and outwardly projected to cultivate a deep nod of xenolalia: the divine, unaccountable performance of a language that the speaker has never formally acquired.
The press materials for Black Origami cite a deliberate turn on the part of Jlin toward the pure core of creation, as well as an attempt to draw influence from collaboration with Indian dancer Avril Stormy Unger. There is an antagonism seeded within this construction of artistic intention that characterizes a prominent tension on the record: there are more tongues, more symbols, more strokes, more metrics, more compositional strategies (via Jlin’s collaborators, among them the infamous minimalist William Basinski, cyborg vocalist Holly Herndon, and neo-futurist producer Fawkes) here than ever before (even for a record in a sample-based lineage), yet the micro-breakdowns inherent in its proud heteroglossia sketch at the shadow-outline of a deep, unitary substance — that same dark energy, distilled and machine-learning its own genus of ornates.
The title track kicks off this unfunky, machinic skittering, orchestrated with a polyphony of oblique, inward-folding voices that glide over and under one another. In conjunction with biomorphic vocal sounds, “Black Origami” invokes a sense of deep reverence, underpinned with cyborgian anxiety and the suggestion of internal collapse. Timbrel strikes of tonal Indian drums function in much the same way an 808 tom conveys a pitch and frequency that, upon repetition, casts a chordal wash over even tracks bereft of conventional melody or dance music structures. Bird’s-eye surveillance topography of rhythmic structure is indeed the departure that enables compositions like these to emerge, one that tends inward towards the singularity of Jlin’s vision as much as it pulls from the scope of her influences.
“Enigma” and “Kyanite” follow in the same vein, accordingly accelerating the physical denial of simple resolution and calibrating to the neo-baroque sense of rupture and awe at the indistinct precipice of intuition and algorithmic sequence — the compositional palette parallels this, juxtaposing the spirit-exulting harshness of devotional reed instruments, breathless vocals (as on William Basinski-featuring [!!] “Holy Child”) with an evasive low end of mutating bass and tom patterns. Elsewhere, as on “Hatsepshut” and gripping album closer “Challenge (To Be Continued),” the same rhythmic pattern absorbs a militaristic drum-and-fife band rattle, landing somewhere between the playful ritualism of college drumline and an autopoetic war machine. This ambivalence, too, seems central to Jlin’s work, brutality never truly resolving against almost humorous moments of absurdity.
Themes of energy mining, chemical process, and energetic substance come to the fore on Black Origami both nominally (with track titles like “Kyanite,” “Calcination,” “Carbon 7 (161),” and “Never Created, Never Destroyed”) and in the manner that Jlin’s indelible rhythmic imprint mutates a lexicon of irresolvable heterogenous symbols and sounds. Take “1%,” whose sample bank deploys gestural, functional sound designs from across different genres of media and communication: the ascending whine sound that introduces the lead up to a chorus in drill music abuts the dead line sample from American landline phones (“We’re sorry, your call has not gone through…”) and the death warning of the Red Queen from Resident Evil.
This type of pan-cultural sampling is nothing new in the footwork lineage, but within the context of Black Origami’s intensifying last gasps, the gesture forcefully conveys a deep disjuncture, a vast traumatic gulch belying the convergence of multifarious semiotics that converges in machine intelligence, which anxiously surveils the dwindling energetic substances anchoring planetary biology and the ever-widening imprint of its own activities. The onus of Black Origami is neither to tame nor slay this chimera, but to trace its motions and pay exulted tribute. What emerges is a baroque topography of movement and energy, culled from the explosion of an ultra-specific cultural context outwards, and then back into the dusk.