Rigor is a virtue for Jlin. The Gary, Indiana producer and composer born Jerrilynn Patton is the kind of artist who watches Whiplash and identifies with the teacher, who’s argued that “you shouldn’t create simply because it sounds good to you,” who rejects loops and builds her fearsome post-footwork beats from scratch. It’s surprising, then, to learn that she left a few “mistakes” in her 2017 opus Black Origami; “I like feeling vulnerable,” she told Tone Glow. But while that album seemed to fly off the rails in exactly the way the creator desired, her new album Akoma radiates cool, simmering control. There’s never any doubt that each percussive element and textural glint has landed precisely where Patton intended, yet this samurai-precise music is as unpredictable as a shroomy Ricardo Villalobos odyssey. There’s a delightful contrast at play: Despite the record’s un-psychedelic qualities, the way it yanks the synapses could make you swear you’re seeing colors.
Akoma is technically Jlin’s third album, and her first new solo LP since Black Origami, but the breadth of her craft has expanded vastly in the time between. She scored Autobiography, a dance piece by Wayne McGregor, and pushed her sound into gnarlier realms of tech-noise on her Embryo EP; most auspiciously, she became a Pulitzer finalist for Perspective, a collaboration with Third Coast Percussion. It feels like a miraculous journey for a producer who started out making beats while working 96-hour weeks at a steel mill—and who emerged from a hyper-regional Black dance subgenre that’s been underground for such a long time the 36-year-old Patton recalls hearing footwork at a neighbor’s house when she was four. But Patton’s always been that good, ever since she debuted on the seminal Bangs & Works Vol. 2 compilation with “Erotic Heat”; Pitchfork’s Jonathan Williger was right to question in his review of Perspective why it took collaborating with a classical ensemble for the Pulitzers to take notice.
Akoma wears its classical bona fides on its sleeve, not least with guest appearances by Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet. Neither of them is really asked to do much: Glass’s spider-fingered études fill the gaps between the drums on “The Precision of Infinity,” while Kronos saw away madly in the distance on “Sodalite.” It’s funny that Jlin’s actual collaboration with a string quartet is so much less string-heavy than “Summon,” a sort of warped chamber piece that seems perpetually poised to collapse like some delicate paper structure. For that matter, Björk is a ghost on “Borealis,” which came from a proposed collaboration whose parts Jlin salvaged for her own purposes. These luminaries’ names seem present in the credits for the same reason Patton decided to name one track after an Egyptian goddess and another after her “Grannie’s Cherry Pie” (actually a cobbler, it turns out): These figures are as much collaborators as inspirations and exemplars, pushing Patton to give her best.
There are enough beat-switches, breakdowns, switcheroos, and change-ups on any given track to give “Bohemian Rhapsody” hives. “Speed of Darkness” and “Open Canvas” are the two longest and most compositionally impressive cuts, the former assembling and reassembling itself out of pockets of silence, the latter something of a free-jazz riff on earlier Midwest dance classics like “Percolator.” Four-on-the-floor kicks appear, disappear, and leave nothing but triplets and pockets of empty space, and it’s a safe bet that if a song settles into anything resembling a groove it’ll splinter apart just as rapidly. The underlying structural logic governing these tracks isn’t always easy to suss out, but there’s no doubt that it’s there; this music is always developing, never meandering, repeating elements only when necessary.
Patton’s music draws from a wide range of sources in addition to electronic and classical music. Her love of HBCU marching bands carries over from Black Origami, and the arrangements should inspire nods of recognition (and memories of grueling rehearsal) from anyone who’s ever been in or written for drum corps. Sometimes Akoma sounds like fife-and-drum blues or AACM jazz or African music, even when it’s written in the language of footwork, where whip-crack 808 and 909 snares are the norm. She even includes a few more traditional juke cuts like “Auset” and “Grannie’s Cherry Pie” to show what she’s capable of in a more conventional mode—and how far she’s come from Bangs & Works. Footwork has always drawn from omnivorous sources (check out Traxman’s face-melting AC/DC flip), but Jlin’s work is lighter on samples than most productions in the genre, and her inspirations are deeply woven into the music’s rhythmic DNA rather than left floating on top.
Jlin’s music is light on melodic and harmonic elements, which can make it a non-starter for those who require something pretty to latch onto. What’s going on in the foreground often exists to perfume the background, as on “Iris,” where the distant ghost of a cell phone ringtone snakes through a near-overwhelming barrage of drums and a vicious acid bassline that sounds like someone grasping a large flying insect. Those accustomed to thinking of percussion as an inherently auxiliary instrument will have to readjust their expectations, as will anyone looking for a casual listening experience and unwilling to enter an almost prey-like state of alertness. Jlin’s world is not always an easy one to navigate, but the endorphin rush her music provides just might inspire a listener to add a little more challenge to their life.
