Menace is a sensation endemic to footwork, the Chicago-borne genre of heart-racing house music that is predicated on going harder and better than anyone else on the floor. Dark Energy, the first album from Gary, Ind. producer Jlin, hints at this idea of combativeness, bending all matter of percussion, vocal clips and pre-existing ideas about footwork into submission. Jlin’s talked about the mediocrity that can result from working from a happy place, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some joy at work in her music—it’s found in the process of creating and, for listeners, in the release of the dancefloor. That sly flip—the thrill and release in activating anger—is the emotional ingenuity in Jlin’s music. It’s a certain mindfulness she has in common with Rick Owens, who used her music—and that of pioneering footworker RP Boo—for his FW 2014/15 Paris Fashion Week show. Grim, monochrome upper; mind-altering interior.
Dark Energy has all the hallmarks of footwork—its frenzied pacing, arrhythmic kick drums, a graphic command of blank space—executed with clear-eyed self-determination. This gives the album an opaque, thoughtful quality. It's Jlin’s first release, centered around a track that first went live in 2010 ("Erotic Heart"), which means she’s had time to think about what she’s doing and, more importantly, what she is not doing. While working shifts at one of Gary’s many large steel mills, Jlin spent months perfecting the music, including songs like "Guantanamo", which cleaves hair-raising dialogue from The Ring with a grip of pin-sharp synths. Her tenacity feels even more significant when you consider that she’s a woman working in the man-saturated field of electronic production, and footwork in particular. For women, producer’s anonymity is both gift and curse.
A bunch of these song titles also invite loose contemplation on narratives of blackness, and/or racialized peoples. "Black Diamond" and “Black Ballet” scan more literally, whereas songs like “Guantanamo,” “Ra” and “Mansa Musa” prompt ideas about history, mythology, imprisonment, culture wars and a clash of civilizations. Jlin doesn’t editorialize, and this record isn’t specifically about identity politics. But she’s from Gary, a blue collar, black-majority city, making a record within a genre created for and by African-Americans at a time when the non-white citizenry is growing increasingly restless and hella loud about owning its art and likeness, its safety and life expectancy. Dark Energy has absorbed some of the shock. It has knowledge of self. Throw it onto the list of recent albums, like Heems’ Eat Pray Thug and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, that take personal, political and temporal stock of our lives and refuse to be one-dimensional in chronicling these experiences.
This sense of brooding becomes music that feels venomous. "Mansa Musa"—the name of a prominent ruler and cultural benefactor of the Mali Empire—clarifies Dark Energy’s happy-scary tension best. Halfway through the album, its fizzy, midtempo gait feels like a break from the intensity. But it’s a feint. Effervescent synths and skeletal drums lift the song up only to have a descending bassline and stiff snares prick its rise, sending it flopping to its death like a deflated balloon.
With the exception of vocal snippets, which appear frequently, Jlin doesn’t bother with traditional sampling. She’s generated her own instrumentation: from the winding, symphonic piano loop that opens the album on "Black Ballet" and the atonal moan of a Chinese erhu violin on "Unknown Tongues" to the guttural synths that skim the bottom of "Ra". Like Jlin it’s unconventional, particularly within footwork. Her homespun mutation of the genre feels like she’s staging an interrogation, and there’s the sense of threat: What do you feel when you hear the hollowed-out militant stomp and shiver of "Black Diamond"? What physical realm does this song slip into and out of as pinched, tweaked-out synths whirr ecstatically to life then stop? Are you having fun yet?
