Jlin first made her name as a producer of footwork, a genre that emerged in Chicago alongside the dance style of the same name. Its defining features include breakneck tempos of 150 to 165 beats per minute, irregular, heavily syncopated rhythms, deep sub-bass, lo-fi production, and samples drawn from R&B and pop. The result is music of relentless energy, full of rhythmic twists and unexpected accents, pushing dancers to outdo one another with increasingly intricate, lightning-fast footwork.
Her debut track, Erotic Heat (2011), is still firmly rooted in the footwork tradition. Built around the sample, “The sweet seduction is haunting my dream,” it transforms a single vocal fragment into an insistent, pulsating rhythmic force. From there, Jlin steadily expanded the genre's boundaries. Her debut album, Dark Energy (2015), already hinted at this evolution. On the widely acclaimed Black Origami (2017), her music became denser, more intricate, and far less predictable, moving beyond footwork toward an abstract musical language unconstrained by genre. Collaborations with William Basinski and Holly Herndon reflect this artistic trajectory. On Akoma (2024), she adds two more iconic collaborators to the list: Björk and Philip Glass. The closing track, The Precision of Infinity, lets Glass's unmistakable arpeggios collide with Jlin's vibrant electronic textures.
For Jlin, rhythm is existential: “The original drum is the heartbeat, and without it you have nothing. So for me, rhythm is love and love is rhythm. I'm a walking rhythmic person or being." Rhythm is also the foundation of her music. Her compositions are built from meticulously crafted, often metallic sounding percussion, asymmetrical patterns, and constantly shifting accents. Exact repetition gives way to continual transformation. Jlin herself sums up her approach with the mantra: "CPU – Clean, Precise, Unpredictable."
In recent years, Jlin's uncompromising sonic universe has increasingly found an acoustic counterpart. Commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, she wrote Little Black Book (2018), a gripping work for string quartet and bass drum. At Bozar, you'll hear a new arrangement for ensemble performed by the Extended Music Collective. You'll also have the chance to experience Jlin live alongside Third Coast Percussion. Their previous collaboration, Perspective (2023), translated her electronic sound world into an astonishing array of percussion instruments—and earned Jlin a Pulitzer Prize nomination.
