Ever since the release of her first album, Dark Energy (2015), electronica artist Jlin has been on a roll.
In the genre of footwork — a type of electronic dance music that originated in Chicago during the 1990s and is characterized by rapid-fire vocal loops, fast tempos, repetitive samples, jittery drum patterns, and syncopated rhythms — she’s parlayed her success into a variety of collaborations that have brought her music into the world’s concert halls.
On November 15, Jlin will take center stage at UCLA’s The Nimoy, where she will also collaborate on a pre-performance listening party with the avant-garde opera company, The Industry. But don’t ask her what she’ll be playing, because it’s contingent upon, well, how the spirit moves her.
“I haven’t even put that set together yet, but you can expect you won’t be standing still,” Jlin shared with SF Classical Voice over the phone from her Indiana home. “It’s an expression of myself, [and] depending on who’s listening, if they find that they hate it, that’s totally fair. Just dance, enjoy. A lot of my music is not sit-still music. It has some groove to it.”
While her compositions can be thought of as space-agey, spontaneous, and thrilling, they often defy categorization. The artist describes her music as, “very naked, very vulnerable. That’s what I consider myself [to be]. Water is my inspiration, because water can go in anything, in any direction or adapt to anything that it touches.”
Born Jerrilynn Patton in 1987, she grew up in the rustbelt city of Gary, Indiana. She was raised on old school rhythm and blues, jazz, Latin-Cuban music, and everything from Tchaikovsky to Boy George.
Jlin, who worked in a steel mill from 2012 to 2015, does not read music. She composes using FL Studio, a digital audio workstation (DAW).
“What I do is I write a piece inside of the software, then I send a minute’s worth of music to whoever has commissioned me to write it, and they yea or nay it,” she explained. “I continue to edit, or start over. If they tell me to continue, I just write until it’s done.”
That process is decidedly working, as Jlin’s collaborators have included choreographers Wayne McGregor and Kyle Abraham, as well as new music heavyweights the Kronos Quartet and Third Coast Percussion. In fact, Jlin was a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Perspective, a six-track mini-album featuring Third Coast Percussion that showcased her inimitable blend of electronic and percussive music.
Needless to say, the musician was surprised by the Pulitzer nomination. “It came out of left field,” she recalled. “I was coming home from Amsterdam, where the Kronos had done their 50th [Anniversary] String Quartet Biennale and I got a text: ‘Congratulations on your Pulitzer [nomination].’ I texted back, ‘I think you got the wrong person, but thanks again. Maybe one day.’
“She texts me back and said, ‘Get on Google. Put your name and Pulitzer in there.’ I froze. I couldn’t believe it. I’m only 36-years-old, and that’s something you get in your 60s and 70s. It’s nuts. But I was so grateful.”
Her third and latest album, Akoma (2024) — the title is Ghanaian for “heart” — features collaborations with Philip Glass and Björk. “I talked to Björk a few days ago,” said Jlin. “That’s my sister. I love her very much. From the day I met her in 2016 or 2017, she was so welcoming [and] asked me to do a remix for her. When I did that, we became very close. We don’t talk often, but when we do, it’s important.”
The partnership with Glass was born because they share the same management firm, Pomegranate Arts. “I got into his music in 2004. I love [his score for] The Hours, and when I heard his Etude No. 6, I just was like ‘Oh, my god!’ He has a practice of getting up at 5 a.m., so I said, ‘I want him to do his normal 5 a.m., and whatever he plays, send it to me, then I can take it from there.’ That’s how [the track] ‘Precision of Infinity’ was made.”
Jlin is currently working on a commission for Alarm Will Sound, a contemporary music ensemble, as well as another for Third Coast Percussion.
She acknowledged that she’s somewhat of a math nerd. “Math and music for me are one and the same. The difference is, I can feel them both intuitively, but they’re different types of intuition. Music requires me to be quiet, and math requires me to sit still and do something else, and then everything will come.
“But,” she added, “my favorite time is when I write something nobody expects. I'm not doing this for an audience, I'm doing it because I need to, because I feel things in a different way.”
