Jlin – Autobiography

Autobiography offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex mind of one of dance music’s most enigmatic figures

Album Review by Michael Lawson | 25 Sep 2018
Album title: Autobiography
Artist: Jlin
Label: Planet Mu
Release date: 28 Sep

More often than not the coming together of dance music and high art makes for an awkward and ultimately unsatisfactory crossover. Recent examples, such as Haçienda Classiçal, the BBC Radio 1Xtra Grime Prom and Jeff Mills performing with the RTÉ Orchestra, offered little more than an exorbitantly-priced gimmick, with club music’s visceral qualities lost somewhere in the crossfire.

Yet when news broke that Chicago footwork protégé Jerrilynn Patton, aka Jlin, had been commissioned to score Autobiography, Wayne McGregor’s latest ballet composition, the collaboration felt like a perfect fit. Patton’s genre-transcending, polyrhythmic soundscapes expertly complement McGregor’s hypercomplex vision, in which he's worked with scientists to sequence his own genome using the mass data from his own DNA.

The 13-track score is also undoubtedly her most musically diverse project to date. From the impending apocalypse of the Carrie-sampling The Abyss of Doubt to the ethereal exoticism of Blue i, touching a number of bases in-between, Autobiography offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex mind of one of dance music’s most enigmatic figures.

Listen to: The Abyss of Doubt, Blue i, Mutation

http://planet.mu/artists/jlin/