Jlin follows up one of 2017's very best 12"s with her brand new and hugely anticipated long-player for Planet Mu, Black Origami. Continuing the peak time dancefloor devastation left behind by her debut Dark Energy, Black Origami comes on in double strength with an A list of collaborations including William Basinski (!!), Holly Herndon, Dope Saint Jude, Halcyon Veil's Fawkes plus Indian dancer and movement artist Avril Stormy (with whom Jlin previously collaborated at Unsound festival). No matter which way you approach it, Jlin's Black Origami is one of the most fast-paced, disorientating and above all else gut-wrenchingly exciting records you are gonna come across bar none.
As a label Planet Mu has consistently forged a path ahead that has had countless other labels swimming in its wake. Not content with releasing some of the very best (now classic) breakcore and dubstep records around, Mu went on to trailblaze by breaking footwork into the world with two volumes of the now legendary Bangs & Works compilations. Packed to the brim with exciting new sounds, it was Jlin's 'Erotic Heat' that stood out the most, and still to this day continues to be caned by those DJs looking to turn the dancefloor into the most avant-garde game of keep up twister you are ever gonna witness.
Always moving forward and having dropped one of 2015's very best albums, two 12" killers and a slew of sick remixes (check her Factory Floor for some dynamite destruction!) Jlin returns with her most realised vision of electronic music yet. Driven by a creative thirst that she describes as “this driving feeling that I wanted to do something different, something that challenged me to my core. Black Origami for me, comes from letting go creatively, creating with no boundaries. The simple definition of origami is the art of folding and constructing paper into a beautiful, yet complex design. Composing music for me is like origami, only I’m replacing paper with sound. I chose to title the album “Black Origami” because like “Dark Energy” I still create from the beauty of darkness and blackness. The willingness to go into the hardest places within myself to create for me means that I can touch the Infinity”. Black Origami is an album that puts both spirituality and movement in sync, basing a lot of the rhythmic structures around Avril Stormy's dance moves, Jlin has thus created an incredibly vivid realisation of, for want of a better term "dance music" can be within the current 'post-genre' electronic underground.
Much like the image of the cover's metal elephant portrays, Black Origami contains some huge, yet utterly beautiful sounds that seemingly fold in on each other as the record evolves, creating a melting pot mixture of off-tempo snares that ricochet like a machine gun snare firing carnivorous springs around the stereo field, while testones add a touch of techno to that pure peak time in the dance void. Much like Photek's approach to jungle in the '90s and Instra:mental's take on electro in the '00s, Jlin is transforming and transcending this current decade's most visceral club sounds into areas of experimentation that most of her contemporaries couldn't even begin to dream of.
It's telling that everyone from Aphex Twin, Kuedo, Basinski and even Wayne McGregor (who played her music recently on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs and described her music as “quite rare and so exciting”) is hard into this stuff. Take it from us, Jlin is so far ahead of the game it will probably be another two albums before we all finally catch our breath and are able to move ahead from this one.
