Released: 29/09/23
I remember seeing Jlin at small experimental music festival in Bergen, Norway, about 10 or so years ago, and she lit the place up. Granted, she was the final act on a day of extremely atonal avant-garde classical music, and by 10pm all of the Norwegian art-school fashionistas were desperate to turn give their brain some respite and dance like lunatics – but the wild, slightly dystopian polyrhythmical onslaught managed to both match the outré tone of the festival, and more than meet the night-time-right-time-let’s-go needs of everyone in attendance. Which is a hard thing to pull off, to say the least.
But even as good as the Indiana native was back then, how evident was her enormous talent, her evolution as an artist is still astounding – 2023 saw her being shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Music; and then there are her brilliant collaborations with dance companies, especially those of Wayne McGregor and Kyle Abraham – to the point that, on Perspective, it seems inadequate to even call her music EDM, footwork, or whatever, because, simply, no one sounds like Jlin.