Planet Mu レコード& CD

Review: Inimitable footwork titan Jlin returns for yet another challenging take on footwork and juke, Perspective. A pivotal follow-up to her 2017 album Black Origami, it comes as a comparatively terse mini-album, and consists of electronic versions of her compositions for the percussion ensemble Third Coast Percussion. Something about Perspective seems to appreciate footwork's rhythms as rhythmic "impossible shapes", owing to the genre's loose and sometimes off-kilter triplets. On the likes of 'Fourth Perspective' and 'Disonance', she seems to equate juke with minimalism, introducing Reichean additions and subtractions, not to mention a glassy, surreal timbre overall.

Review: The return of Jlin is always a cause to celebrate. In the eight short years since she first emerged, the US producer has firmly positioned herself as a fearlessly inventive, sharply focused artist who never misses. Her fourth album for Planet Mu continues her considered sonic evolution, maintaining the needlepoint percussive programming she's made her name on but broadening the source material to take in some more harmonically rich tones. As ever, you can hear a hint of footwork influence in her work but she's moved beyond obvious links to the Chicago sound, instead occupying her own space where brittle drum science can be a catalyst for rich, continually evolving electronics of the highest calibre.