Bleep

Seven years since her last full length, Bleep’s 2017 album of the year Black Origami, Jlin is back to melt minds with her latest batch of dextrous compositions.

That fateful ‘Erotic Heat’ drop on Bangs & Works Vol. 2 set up over a decade of innovation in the name of footwork, followed by a score for Wayne McGregor’s Autobiography, AI collaborations with Holly Herndon, and Pulitzer shortlisted compositions for Third Coast Percussion, but on her third album Akoma, Jlin pushes far beyond genre with her most significantly evolved and staggeringly impressive work to date.

Totally eviscerated orchestral and folk samples recontextualise Jlin’s beat-laden soundscapes, whether it’s deftly sliced strings from Kronos Quartet skipping like hyper-charged fragments of Markus Popp, or the corkscrewing twists and shakes of drum ensembles forming a kind of gamelan drill and bass on ‘Challenge (To Be Continued II)’ and ‘Eye Am’. Even her producer tag “Sounds of Jlin” is artfully placed, spiralling across tracks filled to the brim with her signature cascading percussion, clustered beat fills, and stuttering scintillations.

On top of that, Akoma features some of the past century’s most revered artists. ‘Borealis’ twitches and pulsates like a boa slithering through contorted sounds, with thousandfold beat switches in constant flux chopping up flutes and vocals from Björk. Meanwhile the speeding closer ‘The Precision Of Infinity’ finds Philip Glass’s piano edited into dense floods, or ghostly echoes meeting a reverent choir. In between is ‘Open Canvas’, an overwhelming take on hardcore techno that sprints with serrated synths like insectoid buzzing and what will likely be one of the heaviest basslines of 2024, then expertly switches into flashes of paradisiacal harp plucks.

Frankly, we’re all lucky to exist at the same time as such a dedicated composer and producer as Jlin, who furthers her descent into combining viscerally layered dancefloor sounds with classical composition on Akoma.