Preview

Jlin is the recording alias of Jerrilynn Patton, an electronic music producer from Gary, Indiana. Initially associated with Chicago’s footwork scene, her music evolved far beyond that style, exploring unheard rhythms and placing her in a category of her own. Following her acclaimed albums Dark Energy (2015) and Black Origami (2017), the pandemic propelled a renewed love of her craft into her latest EP album, Embryo, as expressed in an interview with NPR:

“The way those tracks are created, it may have been created in bad spaces, but people dance to them. That makes me happy. Because in the midst of that, there’s the balance of life. It happened in a bad circumstance, but hey, y’all are dancing, and it’s cool! It makes perfect sense.”

This UMS Live Session was filmed in January 2022 at the University of Michigan’s Power Center for the Performing Arts. Multimedia artists Fee and Sky Christoph transformed the Power Center lobby’s brutalist spiral staircase into a dynamic canvas, using a microscope camera, digital manipulation, and a high-resolution projector to visualize Jlin’s beats.