Review Summary: Anxious fidgety cogs throw a dance party and you are not invited.
If you are anything like me, an indecent pervert, then you must have been deeply upset by the realisation that footwork is just some music genre. Those of you particularly keen on playing detective must also be rather displeased.
Footwork, from what my meekly sheltered eurowhite philistine understanding can surmise, is a 90s-bred sub-sub-genre (the pervert licked his lips at the double sub there, while the detective took a note that inquiries must be conducted) of house music, wherein all beats and melodies are conducted exclusively by percussion, studio-recorded or artificially manifested. The style also extensively draws influence from deconstruction of melody and harmony, often relegating its life force solely to angular rhythms and sampled percussive sounds. Within this, the style’s golden child, Jlin, made her splash oh so known, oh so distinctly. Think corroded jungle music, lavished with crisp click-clacks of old timey computers, ornated with zinging cymbal loops and some such compositional wizardry. There sits Jlin’s splatter of monochromatic instruments. Her first two albums were greatly revered by the general critic and mostly met with confusion or indifference by the general public. Her particular pursuit of repetition, cyclical hypnotics, and sampling bases reached near academic levels of pedanticism. This alienated plenty a casual listener hoping for a semblance of conceivable order. Yet there is order, ever so slightly off balance and off the yellow brick road. The order here, as well as on other Jlin records, is a fickle creature, vibrantly shifting within the extremities of percussive hopscotch. Order is a thing of mockery for Jlin. Rhythm is order, but rhythm is a living, breathing entity unto itself. Order here is thus also an organism with its own opinion and desire for subjective choice.
A song like “Derivative” is at once a riposte to all criticisms of repetition, overt influence, insufficient variety in sound and production. The song is by far the least footwork-adjacent endeavour Jlin has put on record yet answers every major criticism with a head-on admission. Its screeching synthesised veneer goes on and on, becoming deliberately mind-numbing, exhausting, monotonous. Whatever the opposite of ‘hypnotic’ may be, this is it. And on purpose. It is all a joke, just like overt order, or conceit to convention. The track, as well as its preceding high-pitched bizarro sample bastard sibling “Obscure”, certainly borrowed from the “CBAT” school of musical philosophy. The onslaught of glitched out synthy veil is damn near
s u f f o c a t i n g. Of course, Jlin is well aware of how difficult a listen this can be, therefore the following track “Dissonance” is—also mockingly meaning the opposite of what its title suggests—offers a form of scatterbrain breather with just steeldrums rhythmically plundering on in jungle beat formation with, for lack of a better word, “tribal” percussion.
ʎɹɹos ɯ'ᴉ ,ǝʇᴉɥʍ os ɯɐ ᴉ
Fear not, though, for this album is not all jokes and responses to critics and nimrods saying nonsense like
“the ***ing snare and hit hats are in stereo on the far left and right sides who the *** does that it sound awful” . Jlin has crafted a perfectly narrative-driven soundscape, where each track follows the preceding one in its approach one way or another. The two centrepieces, however, are the grandiose throw-***-at-the-wall opener and closer, both functioning as amalgam of
Perspective’s percussive trajectory, all tuned and tweaked like a sportscar at a demolition derby. There is industrial scaffolding surrounding the structures, which many an observer online pointed to as being unmistakably IDM why of course yes sir definitely. The haze of the overall production, however, casts doubt upon that why-of-course-yessir-definiteness a slight bit. Industrial machinery is certainly at work, but we are walking a careful arts’n’crafts shop, not a damn factory, kids. This here is the slick, clickity-clack studio of a creative mind, not a rough and raucous non-union health hazard of manual labour.
There is dance, there is sensuality, there is even sexuality (again, I hate having to invoke “CBAT”, but you can actually conduct loveage to this, be you so willing, naughty technogasmer). All of that eventually culminating in “Duality”, beautifully mirroring the record’s self-awareness and its abrasiveness. It is duality of tone, where at once coarse sounds and percussion experiments coalesce into a puddle of sharpened metallic blades, but can also create beauty. “Duality” is beautiful, as far as Jlin’s brand of cyclical footwork goes.
Perspective is beautiful as far as hypnotic deconstructions of form and meaning go. Footwork is beautiful as far as cerebral analyses of art go. But above all, it is playful in a way not immediately obvious, nor outwardly intentional. It is angular and harsh, but only in a way fresh off the conveyor belt sleek futuristic product can be. And if you tweak your perspective enough, you will manage to align all the parts to build a whole.
Now do the robot.
