“Akoma” – Jlin

Album: Akoma

Artist: Jlin

Year: 2024

Genre: Footwork, IDM

Grade: B+

In the grand tradition of Aphex Twin, Autechre and Burial, Chicago electronic producer Jlin has crafted a carefully curated persona shrouded in mystique. And in the grand tradition of those famous vanguards, she has the strange, enticing, forward-thinking music to match. Her 2024 album Akoma finds her refining her glitchy, experimental footwork sound while also expanding the genre infinitely into ever stranger directions.

For one, Akoma features collaborations with big names like Björk, Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet on a few of the tracks (though most of their contributions are skewed and sampled beyond recognition). The album gains a rather classical sound as a result, with slightly more attention given to the melodies rather than the highly percussive rhythms. In turn, Jlin has somewhat abandoned the hip-hop and house-adjacent roots of the footwork genre in favor of something far more avant-garde.

Still, Akoma is an exercise in style more than anything. And for a style with so much movement, with beats and rhythms that move at lightning speed, it’s quite impressive that the sound more closely resembles ambient music than EDM. From opener “Borealis” to closing “The Precision of Infinity,” everything blurs into one despite its ever-changing nature.

But that’s both a blessing and a curse, as I can’t really discern one song from another, or delineate Akoma from predecessors like Perspective or Black Origami, which remain the producer’s best overall works.

Nonetheless, Akoma is another thoughtful and worthy addition to Jlin’s increasingly interesting discography. With so many bleeps and bloops and dots and loops, I’m sure that every second of this album was painstaking to produce, which only confirms her technical genius. And the endorsements from postmodern heroes like Glass (and the late great footwork pioneer DJ Rashad, albeit that was years ago) have got to count for something. Listen to this album once to be wowed by the technique; listen again if you believe there are hidden layers of meaning to be pored over.

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