Jlin’s music seems to channel dancers’ surges of adrenaline and melancholy. Photograph by Ryan Lowry for The New Yorker

In June, 2010, Jerrilynn Patton sent a Facebook message to Mike Paradinas, a British producer who runs the adventurous electronic-dance-music label Planet Mu. She had heard that Paradinas was putting together a compilation of footwork, a niche form of club music that originated in Chicago. Many of footwork’s practitioners were surprised at Paradinas’s plans; they were barely known outside the Midwest, and it was hard to imagine that people in Europe had been paying attention. Patton, who records as Jlin, shared a track she had been working on, called “Tetris Freak.” It was a fine distillation of footwork’s at times overwhelming sound: a controlled deluge of skittering snare and kick drums, bass lines that you feel rather than hear, and a chopped-up sample of the theme from the famous computer game. Paradinas was nearly done with the compilation, and he told her that she could be on the next one. They kept in touch, and Patton recommended some producers whose music Paradinas had never heard. She also suggested that he name the compilation for one of its standout tracks, DJ Trouble’s “Bangs & Works.”

Chicago dance-music d.j.s and producers often say that, in the nineties, the city’s radio stations and clubs turned away from house music, in favor of hip-hop and R. & B. This lack of a support structure meant that there were no gatekeepers to please, so the music became faster, weirder, and more profane. These aggressively jittery variations on house music took different names, most of which—like footwork and its predecessors, juke and ghetto house—were interchangeable. The only real distinction was what you were using the music to do: dance with people or against them.

Until the release of “Bangs & Works,” in late 2010, the easiest way to keep tabs on footwork was either to live on the South Side of Chicago or to seek out the music on the Internet. But listening to tracks on sites like MySpace or imeem conveyed only half the story. Watching footwork dance battles on YouTube helped explain why the music was so punishingly frenetic: it existed to serve the dancers. Circles of kids competed to corkscrew their bodies at breakneck speeds, and often looked as though they were tap-dancing across hot coals. The battles were conversations between musicians and dancers, each pushing the other toward more extreme rhythms. By some estimates, the most agile dancers could take five steps per second, and the blurry quality of the videos made their moves seem even more superhuman. The dance floor’s welcoming throb had been reimagined as a series of carefully choreographed pirouettes and stumbles. People became pure kinetic energy.

Patton admired footwork from afar. She was born and grew up in Gary, Indiana, about thirty miles from Chicago; she has a memory of hearing footwork for the first time when she was four. She was a curious, introverted student, and spent much of her spare time in college making music. In her twenties, unsure of what to do with her life, she took a job at a steel mill.

Patton used MySpace and Facebook to connect with producers she admired, befriending artists like RP Boo and DJ Rashad. At first, she learned by emulating the greats. She became a disciple of Chicago’s DJ Roc; her early productions were so indebted to his style that she was often referred to as Roc, Jr. Though Gary was less than an hour from Chicago, the distance proved to be liberating. Dance music has always been utilitarian—an excuse to throw a party, a reason to commune with strangers. But having little direct engagement with footwork’s epicenter, particularly its live element, allowed Patton to play around with the genre’s structures and dynamics. When Patton sent Paradinas the songs that he included on “Bangs & Works Vol. 2,” in 2011, she had discovered a style of her own.

One of the most unnerving aspects of footwork is how it withholds catharsis. Drums and samples stutter repeatedly, like a gas stove that sparks but never lights. It can feel relentless, uptight, spooky, and desperate; you don’t nod along so much as try to find your path through a maelstrom of way too many snares and high hats. Samples are sped up to a surreal, chipmunk whir or slowed down to a dirgelike pace, at times clashing with the furious rhythms. But there’s something hypnotic about the sound of different rhythms coming together on a track. The music and the dancing can feel wildly free, or aspirational, as though it’s up to the rest of the world to catch up to their speed and vision.

In 2015, Planet Mu released Patton’s début album, “Dark Energy.” She had internalized footwork’s sensibility, that of the controlled freak-out, and turned it into something different. Her music was dense and operatic, based less on the hectic energy of sampling and more on immense, moody swells of synthesizer. Her chattering drum patterns verged on claustrophobia-inducing. The music seemed to respond to surges of adrenaline and melancholy, and to focus on the moods that dancers were trying to exorcise rather than on the movements of their feet.

Patton’s new album, “Black Origami,” is an astonishing global exploration of what drums can do. Each track feels like an experiment in a different rhythmic idiom. “Hatshepsut” starts off like a marching band taking the field at halftime, before a jagged synthesizer begins gnawing away at the confident strut of cymbals and timpani. The echoes of a Bollywood score run through “Kyanite.” The squalling synthesizers and open spaces of “Never Created, Never Destroyed” call to mind contemporary hip-hop production, except that no booming payoff ever arrives. I kept hearing Tone-Loc’s “Wild Thing” in the festive opening seconds of “Nyakinyua Rise”; but then the song coiled into a fierce, tribal stomp, its slivered vocals at war with one another.

Many people argue that we’ve exhausted the possibilities of the human voice, and that this has led pop artists to tinker with digital processing. Listening to “Black Origami,” I wondered if the same could ever be said about rhythm. I keep returning to the album, because it keeps me off balance. A song begins with a steady rhythm, and then its parts rearrange themselves into something frenzied and nightmarish. Nothing is where you expect it to be. “Holy Child”—a collaboration with the minimalist composer William Basinski—seems austere and slow, as a woman’s chants are tracked by sparse, muted drumrolls. Her voice is slowly stretched apart, then reinserted alongside a massing riot of snares and kicks, until it becomes its own kind of sputtering rhythm. This is the most enchanting aspect of “Black Origami”—its willingness to turn anything into a beat. There are kick drums and high hats, tambourines and claves, handclaps and foot stomps, the staccato stabs of a singer’s voice; I also felt as if I were hearing the sound of change clattering around in a bowl or a car door being slammed, someone dropping a drum kit down a flight of stairs.

When I first heard footwork, I thought of go-go music, and how its laid-back, call-and-response funk jams never really caught on outside of Washington, D.C. There are plenty of regional styles that never travel the world, and footwork has no doubt benefitted from releases such as the “Bangs & Works” compilations, and from the Internet’s capacity for making faraway subcultures seem both mysterious and digestible. Thanks to artists like Patton, who regard footwork from a loving remove, the genre continues to mutate. Some of my favorite music of the past few years has explored what happens when you take a preëxisting model and build it with different materials; the producers Foodman and SELA., for example, imagine an intersection between footwork and blissful, dreamy pop.

Patton’s music has ended up in unexpected places. The designer Rick Owens used one of her early songs, “Erotic Heat,” for his 2014 runway show. This October, she will collaborate with the British choreographer Wayne McGregor for his company’s latest work, “Autobiography.” But success has also brought her to places she’s always belonged. Last summer, she performed at the Pitchfork Festival. It was her first time playing in Chicago. ♦