Jlin’s relationship with genre has always been complicated. For as long as she has been recording, the Gary, Ind. producer has been associated with footwork, the hyperactive post-house music spawned alongside the equally chaotic competitive dance style popular in neighboring Chicago. Superficially, the affiliation makes sense. She counts both footwork godfather RP Boo and its most revered son, the late DJ Rashad, among her mentors and made her earliest appearance on the second installment of Planet Mu’s genre-survey Bangs & Works. But she built these ties at a distance; not from weekend road trips into Chicago but from hand-me-down juke tapes and, later, through Myspace messages and extended phone conversations with her influences.

This is, of course, a uniquely 21st-century phenomenon: an artist situating themselves at the center of a culture, particularly such a socially oriented one, from the comfort of their bedroom. And this outsider/insider contradiction has long been a source of power for Jlin, giving her the means to master the tools of this potent style while still operating without any obligation to its conventions. On Dark Energy, her 2015 debut, this meant stripping footwork’s stuttered-triplet-everything model down to its skeleton and draping it in frigid industrial textures; her day job at a steel mill provided critics with a too-perfect shorthand for the project’s brutalist impulses. The follow-up, Black Origami, is more difficult to define, moving further away from footwork’s literal sonic qualities while reclaiming and amplifying the genre’s already imposing physicality.

Black Origami is a gorgeous and overwhelming piece of musical architecture, an epic treatise on where rhythm comes from and where it can go. The lone ping-pong synth squiggle that opens the album on its title track is misdirection because the 40-some minutes that follow are nearly absent of melody. It’s all perpetually escalating polyrhythmic tension, a time-stopping barrage of drum rolls and disembodied angelic voices. The only moments of calm come in the milliseconds of silence between songs.

Like her juke and footwork predecessors, Jlin tends to favor the stock digital sounds of ’90s drum machines to the warmer analog kits of the ’80s or the mutated grandchildren thereof, which now dominate contemporary urban/electronic music. This only adds to the disorienting effect of the record’s intensity, as there is nothing quite like being pummeled by hyper-vivid clavs and shakers grown in the heart of the uncanny valley. This creates a certain grace to this chaos. It’s not dance music per se, at least not in the way footwork originally was—it’s also not not dance music the way the gulps of 808 move against the many polyrhythms of “Nyakinyua Rise.” The martial undercurrent to the record builds from cross-firing drum lines and drill whistles, battle cries and elephant roars. It's like Jlin is less interested in violence than she is the precise motion and strategy of warfare. (This, too, might be read as a nod back to the battle elements of footwork.)

As listeners of electronic music have become so closely attuned to its many shifting micro-genres, their natural inclination may be to decode and map out these many moving parts. Fans of contemporary club music might try to situate it in the context of not just footwork but the similarly charged movements currently happening in Lisbon or Durban. Those more closely attuned to avant-garde corners of the electronic music world could invoke the data-dense sputtered beat structures of Autechre or Ikue Mori’s experiments in teasing humanity out of canned drum machines. An ear more rooted in traditional music might catch the strands of drum corps and school bands (c.f. the marching snares “Hatshepsut”), tribal seances, and gamelan ensembles.

The wonderful thing about Black Origami is that it’s all of these things and none of them at once. It’s a rhythm-spanning collection of contradictions and colliding worlds—the intensity of social music refracted through an introverted mind, the physical converted into digital and back again, the past told through future music and vice versa—all making the case that rhythm is too infinite, too forceful to be reduced to mere utilitarian functions. It denies listeners the question of, “What do I do with this music?” and forces them to react directly to what it does to them. It’s a pure exercise in sound-as-power, music that has no specific agenda beyond simply making itself felt.