Black Origami is the second album by American producer Jlin, first issued for streaming on May 11, 2017 and on other formats by Planet Mu on May 19, 2017. Produced in a year from 2015 to 2016, it features collaborations with William Basinski, Holly Herndon, Fawkes, and Dope Saint Jude. The title of Black Origami describes the structure of the music: the songs are complex pieces that take advantage of silence as much as sounds, similar to how an origami makes intricate art based on plain paper. Two tracks from previous Jlin extended plays appear on Black Origami: "Nandi" from Free Fall (2015) and "Nyakinya Rise" from Dark Lotus (2017).
Black Origami was critically acclaimed upon its release; reviewers highlighted Jlin's increased range in her sound and style, the album's variety of sounds, its percussion and rhythms, and the use of collaborators. Black Origami landed in the top ten of year-end lists by publications such as Exclaim!, Rolling Stone, Spin, Pitchfork, PopMatters, and the Chicago Tribune and was one position shy of making it into the top ten of The Village Voices annual Pazz & Jop critics poll.
Production
Jlin began work on a second album "about May-ish, June-ish of 2015" and completed it a year later. The first track made for it was "Nandi". The next track she worked on was what would become Black Origamis title track, its 24-measure ending of the title track taking three days to complete. She explained that when she made the title track, "I thought I might be onto something and dug deeper. It's started developing into an album before I realized it." After completing the song, Jlin became friends with Indian dancer Avril Stormy Unger. As she explained, "I happened to go to her page one day and I saw videos of her dancing. And I was like, Oh my god, this is it. Her rhythm and movement was matching my rhythm and sound." As a result, Jlin created "Carbon 7" based on Unger's dancing. The next two songs to be completed were "Enigma" and "Hatshepsut", named after an Egyptian queen.
According to Jlin, the staff at Planet Mu called her "stupid because I didn’t wait for someone who should have been on my second album—we had a difference in the work we were collaborating on. Everybody else thought I should have waited and was in total panic mode, so I had to work around them and push past them to make a decision." However, Black Origami still features collaborations with avant-garde producers such as Holly Herndon, William Basinski, Dope Saint Jude, and French artist Fawkes. "Holy Child" began with Jlin emailing a female Baltic folk vocal loop to William Basinski for him to turn into "magic". Basinki first met Jlin unexpectedly during a soundcheck in New York. The penultimate track done for the album was a collaboration with Holly Herndon named "1%". Herndon previously worked with Jlin on "Expand", a track from her debut album Dark Energy (2015). Jlin produced the last songs for the album in India.
Composition
As Exclaim! critic Daniel Sylvester summarized Black Origami, "it's earthy and futuristic, complex and linear, dance-y and a total mind-fuck."
With Black Origami, Jlin, in her words, wanted to do "something different, something that challenged me to my core," and make music "with no boundaries". She wanted to make the music "complex" like an origami, hence the title. As such, Black Origami involves "manipulating silence", much like the "emptiness" of paper origamis are often made of, as much as "volatile beat patterns and otherworldly fragmented sounds," claimed The Fader. The album, as a result, is more spacious than previous Jlin records, to the point where "tracks like the rattling "Enigma" or the glittery splash of "Carbon 7" feel like they should be choreographed with fluid and balletic steps instead of the rapid movements of footwork and juke, even if the rhythms remain at the same BPM as ever," wrote Consequence of Sounds Robert Ham.
As per usual for Jlin's music, the album contains chaotic, unpredictable rhythms and lots of detail in the sound design. In fact, the drums and percussion in the album's original mix sounded so aggressive that Planet Mu instructed the mastering engineer to tone down the harshness of the sound. Black Origami is non-melodic and features sounds of drums, bells, vocal snippets, whistles, and world music percussion samples. It is "propelled by the sheer force of her percussion, her ornate, radical progressions, her shape-shifting sounds," and "an undercurrent of menace", wrote Rebecca Bengal.