dontdiedontkillanyon
New member
A Panera Bread on a suburban strip is not where I had expected to interview a musician whose work is motivated by confronting her darkest fears, but after Patton’s photo shoot wraps, she steers us away from Gary, to the nearby town of Schererville. James Taylor songs ooze out of the restaurant speakers. We are only 15 miles from downtown Gary, in an atmosphere so generic it could be anywhere.
“It would be a lot easier if I lived in Europe, wouldn’t it?” she says, with the acknowledgment that her first move out of her parents’ house might, eventually, be overseas. Nearly all of her creative partners exist in far-flung time zones—her dance collaborator, Avril Stormy Unger, in India; Mike Paradinas, owner of her label, Planet Mu, in the UK; experimentalist Holly Herndon, who teamed up with Patton on Dark Energy’s “Expand” and Black Origami’s “1 Percent,” in Berlin; the rapper Dope Saint Jude, who contributes vocals on a track from the new record, in South Africa. Right now Patton is busy composing the soundtrack for British choreographer Wayne McGregor’s next work, Autobiography; when it premieres in London in October, the girl from Gary who has forever longed to go to the opera and the ballet will get her wish. “My first ballet will be my own.”
Patton has hourlong conversations with minimalist composer William Basinski, whom she instantly bonded with at a show in L.A. last year; recently, they collaborated on Black Origami’s “Holy Child.” “Oh, I just love her to death! She’s like my little sister!” Basinski tells me by phone from London. For “Holy Child,” he emailed her a loop of female Baltic folk singers—“I just sent her this potion and, you know, she made magic.”
https://soundcloud.com/planetmurecords/jlin-holy-child
Over salads and grilled cheese sandwiches, I tell her how the first time I heard Dark Energy it seemed to strike me from all sides, like I was inside an explosion; how in Black Origami you really feel the energy of distinct, opposing forces.
Patton nods vigorously. “I wanted to have that duality,” she says. “I used to love hearing Prince do that. Or Frankie Beverly. Sade’s notorious for it—all of her songs, they have that Sade feel, but everything she made was ahead of its time. Dark Energy is chaotic, but I think of Black Origami as a refined bold.”
Patton references the people she refers to as her ancestors, living and dead—Igor Stravinsky, Eartha Kitt, Marina Abramovíc, Alice Coltrane, Nikola Tesla, Serena Williams, and the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, for whom she wrote a song on Black Origami. She consults these spirit guides as often as she does her contemporaries.
“I hope this doesn’t sound crazy, but I talk to my ancestors a lot,” she says. “I talk to Nina Simone ’cause she said when you have a gift you have a responsibility to create and reflect the times. In this day and age, it’s ridiculous for an artist to make something and not have a reason for it. ‘I made it ’cause it sounds good.’ You made something ’cause it sounds good? For real? You’re not doing enough.”
When Jerrilynn Patton was 4 years old, growing up in Gary, she went over to a neighbor’s house one day, drawn to the strange sound she heard leaking out of a pair of headphones: dark, twitchy, syncopated rhythms, songs firing at 160 beats per minute. It was her first taste of footwork, the hyperspeed dance music descendant of Chicago’s house scene. “It was like nothing I had ever heard before,” Patton remembers. It would be years before she would encounter footwork again, but that day would make a serious dent, marking a place in her to which she would one day return.
As a child, Patton was so baby-faced people called her Gaga—“like goo goo, ga ga,” she says. She loved watching documentaries, especially about ancient Egypt or elephants—as an adult, she once skipped her own birthday party because the National Geographic Channel was airing a special about woolly mammoths. She took piano for a while, but it never held her attention the way drums would. On weekends at home with her parents, Roberta Flack, Earth, Wind & Fire, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis records were all in heavy rotation. She was into basketball and played on the school team. Until, abruptly, she stopped.
When Patton talks now about working from a place of darkness and turmoil, that means a few things, but mostly she means the years of sustained bullying she endured as a teenager, a thorny combination of mean girls, verbal abuse, and shaming. It’s a painful legacy that followed her into adulthood. “They turned everyone against me,” she says. One day, no one on the basketball team would talk to her. Her self-esteem plummeted. Her mother wanted to know why she always seemed sad and withdrawn. The only times the mean girls stopped bullying her, she says, were when they needed help with their math homework.
“I’m sure you notice when I talk to you, sometimes I don’t look at you,” Patton says, managing to meet my eye most of the time as she says it. “I can spot a kid who’s been bullied just by their body language. For me it was no eye contact. I used to grip the soap bar in the bathroom until you could see my finger marks. I wouldn’t hug my mom. Your whole countenance just changes. You don’t like anything about yourself. And I’m just starting to come out of that.”
What brought her out, years later, was footwork. For a high school talent show, she reluctantly agreed to take part in a group dance routine based on a footwork track. Though the idea ended up getting shelved, Patton found herself hooked on a sound she’d first encountered as a little girl. “It hit me in that spot again like, oh my god,” she says. Instead of the brightly colored cassettes that had drifted down the road from Chicago into her neighbor’s collection, she downloaded tracks from the song-sharing site Imeem.
“By the time I was in college, I was listening to footwork heavy,” Patton says. “I started messaging people on Myspace like, ‘Hey, I really like your work.’” Even though she lived at home and didn’t go to clubs or footwork battles, she began chatting with DJ Rashad, the late pioneer of the Chicago scene, who was the first producer to respond to her MySpace queries. Another footwork DJ sent her the music-making software FL Studio. “I just sat there trying to get it to make a noise,” she says. “And when I could finally hear the drums and the high hats and everything, I thought, Man, I’m going to make footwork!”
She was attracted to the style’s percussive qualities. “Being of African descent, you feel it,” she says. “You have rhythm and drums in your blood. My sound is not a bite, it’s a grab—it takes hold of you and it doesn’t let go.” At this, she tightly grips her left wrist in her right hand.
https://soundcloud.com/planetmurecords/jlin-nandi-from-black-origami-out-19th-may
“It would be a lot easier if I lived in Europe, wouldn’t it?” she says, with the acknowledgment that her first move out of her parents’ house might, eventually, be overseas. Nearly all of her creative partners exist in far-flung time zones—her dance collaborator, Avril Stormy Unger, in India; Mike Paradinas, owner of her label, Planet Mu, in the UK; experimentalist Holly Herndon, who teamed up with Patton on Dark Energy’s “Expand” and Black Origami’s “1 Percent,” in Berlin; the rapper Dope Saint Jude, who contributes vocals on a track from the new record, in South Africa. Right now Patton is busy composing the soundtrack for British choreographer Wayne McGregor’s next work, Autobiography; when it premieres in London in October, the girl from Gary who has forever longed to go to the opera and the ballet will get her wish. “My first ballet will be my own.”
Patton has hourlong conversations with minimalist composer William Basinski, whom she instantly bonded with at a show in L.A. last year; recently, they collaborated on Black Origami’s “Holy Child.” “Oh, I just love her to death! She’s like my little sister!” Basinski tells me by phone from London. For “Holy Child,” he emailed her a loop of female Baltic folk singers—“I just sent her this potion and, you know, she made magic.”
https://soundcloud.com/planetmurecords/jlin-holy-child
Over salads and grilled cheese sandwiches, I tell her how the first time I heard Dark Energy it seemed to strike me from all sides, like I was inside an explosion; how in Black Origami you really feel the energy of distinct, opposing forces.
Patton nods vigorously. “I wanted to have that duality,” she says. “I used to love hearing Prince do that. Or Frankie Beverly. Sade’s notorious for it—all of her songs, they have that Sade feel, but everything she made was ahead of its time. Dark Energy is chaotic, but I think of Black Origami as a refined bold.”
Patton references the people she refers to as her ancestors, living and dead—Igor Stravinsky, Eartha Kitt, Marina Abramovíc, Alice Coltrane, Nikola Tesla, Serena Williams, and the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, for whom she wrote a song on Black Origami. She consults these spirit guides as often as she does her contemporaries.
“I hope this doesn’t sound crazy, but I talk to my ancestors a lot,” she says. “I talk to Nina Simone ’cause she said when you have a gift you have a responsibility to create and reflect the times. In this day and age, it’s ridiculous for an artist to make something and not have a reason for it. ‘I made it ’cause it sounds good.’ You made something ’cause it sounds good? For real? You’re not doing enough.”
When Jerrilynn Patton was 4 years old, growing up in Gary, she went over to a neighbor’s house one day, drawn to the strange sound she heard leaking out of a pair of headphones: dark, twitchy, syncopated rhythms, songs firing at 160 beats per minute. It was her first taste of footwork, the hyperspeed dance music descendant of Chicago’s house scene. “It was like nothing I had ever heard before,” Patton remembers. It would be years before she would encounter footwork again, but that day would make a serious dent, marking a place in her to which she would one day return.
As a child, Patton was so baby-faced people called her Gaga—“like goo goo, ga ga,” she says. She loved watching documentaries, especially about ancient Egypt or elephants—as an adult, she once skipped her own birthday party because the National Geographic Channel was airing a special about woolly mammoths. She took piano for a while, but it never held her attention the way drums would. On weekends at home with her parents, Roberta Flack, Earth, Wind & Fire, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis records were all in heavy rotation. She was into basketball and played on the school team. Until, abruptly, she stopped.
When Patton talks now about working from a place of darkness and turmoil, that means a few things, but mostly she means the years of sustained bullying she endured as a teenager, a thorny combination of mean girls, verbal abuse, and shaming. It’s a painful legacy that followed her into adulthood. “They turned everyone against me,” she says. One day, no one on the basketball team would talk to her. Her self-esteem plummeted. Her mother wanted to know why she always seemed sad and withdrawn. The only times the mean girls stopped bullying her, she says, were when they needed help with their math homework.
“I’m sure you notice when I talk to you, sometimes I don’t look at you,” Patton says, managing to meet my eye most of the time as she says it. “I can spot a kid who’s been bullied just by their body language. For me it was no eye contact. I used to grip the soap bar in the bathroom until you could see my finger marks. I wouldn’t hug my mom. Your whole countenance just changes. You don’t like anything about yourself. And I’m just starting to come out of that.”
What brought her out, years later, was footwork. For a high school talent show, she reluctantly agreed to take part in a group dance routine based on a footwork track. Though the idea ended up getting shelved, Patton found herself hooked on a sound she’d first encountered as a little girl. “It hit me in that spot again like, oh my god,” she says. Instead of the brightly colored cassettes that had drifted down the road from Chicago into her neighbor’s collection, she downloaded tracks from the song-sharing site Imeem.
“By the time I was in college, I was listening to footwork heavy,” Patton says. “I started messaging people on Myspace like, ‘Hey, I really like your work.’” Even though she lived at home and didn’t go to clubs or footwork battles, she began chatting with DJ Rashad, the late pioneer of the Chicago scene, who was the first producer to respond to her MySpace queries. Another footwork DJ sent her the music-making software FL Studio. “I just sat there trying to get it to make a noise,” she says. “And when I could finally hear the drums and the high hats and everything, I thought, Man, I’m going to make footwork!”
She was attracted to the style’s percussive qualities. “Being of African descent, you feel it,” she says. “You have rhythm and drums in your blood. My sound is not a bite, it’s a grab—it takes hold of you and it doesn’t let go.” At this, she tightly grips her left wrist in her right hand.
https://soundcloud.com/planetmurecords/jlin-nandi-from-black-origami-out-19th-may
