On October 19, 2018, six days after producer Jerrilynn “Jlin” Patton performed at the 16th annual iteration of experimental-music festival Unsound in Krakow, Poland, she decided to cancel her appearance a week later at the Semibreve Festival in Portugal. “I’ve never had to cancel a show due to my health, but this time I have to,” she wrote in an Instagram post at the time. Patton had worked for years at a U.S. Steel mill in Gary, Indiana—she left that job in late 2015, nine months after releasing her debut album—but she says she’s never experienced anything as exhausting as her tour schedule. To recuperate, she flew to India to stay with her girlfriend, illustrator and designer Nafisa Crishna, who lives in Bangalore. “I was dehydrated, my stomach was upset,” Patton says. “She just nursed me back to health until I could function again.”

Patton, who lives with her parents in Gary when she’s not flying around the world, upended her entire schedule while working on Autobiography. “I would sleep from six in the evening to two in the morning, and I would start working at about two, two-thirty,” she says. “I could get into the workflow. Once everybody got up, I probably was in the groove by then, so it was fine. I would work up until six. It actually got the job done.” Because McGregor and his team were on Greenwich Mean Time, six hours ahead of Gary, this routine allowed Patton to stay in real-time communication with them. Two in the morning for her was breakfast time for them.

Pitchfork Midwinter Add-on tickets for Tortoise, Deerhunter, Serpentwithfeet, Grouper, Kamasi Washington, Panda Bear, and Jlin are sold out. Check midwinter.pitchfork.com for updates. Fri 2/15 through Sun 2/17, 5 PM, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, $50 per night plus add-on tickets ($15-$30 apiece), three-day passes and Saturday base tickets sold out, all-ages

Jlin Part of Pitchfork Midwinter. Sat 2/16, 10:30 PM, Chicago Stock Exchange room, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, sold out, all ages

Patton was four when she first heard footwork at a neighbor’s house. “I was like, ‘Oh my God,’ and I just never forgot that sound,” she says. “That’s how it started, and I loved it ever since.” She first tried making footwork herself after she enrolled in Purdue University Calumet (now Purdue University Northwest) in August 2005. She’d signed up to double major in computer graphics technology and architectural engineering, with a minor in mathematics, but music increasingly took precedence.

“I was befriending many producers from Chicago—I needed their help to identify tracks on YouTube battle videos,” Paradinas says. “Jlin was very friendly and helpful.” Patton had offered Paradinas a couple of her tracks for Bangs & Works. “Her initial tracks were full of spirit and rough round the edges, much like other footwork tracks from that time,” Paradinas says. He’d finalized the compilation’s track list before Patton submitted her work, but he hadn’t settled on a name, and she was happy to help on that front too: she suggested using the title of one of DJ Trouble’s contributions, “Bangs & Works.”

Dark Energy by Jlin

Patton wanted to make music whose imaginative complexity and constant evolution would reflect not only McGregor’s essence but also what his show says about all people. “As much as it is personal—it is about him—I also think it’s about humanity as a whole,” she says. “Our vulnerability, our happiness, our anger, our sadness. We all go through these different emotions and variations and phases of life, and that’s what I was trying to capture.”