"My mother used to say it sounded like hell was bubbling up from my room," said Jerrilynn Patton as we walked along Chicago's East 23rd Street. Patton, who composes and produces as Jlin, had just wrapped up a photoshoot in the Motor Row District, where she posed in a Miles Davis shirt, grey pants and box-fresh white Nikes, her long locks stacked in a pineapple ponytail as trains rattled the elevated tracks above us. Disrupted from a strict schedule that typically involves waking up at 4 AM (and centres around her quiet home at the edge of Merrillville, Indiana), Patton was slightly out of her element at 2 PM in Chicago's South Loop. Regardless, like most of the conversations we had during our weekend together, she punctuated every sentence with vibrant laughter and enunciated so that every word glided into a narrow smile.

Patton was getting off a plane from Amsterdam when she found out she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in recognition of her 2023 composition, Perspectives. When a colleague texted her congratulations, she initially brushed it off. "I said, 'Oh, maybe one day, but I think you sent this to the wrong person,'" she said. "And she texts me back and says, 'No, I think I know I sent this to the right person. And you should jump on Google, type your name and Pulitzer Prize.' So I did." On May 8th, Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels were awarded the Pulitzer for their opera, Omar. If Patton had won, she would have become one of few Black women honoured with the Pulitzer Prize for Music. For many marginalised artists, her being a finalist was inspiring enough. "Jlin was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in music for her most recent work," LA-based drum & bass producer DJ Noir tweeted in July. "Let's please not just glaze over that like you do for everything else women do."

Perspectives was written for the Grammy-winning percussion quartet Third Coast Percussion. It was borne in an old factory along the North Branch of the Chicago River, where lighting manufacturers previously dotted the landscape. Here, the quartet housed their massive physical percussion library that was used to record samples for the album. Patton described the library as so extensive that "if you went there every day for eight hours, you still couldn't record all those instruments." She visited for two days, recorded the project's seven pieces and sent the stems to the ensemble, who in turn arranged the notation as they saw fit. "It was their arrangement from their perspective," she said.

Third Coast Percussion member David Skidmore first learned of Patton's work in 2015, after reading a review of her debut album, Dark Energy. He was struck by the liminal nature of her music, and how it sounded so familiar to the acoustic percussion music he plays. "I mean, I knew it was electronically generated just from reading about her process," he gushed over the phone. "But I just immediately thought, oh my gosh, like, she's a percussion composer." Years ago, his crew reached out to Patton with the interest of collaborating with her, but by then, she was already tied up in the making of her second and third albums, Black Origami and Autobiography.

The swanky hotel restaurant Patton and I were heading to, The Hoxton, was not one of the "same five places" the studio-dwelling artist frequents these days. When she does step out of her Merrillville routine—which typically involves visiting her parents in her hometown of Gary, Indiana, spending time with her girlfriend (whom she met at one of her other favourite spots, Whole Foods), putting in studio time or, when in need of inspiration, simply sitting out on her pine-tree-lined porch—her itinerary finds her in New York more often than Chicago. More than a decade ago, the Windy City embraced her not-so-footwork footwork, even when she herself was uncertain of the wayward beats flowing out of her computer.

Patton described the time in her life leading up to her debut album as difficult. "You probably know about this, but there was a period when my mother didn't trust me," she said, turning to look directly at me. She was discussing the time when her mother, whom she typically told everything to, found out that she had been skipping class to focus on production. That first, quiet rebellion led to others with great cultural significance. The world grew to know the rhythmic convulsions of Dark Energy, which made the year-end lists of this magazine, The Wire, Pitchfork and a host of other music publications in 2015. Today, the world meets Jlin the composer, the Pulitzer finalist and member of an experimental vanguard that snickers at limitations.

Patton has never been afraid to be more than one thing. She's a lifelong mathematician, experimental composer, dance music producer, minimalist and former steel mill worker. In the backseat of an Uber on our way to lunch, she pointed to a cherry picker sitting along the highway. "I can operate one of those," she said. She went on to list the remainder of the machines she operated during her time as a steel mill worker in Gary, her right index finger hesitantly touching each left finger as if she was solving a rudimentary maths problem. It's been a while. Her time at U.S. Steel's largest plant, Gary Works, ended nearly a decade ago, shortly after Rick Owens asked her to soundtrack his Paris fashion show upon hearing her breakthrough single, "Erotic Heat." In 2014, when she flew to Paris with her mother to attend the show. It was her first time on a plane.

The music industry has long had a difficult time categorising Patton's work. Music journalists often refer to her as a footwork producer, even though she hasn't made anything remotely resembling the battle-friendly style in years. Following the release of Dark Energy she set to work on her second album, Black Origami, as well as her score for Wayne McGregor's ballet, Autobiography. Both works are a further departure from footwork, bristled with sharp, angular beats that were practically unrecognisable from the sound that defined her roots. In interviews around that time, she expressed not only her admiration for mentors like RP Boo and the late DJ Rashad, but also her love for the legendary minimalist composer Philip Glass.

Through her forthcoming mini-album, Perspectives, the electronic counterpart to Third Coast Percussion's arrangement, she pivots fully into composing. When I asked her if she struggles with the term "producer," she responded fiercely before I could finish my thought. "I know I'm a composer but I also know how to produce," she said. "Just like I know how to DJ—but I play live sets." As someone who has never limited herself creatively, her issue lies not with her continued association with footwork, but with the public's inability to acknowledge her multidimensionality and growth beyond her earliest releases.

I suggested that part of the media's blundering has to do with the belief that classical music and composition is regarded as high culture, which Black people have long been excluded from. "Well, a lot of that is on purpose," she said, gently nodding her head. When I asked her to elaborate, she spoke of Nina Simone and Miles Davis, who were both told they could only do one thing: jazz. "When you don't want to let a particular group of people, or too many of them, in, you do that," she said. "So I understand, the 'let's put you over here.'"

Later at The Hoxton, freshly suited colleagues and well-mannered families stabbed at salads and swirled espresso martinis. Patton and I had been stirring the melted ice in our virgin Mai Tais for 30 minutes, connecting over a number of seemingly random things: a shared childhood drawing hobby, a love for choreography and our obsession with that one ASMR track from her close friend and collaborator Holly Herndon (which Patton reportedly used to habitually listen to before bed, much to Herndon's confusion).

As we watched a gaggle of aimless servers ignore us in the sparsely attended dining room, Patton said with a chuckle, "Write that they starved us!" When we finally tracked down our server, they wrote down the rest of our order all the while wearing a confused expression—allegedly, they assumed we only wanted to order drinks at the restaurant. Patton and I gave each other a well-practised look that Black people find themselves sharing from time to time. "I mean, that was a hell of an assumption," she said. "In Paris it's like this, but it's worse. They're in your face about it."

The Chicago sun slowly dipped behind a gauze of grey sky as my Uber made its way south. In Merrillville, ten minutes away from Gary, there wasn't the faintest murmur of metropolitan buzz. Only a handful of sounds broke the rural silence—the thrum of crickets, a gentle wind caressing endless rows of corn stalks. The few commercial buildings were low and box-shaped. Clusters of identical beige, one-story homes broke long stretches of manicured lawns.

"My place is a blank canvas," Patton said earlier. "It's the place I go—" she took a deep, exaggerated inhale "—to create." Dressed in her everyday clothes—steel blue sweatpants, a Lion King T-shirt, colourful Nikes, prayer bracelets wrapped around her right wrist—she looked more in her element as she greeted me outside her home. Inside, smoke carrying the smell of sandalwood and cinnamon spiralled from a burning incense stick. As she rustled around in her kitchen, she asked if I was hungry, insisting that she could "throw down," but lately she hadn't been in the kitchen much. She's mostly just obsessed with her juicer. As evidence, Patton opened her fridge to reveal a trio of large mason jars full of homemade juices. I sipped the first, a refreshing mix of cucumber, celery and lime.

The blank canvas was, in fact, a minimally decorated apartment (with no pictures on the walls, she liked to point out). But her personality flashes in the few items that accessorise her living room, where we conversed for two hours on her grey corduroy couch. The 300-page monograph that accompanied the Kevin Beasley compilation she contributed to earlier this year, A View Of A Landscape, perched on her kitchen counter. A vinyl sleeve for Glass's 2002 The Hours soundtrack, gifted to her from her team, rested on the left side of her living room console. And—a reminder that it was her birthday just a few weeks ago—cards from her family on the right.

Patton is protected. In a more immediate sense, she says by her parents, and in a spiritual sense, by her grandmother and great grandmother. One testament to this she offered, was that during her mother's pregnancy, doctors couldn't detect Patton's heartbeat. "They thought I would be a stillborn," she said. When her birth date finally came on July 30th, it was one of the hottest days of 1987. She had little amniotic fluid surrounding her in the womb and for a moment, her father was faced with a choice—either save Patton or her mother. But they both persevered. When she spoke about this on her couch, she transitioned from a relaxed recline to a hunched over position, her Nikes planted firmly on her carpeted floor and her eyes occasionally focused on something far away.

Reminiscing about her childhood, Patton described her time with her family as one constant party. This liveliness bled into her early production, less derivative of than inspired by footwork. The handclaps sound hi-fi and laminated. Acoustic instruments like the taiko drum, marimba and ankle bell fly like darts, taking the place of footwork's ultra digital percussion. It's arrhythmic—sometimes, it's difficult to find the one. More than a decade after Planet Mu's Mike Paradinas convinced her to release "Erotic Heat" on the label's footwork compilation Bangs and Works Vol. 2, her music stands in its own lane, untethered by genre and bursting with experimentalism.

Patton met one of her musical north nodes, Philip Glass, for the first time last year. She pointed to the The Hours record. Earlier this year, when they met again, he signed it and gave her some advice. "He told me to be more patient," she said. When I visited her, a patience bowl filled with white rice and speckles of black rice rested on her kitchen counter. She demonstrated how she plucks the black rice one by one and drops them into a mason jar when she's struggling with a project.

Speaking to Patton's high school algebra teacher, Mrs. Lee, she explained that Patton is committed to an academic term called "productive struggle." "There was something about her, she could not let something go if she didn't understand it enough," Lee told me over the phone. "She's kind of a rare breed. Some people give up when something is difficult. Jerrilynn just, she buckles down."

Lee has known Patton for some 20 years, and they have a relationship that developed during the years Patton spent visiting Lee before and after school as a curious underclassman. Their connection was briefly severed when Patton was in college and "struggling to find her direction." She would skip class and focus on making music instead. The two touched base again after Planet Mu released Dark Energy to critical acclaim in 2015. "I think some of that was her wanting to say, 'here, I've done this,'" Lee said.

In recent years, Patton has put her head down in the studio. She wrote remixes for Marie Davidson and L'Œil Nu, worked with Björk and wrote a track with the late SOPHIE. She reimagined Beethoven's Fifth. As part of her collaboration with choreographer and dancer Kyle Abraham, she added toms, claps and hi-hats to Mozart's "Requiem." During conversations about genre, Patton spoke with the measured confidence of someone who thinks about these things regularly. "There are genres that are created, but to me, they're all the same movement," she said. "That's why I can bounce from this to that. I don't see classical music as separated from trap because they're very similar to me."

The response to artists committed to demolishing boundaries can be quite polarising. In a 2021 The New York Times review of Requiem: Fire In The Air Of The Earth, Brian Seibert wrote: "The innovative electronic music producer Jlin is in charge of the music, and she often remixes it beyond recognition… This is nowhere near as simple (or as fun) as putting a groove under Mozart, in the manner of the disco remake 'A Fifth of Beethoven.'"

Abraham and Patton showed Requiem at Lincoln Center to enthusiastic, resounding applause from the audience. Hours later, Patton was booed during a silent disco performance at Afropunk. After New York DJ Kush Jones set the tone with an uptempo turn, the crowd was not prepared for the abrupt shift in atmosphere when Patton hopped onto the stage for her live performance. She estimated that around 90 percent of the audience left. "Let me tell you something," she said, her eyes wide. "And somebody else might say this is insane. But that was the best learning experience of my life."

Not much has changed since the Pulitzer recognition. Patton continues to take things at the slow, easy pace that she has embraced post-pandemic. Basically, she's at the same five places. As someone who doesn't feel drawn to writing on the road, her current touring hiatus is helpful for her music writing process. In a corner of her bedroom, one of her MSI laptops sat beside a container of No. 2 pencils ("It's a math thing. Not that you're surprised?") and was flanked by two bookshelf speakers. The remainder of her hardware was stored in her walk-in closet along with her other valuables, like her expansive sneaker collection. As she sifted through her files of releases to come, she landed on tracks that swarmed with violent strings and piano ripples that lurched with her signature twitch. Her head ticked in a circular shape in sync to each beat, as if she was attempting to draw the waveforms with her chin. She stared at her screen with the focus of someone who had seen the arrangement for the first time.

Watching her, words from an earlier conversation were etched into my brain: "When they asked Prince what his favourite album he ever made was, he said, 'the last one,'" she told me. "And I relate to that."

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