Alarm Will Sound Turns Jlin's Footwork Into a Living Band Sound

By Elena Vasquez

Alarm Will Sound released its new album New Acoustica on October 23 via Cantaloupe Music. The follow-up to the ensemble's groundbreaking 2005 album Acoustica features two tracks by producer Jlin: an arrangement of her earlier song "Black Origami" and an original piece written for the group, "Back Against the Wall."

The Grammy-winning ensemble built its reputation on translating electronic music into acoustic performance. Acoustica did this with the music of Aphex Twin. The new record updates the concept with artists from electronic music's current cutting edge, including SOPHIE, Lucrecia Dalt, and King Britt.

Who is Jlin and what does her music sound like?

Jlin — Jerrilynn Patton — works in footwork, an avant-garde evolution of house music, which itself originated in Chicago's Black club culture in the 1980s. Her melancholy, menacing strain of the genre, the source notes, "feels like listening to ghosts haunt a nightclub."

Her sonic palette is dense and specific:

• Prickly textures evoking African drumming
• Stuttering violins punctuating sparse echoes
• Murky vocal samples that feel clipped from bygone club hits or even opera

What happens inside "Back Against the Wall"?

The original piece keeps the rhythmic vitality and timbral palette of Jlin's electronic compositions while adding what only living players can provide. A one-note sputtered riff anchors the track, played in octaves across strings and brass — a distorted, not-quite unison — over crisp, punchy drums.

The detail work rewards close listening. Brush scrapes on snares and cymbals hiss "like a snake poised to strike." Jlin's signature glass-and-metal sounds are reproduced on woodblock and guiro. A piccolo joins the riff on the wrong note and beat, raising the anxiety. Low tam-tam bangs raise the threat further.

Halfway through, the band cuts out. A cello introduces a triplet motif that the ensemble takes up "as if gasping for breath." The respite ends quickly. A jaunty two-note staccato tune races forward. Near the close, a threatening intercom-like vocal sample announces the first theme's return. The riff reappears without drums, evil laughter cuts in, and the music disintegrates before ending abruptly with a whimpering tutti glissando.

Does an acoustic ensemble actually groove?

The verdict from the source is emphatic. The piece is "virtuosic, chaotic, and eminently danceable." Percussionists and heterogeneous strings and winds render Jlin's essential timbres beautifully while playing extremely simple one- and two-note melodies. The comparison offered is pointed: "It's as if Webern had written house music."

The distinction matters for how listeners approach the record. "This isn't a chamber orchestra; this is a band — playing and grooving like one." The closing image seals the point: a nightclub with Alarm Will Sound playing "would be packed to the gills."

The takeaway is plain. Two decades after Acoustica, the ensemble's acoustic-electronic alchemy still works — and "Back Against the Wall" shows Jlin's footwork vocabulary survives the translation intact.