When Felix Manuel, known to the electronic music world as Djrum, released the brain-scrambling Under Tangled Silence last year, his composition and production finally caught up to the technical wizardry of his legendary DJ sets. By now, Manuel’s approach to DJing is well documented. He doesn’t jump between genres so much as inhabit several at once, changing their DNA from the inside, one flick of the wrist at a time. He has a penchant for dazzling tempo twists, and he frequently layers acoustic instruments like piano, harp, and cello into convoluted beats, like a Four Tet with eight hands. Under Tangled Silence compressed those traits into a dense, overstuffed album that rarely repeated itself, shooting off in multiple directions every few bars. His sets are still some of the most thrilling out there, but we’ve gotten to know his tricks, both on stage and on record. So what do you do when your shock and awe isn’t quite as shocking anymore? I Wander offers one answer: You zoom out and condense what once felt epic and sprawling into 16 minutes of pure power.
A Masterclass in Rhythmic Compression
Blitzing through six tracks in just over a quarter of an hour, I Wander looks like a club EP on paper, but it plays more like Djrum’s attempt to speedrun his own album. The EP’s seven numbered parts are divided into six tracks, all stitched together into one seamless suite, reminiscent of a side-long ’70s prog-rock epic. It begins like an orchestra tuning up, with a spacious tom groove surrounded by erratic bursts of drums and electronics. Then it hits warp speed, throwing off bruising synth bass and breakbeat fragments. The suite is built atop a core rhythmic foundation that changes course across the EP’s discrete passages, but in typical Djrum style, he turns expectations inside out: those shorter tracks make for some of the most dazzling, heart-in-mouth moments of his discography.
Tactile Precision and Acoustic Texture
Take the minute-long “I Wander (III),” which comes barrelling out of the blocky breaks and jazz-inflected keys of part two in an unhinged percussive freefall. The drums speed up, slow down, and bunch up unpredictably, changing shape until they resolve into a synth chord that begins the more restrained—but still plenty frenetic—“I Wander (IV + V).” The track’s tangled syncopations would sound hectic if it didn’t all come across so smoothly: Manuel’s drums are bevelled, contoured, and mixed down perfectly, so their impact is more sensuous than, say, the jackhammering kicks of hard techno. That tactile feel is what makes the fourth and fifth sections feel warm and inviting even at their most intense, framed by strange piano chords that add a tinge of sleaziness. Imagine Bohren & Der Club of Gore if they’d played Metalheadz at the Blue Note in the early ’90s.
In the past, Manuel’s use of live instruments could sound a little forced; they sometimes dampened the high-octane energy. Not so on I Wander, where he turns those acoustic elements into part of the attack. Much of the EP is propped up by topsy-turvy basslines, which transform into a cello at the beginning of the sixth movement—another sub-two-minute banger. The intro of “I Wander (VI)” isolates the pitch-bent cello, and the momentary stasis is like opening a trap door to more rhythmic chaos, as the new drums scatter like ball bearings.
A New Benchmark for Breakbeat Science
The pairing of percussive fireworks with classical instrumentation brings to mind Venetian Snares, the Canadian breakcore artist who once chopped an orchestra into athletic feats of drum’n’bass pandemonium. There’s some of that here, especially in the way that Manuel’s rhythms can stop or turn on a dime. But Manuel’s approach is more controlled. I Wander doesn’t carry itself with the confrontational swagger of breakcore, nor is it standard dance music: though any of these tracks could make for an interesting bridge in a techno or drum’n’bass DJ set, only a DJ as brave as Manuel would dare to drop them.
Djrum is the rare dance-music breakout figure who doesn’t really have to sacrifice any edge or authenticity to land on popular playlists. His use of acoustic instrumentation may help him court fans who aren’t otherwise schooled in the intricacies of breakbeat science, but the gleeful speed and rigorous finesse of his productions would appeal to many people, even without the piano. The ending section of I Wander moves with a grace that most producers could only fumble at. Every element seems to exhale. It might seem almost sentimental if it weren’t preceded by 14 minutes of hair-raising mayhem. In less than a quarter of Under Tangled Silence’s running time, I Wander takes up the record’s fireworks and makes them bigger, bolder, and more precise.
