Felix Manuel, the DJ and producer higher generally known as Djrum, has a manner with sleights of hand. In an interview with Resident Advisor, he defined a few of his favourite mixing methods. One is utilizing an ambient document to stage a dramatic shift in vitality. One other is the crab, an old-school hip-hop trick the place you utilize your thumb and three fingers to tickle the crossfader, teasing the following document in tiny, rapid-fire slivers. Strikes like these enable Manuel, armed with nothing greater than a bag of information, a mixer, and three turntables (arrange battle type), to nimbly transfer via dubstep, drum’n’bass, breakcore, home, techno, hip-hop, trip-hop, drone, jazz, soul, classical, gabber, no matter—multi function set. Leap to any level in his latest BBC important combine, which blitzes via 62 information in two hours, and also you’ll get the thought. Has anybody else ever scratched Arthur Russell’s voice over galloping kick drums?
Underneath Tangled Silence, Manuel’s third album, pulls off an analogous feat, however to subtler, extra poetic impact. Like his DJ units, it attracts from all corners of his musical universe, channeling his classical piano coaching as a lot as his life-changing moments at London squat raves. However not like the rowdy melee of his DJing, Underneath Tangled Silence distills these sounds into one thing fluid, seamless, and technically virtuosic. His rhythmic finesse drives many of the album, however this isn’t precisely a dance document; it’s a mercurial survey of what sound like Manuel’s deepest feelings, delivered with a stage of nuance that’s uncommon in membership music.
On the coronary heart of the album is a deft synthesis of wholly totally different musical traditions. Manuel has performed piano because the age of seven, however solely steadily wove the instrument into his information. In 2016, he instructed an interviewer that the piano components on his Forgetting EP had been “very a lot composed slightly than improvised,” including that improvisation had “but to filter its manner into my manufacturing correctly.” Right here, piano is the album’s lead instrument, a lot of it seemingly off the cuff. (Manuel says that “Waxcap,” the album’s second monitor, started as a jazzy improv he later developed additional.)
There are different dwell devices, too. Manuel performs harp, percussion, and mbira, and calls in previous collaborator Zosia Jagodzinska for silky swoops of cello. However the melding of jazz, classical and dance music runs deeper than instrumentation, proper right down to the preparations, each in particular person songs and throughout the album as an entire. Whereas most dance music works in phrases of eight or 16 bars, luring the listener right into a hypnotic groove, Underneath Tangled Silence not often repeats itself for quite a lot of measures at a time. Sloping and swerving, dipping and hovering, Manuel’s compositions transfer like a murmuration of birds.
