Djrum likes to change issues up. In his three-turntable DJ units, the UK musician born Felix Manuel zigzags by genres, moods, and tempos, utilizing atmospheric interludes and athletic turntablism to grease his audacious transitions. He’s so dedicated to unpredictability that generally he doesn’t even beatmatch within the standard vogue—he simply drops the observe in, quantity up, and kinds it out within the combine. It’s the alternative of seamless. (“A variety of the time, the seams are the attention-grabbing elements,” he instructed Resident Advisor.) Within the studio, Manuel is equally loath to remain in a single place for lengthy. Even his early tracks, which hewed to a pensive, post-Burial bass-music template, felt extra like suites, sidewinding by contrasting passages and patchwork beats; his current remix of Objekt’s basic anthem “Ganzfeld” packs two prolonged ambient bookends and three totally different tempos into its 10-minute run.
However for a very long time, the moody sweetness of Djrum’s productions gave a misunderstanding, or no less than a restricted one: File patrons who swooned to the ruminative, starry-eyed swirl of his recordings could not have been conscious of the mad science he brings to the decks; clubbers who’ve witnessed him shredding the material of spacetime could not grasp the delicacy of his ear. Djrum’s new EP Which means’s Edge, his first solo launch in 5 years, seems like a reboot and a reintroduction, lastly exhibiting us a full image of the artist. The EP’s 5 shapeshifting tracks element a ruthless rhythmic focus, burning off the surplus sentimentalism of his early work with out abandoning the nuances of his music.
The almost seven-minute “Codex” illustrates simply how totally he’s unified all features of his sound. The intricate drum programming, sticks dancing throughout snare rims and cymbal bells, nods to jazz, however the lurching cadences are drawn from a long time of breakbeat science. If Photek’s Modus Operandi introduced Oppenheimer-level improvements to drum’n’bass, the mind-bending complexity of “Codex” seems like Manuel has simply found chilly fusion. Two competing basslines—one sub, one serrated—perform a low-end pincer motion, roiling your insides and pinning you to the ground. There are echoes of Squarepusher within the acidic antics of the midrange lead, however the observe is doggedly dancefloor-oriented in a method that Tom Jenkinson has by no means been: The jagged-lightning riffs and seismic subs telegraph the deadly seriousness of a pure catastrophe. All that latent violence is balanced by a luxurious smear of shakuhachi flute and Detroit-techno synth pads, and he sneakily weaves in innumerable different sounds underneath cowl of the flash-bang drums—chimes, violin, even the briefest snippet of what seems like clarinet—till the entire thing begins to resemble a fowl’s nest outdoors a yarn manufacturing facility, its brittle twigs dripping with coloration.
If “Codex” is intense, then “Crawl” is an alarm with no override swap. The 170-BPM groove’s staccato drum hits flicker just like the wings of a mechanical hummingbird, the barrage coming at you from each conceivable angle. I can’t consider the final time I heard extra dynamic use of the stereo area. The push of drums will be thrilling, like a hailstorm, and soothing, like a waterfall. But it surely’s additionally unsettling: Pockets of reverb increase and contract with out warning, yanking you from a dank cavern to an anechoic chamber and again once more in milliseconds. The irreality of the soundstage solely heightens the fight-or-flight response triggered by the drums’ rapid-fire juggernaut, leaving you on edge. Structurally, this seems like one thing new for Djrum: Instead of his ordinary feints and arduous lefts, “Crawl” merely rolls with out finish, like swells on the excessive sea, generally bassier and generally treblier, however basically unchanged; it looks as if it might go on like that perpetually, a perpetual movement machine working on nerves.
