Felix Manuel, the DJ and producer better known as Djrum, has a way with sleights of hand. In an interview with Resident Advisor, he explained some of his favorite mixing techniques. One is using an ambient record to stage a dramatic shift in energy. Another is the crab, an old-school hip-hop trick where you use your thumb and three fingers to tickle the crossfader, teasing the next record in tiny, rapid-fire slivers. Moves like these allow Manuel, armed with nothing more than a bag of records, a mixer, and three turntables (set up battle style), to nimbly move through dubstep, drum’n’bass, breakcore, house, techno, hip-hop, trip-hop, drone, jazz, soul, classical, gabber, whatever—all in one set. Jump to any point in his recent BBC essential mix, which blitzes through 62 records in two hours, and you’ll get the idea. Has anyone else ever scratched Arthur Russell’s voice over galloping kick drums?
Under Tangled Silence, Manuel’s third album, pulls off a similar feat, but to subtler, more poetic effect. Like his DJ sets, it draws from all corners of his musical universe, channeling his classical piano training as much as his life-changing moments at London squat raves. But unlike the rowdy melee of his DJing, Under Tangled Silence distills these sounds into something fluid, seamless, and technically virtuosic. His rhythmic finesse drives most of the album, but this isn’t exactly a dance record; it’s a mercurial survey of what sound like Manuel’s deepest emotions, delivered with a level of nuance that’s rare in club music.
At the heart of the album is a deft synthesis of wholly different musical traditions. Manuel has played piano since the age of seven, but only gradually wove the instrument into his records. In 2016, he told an interviewer that the piano parts on his Forgetting EP had been “very much composed rather than improvised,” adding that improvisation had “yet to filter its way into my production properly.” Here, piano is the album’s lead instrument, much of it seemingly off the cuff. (Manuel says that “Waxcap,” the album’s second track, began as a jazzy improv he later developed further.)
There are other live instruments, too. Manuel plays harp, percussion, and mbira, and calls in past collaborator Zosia Jagodzinska for silky swoops of cello. But the melding of jazz, classical and dance music runs deeper than instrumentation, right down to the arrangements, both in individual songs and across the album as a whole. While most dance music works in phrases of eight or 16 bars, luring the listener into a hypnotic groove, Under Tangled Silence rarely repeats itself for more than a few measures at a time. Sloping and swerving, dipping and soaring, Manuel’s compositions move like a murmuration of birds.
