Djrum likes to modify issues up. In his three-turntable DJ units, the UK musician born Felix Manuel zigzags by means of 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 trend—he simply drops the monitor in, quantity up, and kinds it out within the combine. It’s the alternative of seamless. (“Loads of the time, the seams are the fascinating elements,” he advised 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 means of contrasting passages and patchwork beats; his latest remix of Objekt’s traditional anthem “Ganzfeld” packs two prolonged ambient bookends and three completely different tempos into its 10-minute run.
However for a very long time, the moody sweetness of Djrum’s productions gave a misunderstanding, or at the very least a restricted one: File consumers 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, appears like a reboot and a reintroduction, lastly displaying 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 points 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 many years of breakbeat science. If Photek’s Modus Operandi introduced Oppenheimer-level improvements to drum’n’bass, the mind-bending complexity of “Codex” appears 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 monitor is doggedly dancefloor-oriented in a approach 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 appears like clarinet—till the entire thing begins to resemble a chicken’s nest outdoors a yarn manufacturing unit, its brittle twigs dripping with colour.
If “Codex” is intense, then “Crawl” is an alarm with no override change. 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 frenzy of drums will be thrilling, like a hailstorm, and soothing, like a waterfall. However it’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 appears like one thing new for Djrum: Instead of his ordinary feints and onerous lefts, “Crawl” merely rolls with out finish, like swells on the excessive sea, generally bassier and generally treblier, however primarily unchanged; it looks like it may go on like that ceaselessly, a perpetual movement machine working on nerves.
