When Felix Manuel, aka Djrum, released the brain-scrambling Under Tangled Silence last year, his composition and production finally caught up to the technical wizardry of his 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.
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. I Wander’s seven numbered parts are divided, confusingly, into six tracks, which are all stitched together into one seamless suite, like a side-long ’70s prog-rock epic. It begins a little like an orchestra tuning up, with a spacious tom groove surrounded by erratic bursts of drums and electronics, as though Manuel were testing out all the instruments in his studio. 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—meaty, three- or five-minute chunks, and brief interludes lasting just a minute or two—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.
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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, which are listed as a single track, 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.
