Striking a Balance
Djrum’s Under Tangled Silence
By Charlie Bertsch
Djrum’s latest album, Under Tangled Silence, is destined to be a classic.
On eleven shimmering tracks, he applies the mindset of a long-time DJ to the task of composing music that defies genre.
Although the intricate, fluid rhythms that are Djrum’s calling card remain, he mostly turns his back to the dance floor here. Even when a beat forcefully asserts itself, as happens a minute into “Three Foxes Chasing Each Other,” it feels like we are being asked to contemplate it from a distance.
What makes Under Tangled Silence remarkable is that this sense of detachment bends back on itself until it transforms into a deep investment, not in the groove, but the unploughed territory that lies beyond.
The first bars of the opening track “A Tune for Us” set the record’s parameters. Against a backdrop of light rain, piano notes cascade around a plaintive cello line. Although Djrum likes to cut up his source material and rearrange the fragments, then apply various effects to them, the combination seems organic and timeless, the opposite of music laboriously assembled on a computer.
That sleight of hand is what sets Under Tangled Silence apart from Djrum’s previous work and that of the vast majority of records made by DJs with aspirations to become composers. Even when his manipulations are obvious, they transcend the sampling aesthetic.
In a recent interview, Djrum – whose legal name is Felix Manuel – explained that he loves the mechanistic sound pioneered by Kraftwerk and acoustic music equally. The point is to strike a balance.
“I want modernity and I want history,” he declared. “I want to feel timeless. But I also want to feel futuristic.”
Although he wasn’t speaking about Under Tangled Silence specifically, this description fits the record beautifully.
There are traces of ritualistic use of sound, nods to non-Western music traditions, and references to post-countercultural experiments that fused jazz and classical idioms that gave us New Age.
Yet the album never prioritises the past over the present.
Under Tangled Silence seems particularly well-suited to modern dance, which probably explains why the video content created to accompany it on streaming platforms features expressive human figures against a dark background.
“Galaxy in Silence” returns to the piano arpeggios and cello of the opening track, adds a keening flute, segues into a rhythm reminiscent of the post-rave sounds of the mid-1990s that inspired Djrum to be a DJ, then pulls out the beat, then pulls the beat away to underscore the spacy sounds often found on the margins of that era’s EDM hits.
The ambition of Under Tangled Silence, its refusal to be reduced to a neat-and-tidy category, helps us understand how electronic music has evolved in the three decades since.
Back then, most people saw a clear distinction between DJ-ing and composing.
Djrum worked wonders with other people’s records. Although this occasionally involved making them hard to recognise, most of the time, the goal was to present the original music in a new and flattering light.
Composing was something else, an attempt to bring novelty into the world.
As technology has improved and inhibitions have fallen away, however, this distinction has become harder to maintain.
Although Djrum’s DJ sets differ from his records, decontextualising source material is the order of the day. Unless he tells you what he’s spinning, you would often be hard pressed to tell.
In discussing Under Tangled Silence, Djrum has addressed the album’s painful gestation process.
Early in the pandemic, he worked feverishly on the project. A release date seemed imminent. But then a catastrophic failure of his laptop and damage to his backup hard drive made it necessary for him to start almost from scratch.
Because Djrum composes his music by putting together a vast array of sound files, there was no way to recover much of what he had created, no score that could be played. This is the disadvantage of working in such a technologically dependent manner, as opposed to more traditional music-making.
Even though the British producer lost so much of his work on the album, he still remembered what he had been trying to achieve with it.
Perhaps this is why Under Tangled Silence demonstrates such a light touch. And why it’s suffused with a profound sense of loss.
Under Tangled Silence is a great record because it is haunted by all the music that didn’t make it into the finished product.
That’s a perfect allegory for the creative process of someone who is always thinking of the records in his collection, even as he tries to make something that sounds like none of them.
Photograph courtesy of Rene Passet. Published under a Creative Commons license.