The album has the same under-the-hood quality that makes Manuel’s genre-hopping DJ sets work: a pace and energy that’s bold but gentle, a sense of narrative that’s unpredictable but intuitive. Each song traces its own meandering path, then joins seamlessly with the next to form a larger, beautifully winding shape. If you graphed the album’s arc, it would look like calligraphy, all leaps and loops and elegant curves.
Yet the path it follows is carefully plotted. “A Tune for Us” and “Waxcap” set the stage, blending Alice Coltrane-style spiritualism (shimmering cymbals, woodblocks, silky strings) with UK club signifiers (post-dubstep beats, a bassline several shades subtler than a Reese). “Unweaving” consists of little more than Manuel on piano, complete with the sound of the pedals moving. That track is a palate-cleanser for a middle section driven by slow-rolling beats, part dancehall (“L’Ancienne”) part gqom (“Galaxy In Silence”), though by this point in the album, traditional genre signifiers have lost any real relevance.
Another respite—or “Reprise,” as Manuel calls it—brings somber notes of Sigur Rós or Stars of the Lid before embarking on the album’s final run. In the closing suite of tracks, Manuel performs his greatest trick yet: using elements of dance music’s most chaotic styles to make something that’s by turns lighthearted, romantic, and mournful. “Three Foxes Chasing Each Other” and “Let Me” flirt with elements of breakcore and gabber, all blazing tempos and machine-gun kick drums—but also mbira, piano, and the sound of children playing. The loose dubstep rhythm of “Out of Dust” offers a quick breather, but then the pressure builds up like a kettle boiling. The album ends with “Sycamore,” a 170 BPM, 11-minute epic that’s at once frenetic and soothing, rhythmically mind-bending and emotionally rich, swerving and zig-zagging but always a smooth ride.
That kind of delicate balance is the essence of this album, and it’s something Manuel only recently perfected. His records throughout the 2010s were immaculately produced and richly imagined, but often signaled potential they didn’t quite reach. Some hewed close to UK club conventions that felt beneath him (but were not without their highlights, e.g. 2016’s “LA”). More often, their attempts at emotion and vulnerability simply overshot the mark. The sad-strings-and-club-beats combo could feel a little melodramatic. Some of the spoken-word samples—of which there are none on this album—laid it on too thick (“I’ll show you my scars/You’ll show me the stars”).
Looking back, his previous work seems like a long, patient journey toward an ambitious goal, one that Manuel inched closer to with each new record—until suddenly, he’d arrived. Maybe that seeming leap had to do with him losing nearly an album’s worth of work during COVID and being forced to start from scratch. Maybe it was just a case of years of work and dedication to a sound finally paying off. In any case, Meaning’s Edge, released last October on Houndstooth (the label arm of London’s fabric nightclub, which also released this album), represented a sea change in his music. That was his best record up to that point, and it was outdone a month later by what may remain his single best track: a 10-minute, multi-tempo, multi-genre remix of Objekt’s “Ganzfeld” that one DJ called “the bohemian rhapsody of the electronic music scene.” With Under Tangled Silence, Djrum has outdone himself again. It is a balm, a daydream, a reliable portal to a lovelier place, and one of the most dazzling electronic albums in years.
All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Djrum: Under Tangled Silence
