REVIEW: Djrum - Under Tangled Silence [Houndstooth]
Djrum likely needs little introduction to Delayed readers. His music has long touched on and moved across multiple locations and genres along the history of UK dance music and culture, building on it, and regularly infusing it with a sense of grandeur, of world building, and of exploring the possibilities in extended narratives. This, too, has often come with a focus on intricacy and delicacy. And further, perhaps from Portrait of Firewood onwards, his music has increasingly incorporated aspects of modern classical, ambient and post-rock. Much of Under Tangled Silence is built around Djrum’s piano playing, bookending beats, opening space for them, and providing a connection across tracks. And the album is at its best when there’s a direct overlapping or interplay between the classical and dance elements, in the rather chaotic yet serene busyness of ‘A Tune for Us’, or the tension towards the end of ‘Galaxy in Silence’ in the dual between a lamenting string arrangement and an overdriven kickdrum pattern. Despite the increased prominence of the piano, Under Tangled Silence feels more of a club friendly record than some of Djrum’s recent work, or maybe there’s just more tunes on here I’d like to hear on a dance floor.
It’s worth revisiting Djrum’s discography here as he has been creating beautiful music for a long time now. His early works, like 2012’s ‘Watermark’, sit alongside tunes like Eleven Tigers’ ‘Stableface’ or My Nu Leng’s ‘Find You’ as a return to garage in amongst the debris of dubstep’s collapse, when people were trying to make ‘future garage’ a thing, and where pretty, dreamy, drawn-out melancholic shuffling beats was a welcome relief from a space that had gone a bit weird and aggressive. Personally, anyway. There’s likely no shortage of sad, atmospheric garage-inflected post-dubstep you could point out from this time, yet Djrum’s music was perhaps a bit more intricate, more willing to experiment with structure, a bit more elusive. 2014’s epic ‘The Miracle’ is a great example, a pretty, lowkey little shuffling tune rolls along for 6 minutes before dissipating into a 9-minute afterthought. That may not sound complimentary, but things don’t have to be loud or imposing to be great.
Djrum’s early releases stood out for me as by this time dubstep had jumped the shark years ago and collapsed under the weight of its own excesses. Now it was both wildly popular, yet utterly foreign and alienating to this humble dubstepper. Many responded by bunkering down into a militantly austere and puritanical mode perhaps best associated with Youngsta’s Rinse FM shows of that era and the half-joking references to the ‘dungeon dubstep’ sound. Others flew off in all directions, many deciding to write around the less contaminated rhythmic scaffolding of techno and garage. I would also argue later there was a slow growth or reaffirmed affinity with jungle and drum & bass, and an eventual softening of genre boundaries where mood and sensibility override tempo. Speculating on alternate histories (‘if this didn’t happen, then this would be different’) is a bit pointless, but I’ll do it anyway. I’m uncertain if music like the off-kilter, screwy dub techno of Bristol and Livity Sound, et al., the lush dub techno and ambient hybrids of something like Synkro’s Ovïd alias, Djrum’s music itself, the music of Timedance or Wisdom Teeth today, and so on (I’m basically just listing things I like here) would have articulated themselves in the same way, would have emerged along a similar timeline, or would have the same resonance today if dubstep hadn’t gone to shit so catastrophically.
Anyway, now I’ve yelled at clouds, let’s look at Under Tangled Silence. It opens gently with ‘A Tune for Us’, all cascading piano surrounding doleful strings gaining momentum as the piano’s left-hand side takes over from the strings, joined by pattering, scurrying, chopped up breaks. It’s all swirling piano weaving in and out, around and through the drums. It reminds me of Ian William Craig’s ‘Lovers, Cascading (Part I)’, perhaps in the way repetitious, rapid piano runs act to slow a sense of time and open a little portal for you to disappear into for a while. It’s followed by ‘Waxcap’, a great little funky technoid thing. The tune I’d love to hear most on the dancefloor. Something in its timbre or quality reminds me of early Call Super releases such as The Present Tense EP or ‘Acephale II’. At the same time, there’s a foregrounding of these whirling, springy, chirping mutterings and vocalisations that are reminiscent of Two Shell’s ‘Blobject’, sounding like a young android immersed in play. Dance music has always had a fascination with the future and the machinic, but both these tunes articulate a very contemporary stream of music that focuses less on the Terminator style extermination machines waging war on humanity, the drugs via USB body hacks of cyberpunk, or battling aliens in 15 metre tall robot suits, and more on exploring online authenticity, alongside the emotional and personal lives of machines in the age of AI. The future is made small and intimate. They play sonically with the possibilities and limits of computers to provide, mimic, or embody connection and empathy. To put it differently, it is music that carries the glee of an adolescent android changing the default language on his dad’s phone to Chinese and the ways in which this expresses emotional intelligence.
After a tense opening, ‘L’Ancienne’ rolls out into a clipped, staggering rhythm similar to Akkord’s ‘Smoke Circle’ also released on Houndstooth back in 2013. It evokes a sense of a bulking Mecha lurching in slow motion, its stark minimalism and spaciousness between beats providing a sense of scale. ‘Galaxy In Silence’ is a wonderfully complex and mutating piece. I’d written in my notes on first listen that it reminded me of Neil on Impression’s The Perfect Tango EP, which I’m not sure it does, ending closer to The Boats’ ‘Ballad of Indecision’. That is, its last movement is a beautiful melding of post-rock and ambient sorrow with bassweight pressure. ‘Three Foxes Chasing Each Other’ sounds a bit like a Shackleton tune without the dread. Like Shackleton’s music, when it’s not brilliant it can tend to meander. ‘Let Me’ is a good old breakbeat tearaway. I’m not a huge fan of that maximalist ‘more breaks is more’ approach to music. It’s a warped jungle track touching on elements of breakcore, however it reminds me somewhat of M.E.S.H.’s ‘Functions of the Now’ mix from 2014, perhaps in terms of its giddy anarchic energy.
‘Out of Dust’ is a great piece of deconstructed and disorientating instrumental grime. Organised around a Boxed style sadboy grime synth lead, with its drums increasingly insistent, pummeling, and fractious. At times moving into gabber-esque kickdrum blasts, it’s impressive how it stays so chilled while drilling your head in with a kickdrum and plays with decontextualised genre signifiers that takes an assemblage of familiar sounds and places them on a new terrain, altering and overriding the meanings we associate with them. There are some antecedents here in perhaps Night Slugs or elements of Tri Angle or PAN records from 10 years ago or thereabouts, I’m not certain, but it expresses an idea of blowing up dance music genres and playing with their debris. The album closes beautifully with the epic ‘Sycamore’. It feels like a Vietnam War documentary that in a poignant moment switches to aerial footage shot out the side of a helicopter. The sense is that something important is happening, but at a safe distance. That what is happening is so overwhelming that the mind craves psychic distance.
Despite how busy Under Tangled Silence often is, in moving across genres and in provoking memories and ideas that connect and animate it, I love how cohesive it is overall. In some tangential ways it reminds me of Converge’s Jane Doe, insofar as it is best enjoyed not by separating it into parts and culling it down into preferred tunes but as a totality listened to at a less than full focus, alongside reading, a bike ride, study, work, whatever you like, with it regulating mood and time, creating a sonic space of safety and joy, and drawing in focus when it (often) compels you.