Felix Manuel, known as Djrum, returns after a six-year hiatus with Under Tangled Silence, a sprawling album of creative reconsitution inspired by a Patti Smith quote: “We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.” Describing it as “electronic” refuses engagement with what it actually is—a document of emotional recursion encoded in rhythmic disturbance, the dialogue between chaos and catharsis, and pianistic memory of trauma and loss. Under Tangled Silence is a palimpsest shaped like a record. A sutured ruin of a dream; grief as ontology, half-remembered but always felt.
Begin again, because that’s what Under Tangled Silence does. A catastrophic hard-drive failure in 2020 wiped out the album's initial form, four years in the making. Hardly the cute artist anecdote of “starting fresh," this was grief, paralysis, and a direct confrontation with absence. Manuel couldn’t look at his DAW for months, making the silence settle over him like volcanic ash. Only later did he begin again, creating music from fragments and built upon afterimages—melodies hovering long enough to suggest coherence before dissolving into delay and noise; breaks erupting like nervous tics trying to remember the shape of ecstasy. Every note seems to ask what can be made from rupture?
The first clear answer is “Unweaving,” a solo piano piece improvised in the dark. Each note questions the ones before with a smearing intention, courtesy of the sustain pedal. It is not jazz, ambient, or Satie's melancholic objectivity. It is something closer to trauma logic, fragmentation mistaken for pattern; pauses mistaken for rest; silence mistaken for form.
The album is filled with this kind of psychodynamic architecture. “Three Foxes Chasing Each Other” is its most transparent thesis image—an ouroboros gasping in triplicate, caught in its orbit. Jungle breaks arrive with ferocity, while beneath it, the mbira chirps. Children’s voices appear later, half-heard, unprocessed, recorded in the field. Nothing is foregrounded. Everything arrives as a sensation one frame late.
Manuel’s choice of instruments speaks in the language of intimacy. They are tactile. The Irish lap harp, the thumb piano, and the cello, performed by Zosia Jagodzinska, are spectral additions, consistent yet fleeting. They haunt the circuitry. Most of the pianos are mic’d so close you can hear their wood flex and keys creak.
What we can distinguish from previous Djrum records, Seven Lies and Portrait With Firewood, is Under Tangled Silence's formlessness of emotion as form. “A Tune for Us” resists structure entirely. There's no grid, no bar lines, no loop. Manuel constructs a rhythmic frame after the fact, like choreographing a found-footage dance. Like Autechre’s Rae, rhythm on Under Tangled Silence never lands where you expect it to. It slips its logic, reshaped by refusal rather than repetition. This anti-grid logic continues as few tracks repeat themselves conventionally. It’s music written against quantization and predictability. Nothing ever happens the same way twice.
And yet, it grooves through limbic rhythm. The nervous pulses of grief and intuition, “L’Ancienne”'s futuristic ancehall and “Let Me”'s gabber flirtations would rupture floorboards and speakers alike. Even in “Galaxy in Silence,” ostensibly an acid house track, the rhythm is a mirage, feeling like a hallucination rather than a dream. You follow it like a moving shadow as it promises fixity but never quite lands.
The album’s sonic ethics are perhaps its most radical gesture as they sidestep electronic music tropes of melancholy or euphoria entirely. Manuel reintroduces corrupted audio fragments from the crashed hard drive into the final mix. He doesn’t repair the damage. He archives, performs, and elevates it. What he’s after is a granular feeling. A density of sentiment so fine-grained that you don’t feel the sadness or joy until long after the headphones come off.
There’s something of Tim Hecker’s Virgins here, too: hiss and hum as structure, distortion as grace. The Kintsugi-core of breakage made visible, and then honored. Rather than erase the trauma of data loss, Manuel absorbs it. For example, the hiss in “Reprise” is a kind of memorial. Its clipped decays, bitcrushed phrases, and digital static are all intentional. The marks of time’s violence. “Let Me” and “Sycamore” also reflect this philosophy. Both tracks threaten to complete themselves, but don’t. “Sycamore,” the closer, stretches past eleven minutes and never loops. Its melodic content becomes harmonic vapor in a post-form refusal of conclusion.
Throughout, Manuel treats genre like muscle memory. His history as a jungle and dubstep DJ surfaces constantly, but nothing lands clean. Every time you think you hear a reference point, it melts. In fact, he's likened the process to a “broken robot.” He's a figure trying to feel and glitching into self-awareness. Under Tangled Silence takes this figure seriously, with its ontological and phenomenological glitch.
There are aesthetic cousins, sure—Aphex Twin, Skee Mask, Squarepusher—but none share Djrum’s particular affective topology. The only real comparison might be to Derek Jarman’s Blue: a work of layered sensation, stripped of exposition, meditating on mortality through texture, sound, and fragment. Or even WALL·E, the last machine, still capable of longing, combing through refuse to make beauty.
Under Tangled Silence is a container for feelings that don’t diagram well. It is the record of a person's unlearning performance and genre while building instead from resonance and accident. It is exquisite, acutely felt, and a strong contender for best electronic album of 2025.
