DjRUM’s Under Tangled Silence is ambitious and immaculately realised. A Tune For Us opens the album in dazzling abstraction, its expressionist piano feels completely untethered from bar lines, darting and glistening like something lifted from 20th-century classical avant-garde. When the drums arrive, they disorient in the most thrilling way. The rhythm is impossible to count, and yet the groove is undeniable, as if an octopus is playing jazz behind the kit, sounding acoustic but clearly the product of painstaking programming.

Felix Manuel’s musical journey has been characterised by a seamless fusion of genres, blending elements of techno, dubstep, jungle and jazz into cohesive compositions, but Under Tangled Silence represents a significant evolution in his artistry. The album, conceived over nearly eight years, was nearly lost due to a hard-drive failure in 2020, which erased much of his progress. He eventually reconstructed the album from fragments and memory, and has delivered something both physically gripping and intellectually wild. Delicate, aching modern classical compositions that wouldn’t be out of place on a Nils Frahm record sit side by side with warped percussive experiments. Congas patter, kicks pulse, the drum programming is mind-bendingly intricate, but it never feels cold. Whether it’s the sustained piano pedals, or the sheer attention to sonic texture, DjRUM never lets the machine lead entirely, and the complexity invites closer attention without ever pushing the listener away.

Under Tangled Silence is alive with mourning, movement, and mystery, reaching for connection as it splinters rhythm and time apart. On the final track Sycamore, an overwhelming crescendo of rapid-fire kicks rise from a sub-bass murmur into a blinding strobe-light thump, and it’s one of the heaviest moments you’ll hear on any album this year - electronic, metal, or otherwise.

Somehow, this brutality lives peacefully beside the record’s gentlest moments. The grooves defy obvious time signatures - it’s often impossible to count along - and yet they’re unmistakably danceable. The breakbeats don’t sit neatly in the lineage of jungle or garage, instead being used like brushstrokes, layered and fractured to the point of abstraction, but never losing their physical, bodily pull. The tempos might gesture toward drum & bass or house, but the grooves are too slippery to pin down. The beats crackle like burning kindling, and it’s engineered with the same intimacy as a film score. A single kick drum can rupture the peace like thunder. Restraint and chaos held in balance.

So much of IDM ends up cold and alienating, inviting admiration more than feeling, but Under Tangled Silence’s complexity doesn’t come at the expense of emotional depth. DjRUM engineered the machines to express something deeply human - and they listened. It plays with silence as much as distortion, it hits like a sledgehammer, but it also holds your hand. DjRUM has carved something rare: a record of profound emotional intelligence that still kicks like a mule.