Over the past decade, UK producer and DJ Felix Manuel – aka Djrum – has left a distinctive mark on the dance music landscape with his bold three-turntable DJ sets and adventurous releases on labels including R&S and Houndstooth.
His latest EP, Meaning's Edge, released late last year, is probably his most accomplished statement so far. Combining jungle-indebted beats and dubstep bass with Manuel's own flute playing, the utterly distinctive release rightly found a place in many best-of-2024 lists.
We visited Manuel in his Oxford studio to talk through the creation of Meaning's Edge highlight Frekm Pt.2 and discuss his approach to building tracks.
“I often do ‘part twos’ of tracks,” he explains. “This is because I produce a lot of material as I'm working and it can be a challenge to fit it all into one track. Often my tracks end up feeling like multiple parts are happening within one track anyway, and then sometimes I decide to put some of those ideas aside and create something new.”
Like other tracks on Meaning's Edge, Frekm Pt.2 is built around flute improvisations recorded by Manuel. The two parts of Frekm, both of which appear on the EP, are both spawned out of the same recorded flute lines.
Version one is initially the more melodic of the two, before its jazzy flutes descend into digital distortion and glitchy beats. Frekm Pt.2 comes at things from the opposite angle, the flute melodies initially hidden under warped delay effects and overshadowed by a dubstep-like beat, before emerging as a wash of ambient woodwinds.
This approach, of spinning an idea out in multiple directions, is at the heart of Manuel’s creativity. As he explains to us in the studio, allowing himself to get distracted and go off on tangents is often the source of his best ideas.
“You have to allow yourself to not have too much of a goal in mind. It can be really restrictive,” he explains. “This happened to me just yesterday. I was working on a track and I wanted to add a bass sound to it. I loaded up Serum, which is a bit of a go-to when it comes to bass, and I started making a kind of Reese sort of thing.
“As it developed, I made this really cool sci-fi kind of sound that was absolutely not a bassline. That's the sort of thing that happens when you're tweaking parameters and you just find something that sounds good. It was a tangent. I ended up making this sound that wasn't the bass that I needed for the track.”
While some producers are strict about finishing an idea before allowing themselves to move on to something new, Manuel is very relaxed about the existence of his half-finished ideas.
“I'm probably working on four or five different tracks at any time, or even more,” he tells us. “I'm always starting up sessions and not finishing them, but I don't see that as unproductive.
“Those aren't necessarily dead ends. It might seem like that, but maybe I'll pick them up later. It's a case of having a lot of ideas that are free to connect with each other in the pool of ideas. It’s about allowing them to cross pollinate.”
As part of that process, he explains to us, certain elements in his tracks can end up being polished to the point of being near-finished, even while other elements of the track remain sketchy or non-existent.
“I can have a very polished intro, and have no idea what's going to happen next,” he says. “But that intro is finished, because I really went in on it, because I needed it to be finished in order to know that it was right.
“I tend to be quite developed in my tunes from an early stage,” he continues. “Some elements will be, like, really sketchy, and that's okay. But some elements kind of feel like they want you to really develop them and polish them up.”
At the heart of all of this is the idea of creative flow – following ideas and tangents as they appear, without getting lost in details or not allowing yourself to explore an idea just because it doesn’t fit immediately.
“I know some people like to do all the polishing at the end,” he adds. “I think it’s fine as long as it doesn't upset the creative flow. That’s the most important thing in all of this. Any detail you can get bogged down by at a too early stage can kill the vibe. It kills the creativity, it kills the flow and the enjoyment. Enjoyment is one of the most important things.”
Djrum’s Meaning’s Edge EP is out now via Houndstooth. His new album, Under Tangled Silence, arrives April 25.
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