DjRUM

“We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.” This line from Patti Smith was going round and round Felix Manuel’s head as he gradually constructed Under Tangled Silence, his first album in six years and a record of a literal creative rebirth. Felix originally began it in earnest in 2020 Covid lockdown, but a catastrophic hard-drive meltdown destroyed almost all his work and sent him close to psychic collapse himself. However, ultimately this pushed him to rebuild from scratch and in so doing to confront and reassess every part of his musical and psychological processes. All of this – the destruction and rebirth of the album, the coming into himself as a pianist (and harpist!), the lessons of decades of shifting influences – fed into what you can hear now. Under Tangled Silence is of course incredibly accomplished, often even smooth, but it's relentlessly unpredictable, and hugely emotional. Where similarly experimental music has often used its intellectual sheen, or sly wit, to dodge direct emotional expression, Felix is clear that “I feel things, I cry all the time, and I'm not afraid to say it or show it in the music.” Under Tangled Silence is every bit as full of catastrophe, fear, deep sorrow as everyday life, even as it is full of euphoria and abstract ideas.