Djrum Announces New EP ‘I Wander’ on Houndstooth

Where the album pushed his ambitions to new heights, I Wander feels more like a tightly wound distillation of everything that makes Djrum’s music so distinctive. Designed to be played straight through as one continuous piece, it’s also built to work as five standalone tracks — an idea the producer has been chewing over for a while. As he puts it, he’s fascinated by the blurry lines between a song, a track, a work and a piece, and wanted the EP to sit right in that ambiguity.

Sonically, it’s classic Djrum: deep low-end pressure and warped textures give way to glitchy, almost robotic vocal fragments before the record explodes into frantic drum programming shot through with jungle and breakbeat DNA. Just as things reach fever pitch, the mood flips – soft piano lines take over, before a final stretch of Aphex-indebted breaks builds back up into something dense and propulsive. The EP eventually settles into a hazy, string-laced comedown to close things out.