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In the cursed days of auto-sync, pre-mixed sets, and the celebrity spinner, few have done as much to defend the noble art of the DJ as Felix Manuel, aka Djrum, a selector who combines galactically expansive taste with equally vast technical skill. For his first commercial mix CD, Manuel joins DJ-Kicks, a renowned series whose 31-year history includes albums by everyone from Detroit techno royalty to Massive Attack’s Daddy G. Manuel has said that DJ-Kicks was what got him into mixing records in the first place; now he wants to inspire others by showing them a side of DJing they might not otherwise witness. It’s a lofty ambition, but hardly out of reach for a DJ at the top of his esoteric game.
Djrum is the rare DJ who operates almost entirely outside the world of genre; his sets swing from breakcore to IDM, jungle to techno, garage to field recordings to—well—whatever, really, depending on mood. “Genre, microgenre—I don’t really give a shit,” he once said. “I think these terms are really useful to describe things, but they describe the boxes, not the music.” The effect of such radical shifts can be discombobulating. A comment on Djrum’s 2020 Dekmantel podcast sums up a typical reaction to his head-spinning sets: “How is that even possible?”
No score yet, be the first to add.
Looking over the tracklist for Djrum’s DJ-Kicks, you might wonder the same. The 82-minute mix’s 32 selections whizz by at bewildering speed and in dazzling formation, from orchestral breakcore to field recordings, and from spaced-out jungle to the nastiest bass rumblings, while the mood flips from meditative calm to nerve-twitching freneticism at the drop of a record.
The worry is that Djrum might be trying a little bit too hard to impress, sacrificing listenability for technical expertise and look-at-this hyper-eclecticism. Certainly, the wide-open effect of the set is intimidating at first: Within the first six minutes, he splashes from aquatic ambience to classically infused drill’n’bass, tossing all notions of conventional pacing out the window and leaving the unsuspecting listener in need of an urgent lie-down.
Djrum himself might even approve of taking in the mix from a horizontal position; his set is designed more for the dreamer than for the raver. Field recordist Chris Watson, president of the Wildlife Sound Recording Society, turns up three times, proffering extended atmospheric strips to help glue the blends together. There is considerable energy to Djrum’s frenetic mixing, and beats are scattered amid long ambient passages, but intrepid dancers will probably end up with leg cramps (just listen to the way the beat seems to slow down during Emptyset’s punishing “Point,” juxtaposed against Watson’s recording of a rattling train).
But over repeated listens, any fear that Djrum has overcooked the mix subsides as the magic of his blends becomes apparent. Manuel doesn’t just slam the records together in standard DJ fashion: He mixed them on vinyl, then cut up and overdubbed those mixes to produce the final result. DJ-Kicks is less a DJ set than a cosmic journey into the deepest, darkest reaches of Djrum’s brain, where he strings together exotic rhythms, chops between genres that should be diametrically opposed, and creates perfectly weighted fusions. Who would have guessed that Atrice’s deconstructed club beats would work so well over Lino Capra Vaccina’s classical minimalism? Or that the bleep-and-trumpet jazz lurch of Planet Battagon’s “Salacians of Trans-Neptunia” would nudge toward transcendence when mixed with the lopsided breaks of Skee Mask’s “Flip”? Moments like these are like battling your way out of a thick, tangled wood to arrive at a sun-soaked mountain top, or finally discovering the humor that underlies James Joyce’s Ulysses: a revelation that is worth all the effort and more.
At times, Djrum’s skill is breathtaking. Consider, for example, the way the angular guitars of post-punk greats the Raincoats wend their way out of Australian producer Core Self’s forest of electronics and percussive effects; or how Djrum scratches and cuts the drum line from Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids’ Afro-jazz-funk fusion over the tail end of his own gut-churning AFX-gone-classical IDM production “Psychic Video.”
These are but moments in an auteur’s widescreen epic that never sits still. It might even be Djrum’s defining statement: Manuel’s own productions have garnered considerable acclaim, with his 2025 album Under Tangled Silence widely seen as a breakthrough work of deep feeling and production smarts, and if DJ-Kicks isn’t necessarily better than that, it feels more representative of his puckish eclecticism, free-wheeling experimentation, and singular musical brain.
DJ-Kicks is a dense forest that offers no shortcuts, a defiant challenge that sounds impenetrably diffuse at first, only for the back-breaking work behind it to yield a fluid, even intuitive sense of purpose. It’s also one of the best entries in DJ-Kicks’ glittering history and—rare beyond rare—a commercial mix that begs to be heard, absorbed, and repeated.
