SECURE SHOPPING
If you work with youth in some capacity, you’ve probably made homemade playdough before. And if you’ve made homemade playdough before, there’s inevitably that kid who decides to blend every available type of food colouring in the spectrum together, resulting in a purply brown lump of goo. While the structures that Romanian-born, Berlin based Cosmin Nicolae is creating on his new album Gordian are much more complex than mixing flour, oil and water together, there’s a compelling drive to add more and more components that Nicolae himself seemed surprised by when speaking to Juno Plus earlier this year. “To be honest, I’d intended the whole album to be really minimalistic and kind of hypnotic,” Nicolae stated, “and it’s not minimalistic at all. I didn’t want it to be musical, and it is fairly musical. There just seems to be a lot of stuff going on, when in fact I was trying to subtract.”
On the surface, Felix Manuel’s output as Djrum seems to capture the zeitgeist of ‘post-dubstep’ or whatever other tag gets applied to that particular spin-off from the original bassweight sound. The melancholic chords, displaced vocal snippets and crisp beats are certainly not on their own in these times, and previous singles for On The Edge and Smokin’ Sessions tapped into this idea with aplomb. Now settled nicely into 2nd Drop Records with two EPs behind him, Manuel delivers his debut album and in turn gets to expand on the more unique facets in his sound.
If there’s one thing that comes through about Mr Beatnick’s productions, it’s the sheer musicality of it. It’s been a slow and steady ride getting to know the artist, not least on this most recent trio of 
