Djrum is readying his Portrait With Firewood LP for release on August 17th via R&S Records. This past June we reviewed the album’s first single, the excellent cut “Sex,” and today we have the record’s second offering, “Waters Rising.” The track is a collaboration with the multidisciplinary artist and musician Lola Empire, whose soaring vocals can be heard on the song.
On Djrum’s upcoming long-player the musician has foregone sampling as his typical mode of production and has instead returned to his childhood instrument of piano as inspiration. “Waters Rising” began as a sketch on the instrument that he shared with Empire. As the two began to collaborate, Empire expressed that she’d recently fallen in love. Discussing their interaction, Djrum explains:
“I really hadn’t expected love to be a theme in the album…and told her I didn’t think love was an appropriate subject for it. But she came out with this, ‘love is dark’.”
While the track’s initial piano sketch still lies at the heart of “Waters Rising”, Empire’s vocals and Djrum’s breakbeat influenced rhythms add layers of complexity to the song’s first inspiration. At times dreamy and contemplative, echoing vocals and syncopated beat structures soon add levels of anxiety to the song’s more gentle opening. If the complicated feelings that love engenders have a way of pushing us beyond our comfort zone–that feeling that indeed the flood waters are rising–it seems that the collaborative process between Empire and Djrum have also propelled this track into new and unexpected territory. Like love itself, the result is revelatory.
