drmn is an interesting album, not of your typical structure. Bringing together four different producers from four different parts of the world (USA, Greece, Canada, and Germany), DSPLAY, rak, marjen, and noblonski decided to collaborate by splitting an album four ways.

While these four producers hail from different parts of the globe, it’s become clear over the last few years that producers are popping up everywhere to contribute to the conversation in instrumental hip hop. So it should come as no surprise that these producers found each other, as global collaborations have become more and more common. What makes this album so interesting, though, is that one, we have four different producers coming together, and two, the way they split this album up. Instead of everyone just contributing a few beats, or trying to pass around beats between all involved until everyone’s contributed, they decided to just each take one fourth of the album, just one track long, and do their best to compose something interesting. That means that the album is just four tracks long, but each track is about fifteen minutes long. The result is a collection of mini electronic instrumental opuses, with plenty of room for each producer to explore their space and push themselves to outdo the other three. What this means in practice is that this is an album best enjoyed sitting down, with headphones, where you can really allow yourself to get lost in all the twists and turns and genre experimentation that happens here. You’ll get some pretty downtempo beats, to be sure, but you’ll also get moments of aggressive noise, moments of dark and brooding beats, moments of glitches and electronic noise, and all sorts of other directions. It’s an album that’s equally influenced by the likes of Odd Nosdam and DJ Krush at some moments, but then veers into the world of trip hop the next. It’s just a fun album to get lost in.

When this album first showed up at my door, I had no idea what to expect. Now that I’ve spent some quality time with it, I’d love to see more producers take this approach. It’s a fresh take on instrumental music that really opens thing up to some interesting musical conversations.