#483 Aphex Twin - Drukqs

I heard pretty lukewarm things about this and kind of forgot about it. Time to buckle down for two discs of horrors!

Something I read about this pointed out that it sounds less like a triumphant return from the o.g. IDM guru, and more like a trawl through a hard drive for previously unpublished songs, dumped wholesale onto a pair of discs. Coming as it does from a man who bragged about releasing rustled-up old tracks to serve as remixes of others' songs, it would hardly be a surprise.

The sequencing doesn't help the case against: tracks are jammed together harsh-to-low-to-harsh seemingly at random, and on the macro level the whole thing seems like an active defiance of production, structure and good taste.

But on a song level, that overlooks some of the album's definite consistent charm. This stands alone alongside I Care Because You Do and RDJ Album on its own merits. Sure, there's the usual suspects: prettty girl song standouts include Jynweythew Ylow, Avril 14th (sampled on Kanye's Blame Game, who knew?), and Grewly Mernans, while nasty boy songs are headlined by Cock/Ver10's aggressive, unpredictable, protodubbsteppy mayhem.

But there's an acoustic, organic side here that bristles with stray hairs, with player piano clicks and hisses, Aphex songs on a rare field trip outside the computer. Heck, Strotha Tynhe and Nanou2 are just traight up pretty little piano pieces, with no particular fuckery or conceptualism at all

Meanwhile Mr Saint Michel + St Michaels and Afx237 v7 are variations just outside the wide spectrum of AT's usua fuckery, the latter featuring some prefusey chopped vocals.

And actually, at the last minute, some real structure and thought seems to come in, as Ziggomatic gets pretty and fades out, seemingly being the perfect end to the album before a little two song coda that touches upon the albums themes on its way out: Beskhu3epnm has is the zenith of that weirdly accoustic brokedown pathos that runs through the album, and the aforementioned Nanou2 is the final lullabye.

As an aside, is this whole album all a joke to test whether we will bother recreating these batshit keystrokes when trying to refer to these sngs? This from a man releasing an album of basically all unnamed songs that people had to hack together titles for from pictures.

And that's at the heart of the problem here. If your whole thing is doing what no one else has done and constantly subverting expectation, eventually what can you do short of put out an album of silence or otherwise unask the entire album question? I guess you settle for putting a bit more heart into your usual tricks, taking them in some new directions, and fuckit, letting your Welsh cat jam on your keyboard and calling it song titles 4/5

You might like this if: you really like Aphex Twin. You kinda like Aphex Twin and haven't heard him in a while. If you haven't heard Aphex Twin, you might like this is you have a high tolerance for noise and weirdness, but if that's the case there's no chance you haven't heard Aphex Twin. If this is somehow you, start with the Richard D. James album and decide if you want to find your way back here.