I LOVE DRUKQS+

and, no, they do not nessecitate the same thing.

and yeah, i like drukqs too

was actually my favourite until i was told i should be liking the 'ambient' stuff more.

For me, it's got plenty of good things but it's the least interesting of the "proper" studio albums, no doubt.

I pretty much thought it was shite when it came out.

I got into Aphex Twin way late and sorta heard everything all at once. Drukqs struck me as the best. It's still my favorite.

but... the drill stuff was already getting kinda old when this came out and he was looking to end his relationship with warp. I found the analord stuff actually pretty good and at least had a bit of a new direction.

I keep replaying "Avril 14." Is the rest of the album this good?

i finally picked this up a couple weeks ago. it's a bit of an inconsistent album, but i think there's some great stuff on it. i've not yet really digested disc 2 (which seems a little spottier) but disc 1 is excellent.

it kind of got trashed, it seems, when it was first released, but i'm quite happy i finally picked it up. it's a lot better than some of those early reviews made it out to be.

Tape Store, it's his most complete album, however it was let down by the fact it came out about 4 years too late. Rather than a huge stylistic leap, it's a sprawling double album that concentrates on refining what he had been doing since 1996, so to seasoned fans who expected another wacky twist in the ongoing Aphex saga, they were to be disappointed. It has an awful lot of material, some of it excellent and a lot of it, well, awful. But that was always the idea with Aphex I suppose. It was never about being polished and more about the fun ideas. Throw it at a wall and see if it sticks, and if it doesn't chuck it in the pot anyway.

"54 Cymru Beats" is one of his all-time best.

The stretch between "vordhosbn" and "Afx237 V7" is great, but after that I usually turn it off or skip 7 tracks

You can makea a dinky 60 minute cut by ripping out all the whoops-I-left-the-tape-running moments.

grozart's response intrigues me; I'm going to buy this.

"Avril 14th" is like the best soundtrack piece Jon Brion never wrote.

i love drukqs

i wonder if druckqs will be one of those albums that gradually gets the kudos and props that weren't there initially, until, one day, it is described as a classic (probably around the time of the next release, when people will say "man this, shit is just druckqs redux, now that was a cool lp"???

― gareth, Monday, March 11, 2002 8:00 PM

^^

miss gareth :(

Hmm, I just noticed that my copy of "Druckqs" has a parental advisory sticker on it. What am I missing?

It has a song called "Cock", no other reason really.

Which I guess makes Richard James the only other act besides Frank Zappa (at least that I can think of) to get a parental advisory notice stuck on an instrumental release.

There's a swear on one of the tracks I think?

yeah 'Cock/Ver10' has the word "cunt" on it

Yeah. All I could hear in my head was the Squarepusher track with "I'm the fucking daddy" on it.

Jeez I bought my copy from Warp and I actually have a sticker somewhere that says "Come On You Cunt Let's Have Some Aphex Acid"

I have just bought this album again, and am about to listen to it for only the second time in 10 years.

It's just become such a "thing," my fear of this album. I think I'm such a different person and have such different tastes in music and different expectations that it will be interesting for me to see how my reactions to it have changed.

how can you even remember your reaction to an album (a double disc album no less) that you heard once over 10 years ago?

I always wrote this album off due to hearing a lot of bad reviews (ok, just from allmusic, but in my teen years AMG was biblical to me), I'm kind of curious about it now.

i remember my reaction and that was that it was good, but nothing new - and "something new" was what i'd come to expect of aphex, and therefore druqks was a bit of a failure. i've dug this out recently and it's a real re-assessor. Ziggomatic is a good fun tune peeps.

i was disappointed by this when it came out for the same reason. i've since come to see it as the last word in "drill n bass" shit or whatever, with a pretty brilliant mix of other material thrown in. doesn't always work though, and admittedly i most often listen to a single-disc redux of favorites i made if i put it on these days...

i love this album and i really can't wait to see what he comes up with next

i didn't really get into chosen lords or much of the analord stuff but bwoon dub off analord02 is very nice

(for me, anyway)

Ween has a lot of Aphex-coded tracks too so I'd say the feeling was mutual

> PEEK 824545201

a lot of the cheat codes in magazines at the time POKEd 201 (RET in z80) into memory to terminate routines before lives were decremented. but you are right that PEEK is lookup and even 824545 is way too large for a 16 bit address space (65536 bytes)

(i can't remember the day of the week sometimes but i do still remember random z80 opcodes. 205 call, 195 jmp...)

morrisp OTM

Koogs OTM

"PEEK 824545201" is a missed opportunity. He could have named it so as to perform a public service. For example, POKE 59901,82 fixes the Attic Bug.

Haha

Beautiful classical guitar version of Avril 14 on Shane Parish's forthcoming album.

https://shaneparish.bandcamp.com/album/repertoire

okay I got RDJ Album on now, it's still very freaky, just pure cartoon alien shit. or maybe music for the little mushroom guys. I like how he's sampling so many "small" sounds like water drops or tapping on coke cans, and even household objects like his modem (I think?), but then in spots it'll suddenly go all orchestral. especially like the last track having all those percussive instruments in it, obviously can't be done in your bedroom with your machines. so it feels big and very small at the same time. it does still sound good but not as good as his 21st Century stuff. "Peek" always makes me feel like I have sinus pain.

Yeah would agree it's not as good as the newer stuff, but it is still great, and it was a big step (well, that and Hangable Autobulb)—I guess it's a bit like Revolver is clear big step, but whilst they're both great, I like listening to Abbey Road more.

That analogy perfectly explains our respective taste differences. I'm a Revolver >>> Abbey Road guy and put it on far more often.

I like how minimal and 'in the box'it feels even though it's totally maximalist. I'd compare it to Autechre's LP5 in that respect

Yeah I get this, I find it amazing how spacey some of it is, given how much he seems to jam into every track.

Another thing I love about Aphex Twin is how every time I want some more stuff, you just kind of Google around and he seems to have squeezed at least another LP's worth of stuff out there. Currently listening to Oslo 2 +6.1, which is an unreleased track off of Rushup Edge and it's great; in fact, it might be better than most of the stuff on the actual release.

Wow, [S770SCI 3000,powertran] beautiful Japanese people might be one of his best.

Isn't Cheetah like "Hey I made an album thar sounds like my other stuff except on a redundant piece of hardware that's really difficult to use"?

I've heard similar concept albums by VSnares and Si Begg and my reaction with all of these is "That must have taken you fucking ages, I shall waste no time in listening to it"

if the piano stuff was sampled surely someone would've discovered from what by now?

I get I can see him just loading up samples of the Cheetah and making stuff that way, in fact certain bits I could swear it's like he's loading up a Syro track through a different set of sounds. I can't specify what exactly but there are bits which sound a little too familiar. That said I can definitely see RDJ getting obsessed with that equipment at a young age and pumping out an EP made on it definitely seems like the sort of thing he would do at this stage in his career, like he's got nothing to prove anymore but I think he does still want to challenge himself.

I agree with the thrust of what you're saying. To be clear tho: I don't mean sampled whole cloth from another piece of music -- but using prepared piano samples and then constructing the pieces on a computer as opposed to outfitting his MIDI Disklavier piano with bolts and the like to record those sounds himself (which is what he supposedly did).

My guess is that he is using the gear he says he is BTW -- at least most of the time. But Analord is probably the stuff that made me think about this issue the most -- because as much as I love the TR-606/808/909s, the MC sequencers and the SH-101 and TB-303, all of those sounds and programming styles can be very credibly replicated using computers.

My bigger point was that this is the guy whose 26 Mixes for Cash includes numerous tracks that have no relation whatsoever to their supposed source material. And so much of what he's done since Syro has cited the gear he used (some of which I own) that I can't help but wonder whether he's taking a bit of a piss by challenging people like me to strain to hear things in his music that literally aren't there.

ahh I see what you mean. yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the prepared piano stuff was actually fake. I wondered about that with that Computer Controlled Instruments EP he did, like it could easily just be samples right? though when I listen to it, it very much does sound like the product of an actual studio. something about the reverb especially sounds authentic.

the Autechre guys were talking about analog vs. digital once and while they agreed the analog stuff sounded special, they did say you can recreate all that digitally if you knew how, it's just that most people don't. I suspect RDJ is one of the guys who knows how.

the computer controlled instruments are real

https://www.logosfoundation.org/instrum_gwr/HAT.html
https://www.logosfoundation.org/instrum_gwr/snar2.html

I can only hope their instrument manufacturing is more sophisticated than their web design.

i like their web design