I LOVE DRUKQS+

Of course with IDM it's a bit distorted because when Aphex Twin started he was competing with maybe ten others, and now he's competing with hundreds, thousands of bedroom tinkerers, so the possibility of recognisable innovation shrinks dramatically.

In comparison people aren't likely to criticise Bob Dylan for not pushing boundaries (although I get the impression that Love & Theft evidences *personal* artistic progression) because the critical model that surrounds evaluation of Dylan - and traditional songwriting generally - usually adheres to a fall-from- paradise model rather than a race-to-the-finish-line model.

- and hey, maybe Drukqs makes more sense if you try and put it into a Dylan template! It's Aphex's New Morning or Self-Portrait - sprawling but also cosy, perverse and domestic at the same time (all those gentle interludes, the phone call from his parents, the general resting-on-laurels-having-fun ambience that pisses progressive Aphex fans off...). I like it, anyway.

As for Drukqs, what I like about it is the sequencing of the record. It's the one album of 2001 (and I use that term instead of my customary 'LP' deliberately) that only makes sense if you play it all the way through in the prescribed order. Not that I've had the inclination to do that very often! We probably won't know unless and until RDJ deigns to release any of his more recent noodlings if this is just a self-indulgent nod to the influence of 'classical' composers (Delius, Stockhausen, etc.) and drum and bass, or if it's the direction he really wants to go in now. Personally, while I'll always be hoping he can repeat the Windowlicker trick, I'd be equally happy with more stuff along the lines of Gwarek2.

oh well. that always happens to me. AND it bloody fades out, so is pretty hard to mix with.

Not this again. ;-) Both Dan and I think it is very wonderful, thank you. Yay us!

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

Great point! Just shows how much of a legend he is. Almost out of character a bit that he's gone out to the Scottish countryside and settled down.

they should put the audio equivalent of an epilepsy warning on 'mt saint michel + saint michaels mount', feel like i could crash my car if it came on while i was driving

Recently, I was marvelling at some weird electronic effect on one of the Collapse EP tracks, and it turns out it's a sped up sample from a 1981 Britfunk record. Very hard to work out what he's doing... Drukqs is full of samples from 1970s records by all accounts, and I couldn't identify a single one of them despite knowing most of the records in question.

he's gone out to the Scottish countryside and settled down.

Yeah I wonder why he chose there (I think he's in Ayrshire or Kilmarnockshire; somewhere south of Glasgow). I wouldn't choose there and he's got a lot more cash than me.

Drukqs is full of samples from 1970s records by all accounts

Is this documented somewhere(?) First I have heard of it!

Yeah, it's here... Of course, it might be all made up!

https://www.whosampled.com/Aphex-Twin/

e.g. these from Taking Control:

When the Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin (1971)
King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown by Augustus Pablo (1976)
Unwind Yourself by Marva Whitney (1967)

Thx! Wild... "When the Levee Breaks"(!)

Yeah I know... They're pretty much all weird—even the idea that he has actually listened to any music from the 1970s!

i feel like i'm taking crazy pills do you guys not know what breakbeats are

or where they come from

so its probably more he's sampling breakbeats that sampled these tunes not that he's perousing Marva Whitney records for samples

Yeah, could be. Still, I like to think he's a massive secret soul boy

well i doubt he had to dig for it, it's a canonical b-boy break, as is basically everything he uses on the album

i promise you guys aphex twin has listened to marva whitney unwind yourself in its entirety at least a few times in his life this is not debatable

I guess I'm pretty uninformed, I didn't realize he used samples like that at all.

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.

Haha, yeah I can imagine that, but then I can imagine that I'm imagining that. It's pretty painful. I've forgotten the name of it, but there's a paradox that came up when I did AI back when no one cared about AI, including the people doing AI, where you cannot tell if someone is lying if they say they are a liar—I like to imagine him having a chuckle at that.

Re: the Cheetah stuff, I know what you mean frog, though there is a slower version of the CIRCLONT stuff from Syro available (interview tracks—goes on for ten minutes) and it does sound similar, but not sure it's quite the same.

Re: b-boy breaks, yeah I found that surprising too, partly because it doesn't really sound like it at all, like all these late 80s records that did that did—I mean I can't hear Led Zep even although I'm told it's there, but also partly because I don't think he did much of it before or even since, but I may be missing it—does he use canonical breaks on all his other records?

Ha, Aphex Twin definitely uses breakbeats. In the case of that Levee Breaks one, he's just using them as one-shots and using the texture, not the groove. I don't know that I would have ID'd it pitched up like that. But the Marva Whitney one is clear, ghost notes and everything.

Sometimes he doesn't use breakbeats! Often the drum sounds are pretty clearly synthetic. But, say, Come to Daddy has real drum sounds mixed in there, so he clearly took them off some record or other. Pretty sure the new stuff (Blackbox Life Recorder) has some as well.

I agree that it's surprising to hear a breakbeat longer than one hit in his music, usually the drums are so meticulously chopped up out of tiny samples (whether they originally came from breakbeats or drum machines).

i think the drums on most of his 90s stuff were programmed, even when he was channelling the jittery spirit of dnb on hangable auto bulb or whatever he was usually doing it with sequenced single hits, he got heavier into using classic canonical ultimate breaks and beats type loops on the later stuff - druqks, syro and the tuss - though yeah he chops and layers the hell out of them usually to the point of inscrutability

that led zep id might be absolute bullshit though i don't really hear it either

he chops and layers the hell out of them usually to the point of inscrutability

Yes, SHIP OF THESEUS. It would be quite in character for that to be the case.

I'll need to listen again for the Marva Whitney one—can't say I had noticed, but then it's also so massively out of context.

One thing I did hear/learn recently was the bit in I think Taking Control, where his mum is saying "Would you like a blackcurrant drink?", and now I learn that many years later, as a clear fan of blackcurrant drinks, he has married a Ms. Rybena.

poking around further on whosampled i realized he actually flipped two different breaks from the same marva lp on drukqs

https://www.whosampled.com/sample/261703/Aphex-Twin-Taking-Control-Marva-Whitney-Unwind-Yourself/
https://www.whosampled.com/sample/350772/Aphex-Twin-CockVer10-Marva-Whitney-Things-Got-to-Get-Better-(Get-Together)/

it is probably instructive to think of drukqs as his most direct engagement with dnb/jungle production modes (vs dnb aesthetics on rdj/hab/c2d) - bringing in more breaks, doing everything in a tracker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAZo7x83it4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WeKUEL6GNE

also i think the collapse 'britfunk' sample you mentioned is actually from a us freestyle dub
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhgmX903oh0

so much pre idm dna is buried in random '80s dance dubs

No it wasn't that. It wasn't from whosampled though, it was some YouTube video I watched about Aphex samples, I think. It had some film of the original, which I think I remembered from the time, and was quite obviously just the same thing but maybe doubled in speed. When I'm in a better place to do so, I'll see if I can find the video.

Man I loved composing with trackers back in the day. It really did feel perfect for making drum and bass and hyperactive percussion editing.

This isn't a Britfunk track and I certainly don't remember it from when it came out, but I think this might the sample I was referring to on the Collapse EP (video should be set to the right time)—I would have to have got most of the facts wrong though, although that is entirely possible. If I come across something more fitting, I will post it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWqRlAXGn-4

i think ilm strips the time parameters

Collapse is about 7 minutes in

Haha, you mean I stripped the time parameters! To be fair to me, I dunno if YouTube has time parameters when I wrote it.

Very polite of you though, A.

It's this his best album? I didn't really get it at the time and thought it had too much filler, but I've been relistening to it these past weeks and it keeps blowing my mind. It's both very accesible and inaccesible... I think that contrast was off-pùtting to me when I was younger as it makes for a very uneven listen, but the sound design and quality in every one of these is him at the top of his game. I still find it hard to listen to it as a full album but in low doses is really cool. It slowly becoming one of my favorite albums of all time.

otm

I dig it a lot, very much, moreso than in the past.

It may actually be my favourite album of all time.

It's aged well but not my fav still. Some great discourse above from '22-'24 about this album that's some of my favorite on this entire board.

its a one off. it has this stark, organic (sorry), mechanical feeling that none of his other stuff does. its like the and some kind of narrative/curve/path, too.

I don't revisit it often but when I do my reaction is "whoa, this is way better than I remembered it"

maybe one of those where my first impression was kind of dismissive which colored my opinion of it ever since. in part because I loved the gimmicky stuff he was doing, but to be fair RDJ himself did a real lousy job promoting it, saying they were just toss-offs he never meant to release but did anyway for whatever reason, made me feel it probably wasn't worth listening more than a couple times

I was 16 when it was released and my music taste wasn’t as “sophisticated”

I listen to it decades later and now I understand better what he was doing in here and feel like I missed out so many years.

Also I was a student and I had some subpar speakers and cheap headphones so that probably didn’t help. This album sounds majestic on good headphones.

I enjoyed it very much at the time. One disc was stolen along with my CD Walkman in a break-in at our flat on Archway Road 2001. I might buy it again. I have good speakers now.

That was a horrible flat.

but to be fair RDJ himself did a real lousy job promoting it, saying they were just toss-offs he never meant to release but did anyway for whatever reason, made me feel it probably wasn't worth listening more than a couple times

Kind of amazing, in its own way—promoting your own record in such a way that would make people want to not listen to it. That combined with the many reviewers that said it was an 'LP full of Erik Satie-like piano pieces', indicating that they had not listened beyond TRACK ONE.