I LOVE DRUKQS+

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

I also liked Drukqs a lot more than critics did, but admittedly could've done without the multiple straight-piano songs.

Because it was SOOO hyped before hand (and Aphex phanboys are a whole WORLD of obsessiveness if you've never encountered them) and then the critical reaction was a bit "hrrrmmm" and because it was just such an EVENT that Mr. D.James could put out an album that was viewed as less than stellar. It was also the early days of the Blogosphere and I guess EVENT records that send shockwaves across the Blogosphere are a dime a dozen now and therefore not such an event, but at the time it seemed to take up a lot more space, culturally, than it might otherwise. I guess I just heard so many Aphex phanboys who were outraged that it coloured the experience for me and I approached it on first listen with the expectation that it was going to be both hard going and not very good.

It's odd how the critical reaction of other people can colour your experience of a record, even to make you dislike something you wouldn't normally pay attention to. But also, at the time, I don't think I *liked* Aphex. I was a Spacemen 3 stan who didn't see the point of "modern dance music" - i.e. I liked Selected Ambient Works (but saw it as an outlier that was nothing like the rest of his stuff) and Orbital, but wasn't prepared to go any further out than that at all.

In 2001 I was in a very different place, emotionally and musically, and listening to a lot of glitchy era Radiohead and people were saying to me "you shouldn't be listening to that, you should be listening to Aphex and Squarepusher" and so I tried this album, and my reaction was that it was NOTHING like what I liked about Kid A/Amnesiac - my immediate reaction was "bleurgh, this is a lot of noise and disjointed random rhythms that make no sense."

It's funny, though, *now* having learned a lot more, and broadened my tastes, my reaction to it is very different. I mean, the other record I just bought at the same time was the new FlyLo and if I can pick out order and pattern from that burst of randomness, Drukqs is almost easy listening by comparison. A lot of the stuff that just irritated me at the time (WTF? Why does he have his parents singing happy birthday on one track? And some random chick shouting at him in French on another? What's with the awkward piano solos?) makes a lot more sense in the context of knowing more about him as an artist and as a human being. It seems less like a random assortment of sounds, and more like a carefully crafted collage of a self portrait.

So it's partly about taking a record on its own terms, rather than as a Cultural Event. And partly about how my tastes have completely changed. (It's funny, I thought people's tastes were supposed to get narrower in their 30s. My tastes got narrower in my 20s, then just completely exploded in my late 30s)

There's something very creepy in Richard's mum's Cornish-accented voice isn't there? What about that whooping laughter on one of the Ventolin EPs?

Erm, no. I thought his mum sounds like a right laugh. Especially the impromptu harmony on the "tooo yooouuu" bit. More Welsh than Cornish accent, though.

"Richie" made me laugh, though. The idea of anyone calling him Richie seems inconceivable but clearly his mum does. Adorable.

COME ON YOU C*NTS LETS HAVE SOME APHEX ACID!

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.