I LOVE DRUKQS+

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!

Ha, I never could figure out what dude said before acid.

this album always reminds me of living in a dorm, staying up late working on paintings

BASS
BIT

The long Kate post up thread is awesome, ILM all-time.

Alan N - I always heard that as "decent bit"

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

It's not all that clear to me these days if he is an unreliable narrator... I mean it was easy to see why anyone would think that some years ago, but as the years have gone by it has become clear that he DID have a tank, a bank, and like ten unreleased albums' worth of stuff. It got me thinking if there was anything left that I thought he had been fibbing about, and I'm not sure I can remember any; well, I dunno if he ever bought a submarine or not.