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!

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

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.