APHEX TWIN - DRUKQS @ 20

 

Released on October 22, 2001, Aphex Twin’s Drukqs turns 20 years old today. It was the fifth studio album released under the Aphex Twin name and was one of Richard D. James’ most divisive albums.

Drukqs is so controversial because it refuses to adhere to anyone’s expectations nor to conform to any particular style across it’s two CDs / four vinyl LP mammoth 30 song, 1 hour & 43 minute runtime. It runs the gamut from hyperactive break-beat overloads to gently pastoral mechanical piano interludes and all of it seems to be thrown together with little to no consideration for track sequencing. Indeed, James himself has said that most people just import music into their computers and play albums in any order they like, so he anticipated that people would reconstruct the album to suit their own tastes anyway. As such, there wasn’t much point in spending a lot of time painstakingly arranging tracks into a particular order.

With this in mind, Drukqs can be seen as both a banquet of potential goodies or a confused amalgam of stray ideas. It only seems to make sense when the listener intervenes and puts the music together in a way that works for them. I know I found it an impossible listen when I first encountered the album when it was released and it was only much later when I took the time to reorder the tracks that I was able to find a way to appreciate it for what it had to offer. Personally, I found splitting it into “ambient” vs “rhythmic” tracks created two albums that I could listen to in their entirety, though I'd say I favor the more mellow side of this collection.

Part of the reason for the inconsistency in terms of styles can be found in its genesis, which was largely spurred by the theft of a laptop computer containing a massive collection of unreleased tunes which James lost while traveling. In order to thwart potential bootlegging, James put together Druqks as a stopgap measure, which is a predominant reason for critics often citing the album as merely a collection of random unreleased tracks from the previous few years. For many, it didn’t offer any new groundbreaking material and seemed to be no more than restatements of ideas already explored on more coherent releases like I Care Because You Do & the Richard D. James album.

Ultimately, the album relies on the listener to pick up the pieces and make something listenable out of it. There are some brilliant moments on it, especially with unexpectedly subtle compositions like Avril 14th, one of the mechanical piano tracks alternating between the more furiously complex break-beat excursions. James has provided a pile of puzzle pieces and left it up to the listener to sort them out. It would also have to suffice as the last Aphex Twin album until 2014’s Syro release. Not that James was completely silent all those years, releasing the Analord EP series as “AFX”, among other scattered side projects like The Tuss, but he’d stay away from Aphex Twin for over a decade. Part of that may have had to do with a nasty divorce from his wife and an effort to keep her from benefiting from potential royalties. Whatever the case, it left the Aphex Twin legacy in something of an uncomfortable limbo while fans tried to figure out what was going on.