Aphex Twin Drukqs CD

It's tempting to imagine Richard James holed up in his basement for years on end, concocting foaming aural experiments to try out on unsuspecting listeners, and he certainly does little to dispel that image here. His past musical output has varied from the gentle but weird, to the baffling, to the ghastly, and with DRUKQS he manages to combine all the aforementioned in a compelling yet unsettling mix that is never less than fascinating. The tracks are listed on the booklet, but not necessarily in the same order they appear on the album, and moreover James seems to have developed his own language somewhere along the way, so we're left to our own devices to figure things out.

Like some demented baseball pitcher, James constantly varies his stylings, now pastoral acoustic piano, now impossibly fast breakbeat techno garage, now weird hollers from behind the basement door. He keeps the listener constantly off balance (at one point including a Stephen Hawking-like voice reading snippets of Goldilocks and the Three Bears); it's a wild, strange ride, but it's consistently fascinating to hear what comes next.

Aphex Twin is Richard D. James.

2 CDUncut (11/01, p.101) - 3 stars out of 5 - "...The effect is comforting yet eerie..."
Alternative Press (12/01, p.78) - 8 out of 10 - "...Dense and diverse...This serves as an enlightening intro for novices and as a thrilling recap for longtime fans..."
The Wire (10/01, p.55) - "...A cavernous cabinet of curiousities...amusing and arresting....It has become his lot to exist in a permananet state of satirical seige against the culture that would adopt him..."
Mixmag (12/01, p.61) - 4 out of 5 - "...This is music-box prettiness torn apart by scattershot beats and frantic acid squelches..."
Down Beat (2/02, p.62) - 3.5 stars out of 5 - "...Solo piano tracks interspersed with dizzying complex rhythms and found sounds..."
Vibe (12/01, p.192) - 4 discs out of 5 - "...A long haul, but one beautiful ride..."
Mojo (Publisher) (11/01, p.112) - "...We are talking about the difference between a Masters degree, which is fixed within the frontiers of existing knowledge, and a PhD, which ventures boldly beyond them..."
NME (Magazine) (12/29/01, p.59) - Ranked #10 in NME's 50 "Albums Of the Year 2001".
NME (Magazine) (10/20/01, p.38) - 9 out of 10 - "...It ripples and eddies through whipsmart intellectual techno, gibbering drum'n'bass, early '90s rave and...what sounds like a team of bellringers attempting a backwards version of 'Silent Night'..."