Customer Reviews

Drukqs

5 star:		(88)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I didn't know anything previously about Aphex Twin, although I had heard of him before. I happened upon a link to this CD in ..., and after reading the reviews here, including the editorial reviews, I became intrigued, and decided to order it, as I like a wide variety of music, and like to try "different" things. This CD was not what I expected. I'm not sure I'd call this "music" as much as I would experimental SOUND. As such, I think this "music" might be more appreciated in a space, where it is performed live, and where one can visually appreciate the effort put into producing such strange and variant sounds. It's not something I'd care to listen it at home, even if I were having a party. However, I will say that on many of the tracks, the types of sounds, and they manner in which they are woven are quite unusual, which I can appreciate. There were a FEW tracks that were uniquely pretty (some of the piano pieces), and another few tracks that were quite "interesting", but overall, I did not like this CD enough, especially to warrant it containing two CDs in the collection. By way of background, some CDs I DO like that I'd consider somewhat "different" are Radiohead's "OK Computer", "Mr. Brubaker's Strawberry Alarm Clock", "One Pound Note", "Cup of Tea" (compilation), Crystal Method's "Vegas" and "Vertigo" by Groove Armada, of which "Mr. Brubaker's...." would be the closest thing to "Drukqs"..

I'd read some Drukqs preview/review a week or so ago claiming that this album marked Aphex's move from unlistenable noise assaults to 30 tracks of near perfect commercial tunes.
As I write this, Drukqs is billed as number 72 in Amazon's best seller list which would suggest that a lot of people have read such write-ups and decided that Richard has finally created an album that showcases his obvious talent.

I've listened to Drukqs from start to finish quite a few times since I bought it, and in my opinion, this album is his absolutely worst collection ever. The ultra-hardcore drill 'n bass style featured on his past few releases has been evolved to it's ultimate conclusion here - supersonic splintered breakbeats dominate the albums main tracks (ie, the long ones) and meander aimlessly through filtered squelches and droning synths.

Most of the tracks simply change every few seconds from hyperactive jungle beats to lethargic murky sounding hip-hop speed beats.
Early Prodigy style 808 acid squelches feature on most of the tracks too, but never form anything resembling a tune, their only purpose seems to be as background noise. Combined with these noisy dirges are several boring piano pieces which don't do anything in particular and end up harking back to the smackhead-era Velvet Underground's tinkling piano experiments. Also thrown into the mess are a few pieces that sound like Chinese temple music and a track that features the always captivating music of a metal bar being banged against a fence (Gwarek 2).

I've always been a pseudo-Aphex fan insofar as that I usually buy his albums in the hope that he'll surprise me, and although I've been less than happy with his previous albums as a whole, this one has no redeeming features. Even the twisted humour of the RDJ album, Come To Daddy EP and the WindowLicker EP has been removed with only a silly sample of his mother wishing him a happy birthday as a legacy of his previous outings.

I know that an artist has every right to name his creations as he so desires, but in my opinion track titles like 'hy a Scullyas lyf adhagrow', 'orban eq trx 4' and 'omgyjwa-switch 7' kind of gives the listener a written idea of just what to expect music-wise. Nonsensical, synthetic and unimaginative.

Anyway, tonnes of people will no doubt buy Drukqs and line his pockets with enough cash to refurbish his bank vault, but I'm through giving (...)any more support.

By all means buy Drukqs to settle your own curiosity, but don't say that I didn't warn you.

My friends and I listen to s*** loads of music of all kinds, but the only thing we never talk about is this. It quite simply excapes description. But, what the heck...
Every track a masterpiece, this presentation pulls the attentive listener through Richard James' consicousness, revealing the expanse of his emotions. Truely one of the few "electronic" albums which has the capacity to toy with your soul, it exudes personality of all tones; from the delicate, fine and gentle, through the cheeky, quircky and mundane, to the revelationary, infinite strata of hyperspacial reality - this recording truely has as much depth and content as the spectator could wish to find or even suppose. To put it another way, this is as close as those who havn't discovered the potentials of the inner landscape will currently ever get to experiencing the kind of continually evolving subconscious patterns that stir within us all. Drukqs exhibits a kind of artistry comparable to all the great masters that display a coherant understanding of the transcendent; and the personality of this genius displays a human originality of which will impact the art world as a strong reference for years to come.

Just great. I am a fan of his music for quite a while and all of his records are special in their own way. Tracks with a little twist only RDJ can add. Sometimes a bit sinister, but thats ok for me! Most of his tracks are sertainly refreshing and energy boosting. A philosopher teacher once said: "to enjoy and appreciate the quality of sertain aspects (of whatsoever) you have to have rotten spots besides it". In case of some of the tracks ("ventolin" (medicine for asthmatic patiens) for example in which you hear a sample of a person hyperventilating), annoying bleeps, cracks and sounds are added in such way that when they fade away in a track you almost feel a releef....a contrast between serenety and rotten (no offence)

Just great. I am a fan of his music for quite a while and all of his records are special in their own way. Tracks with a little twist only RDJ can add. Sometimes a bit sinister, but thats ok for me! Most of his tracks are sertainly refreshing and energy boosting. A philosopher teacher once said: "to enjoy and appreciate the quality of sertain aspects (of whatsoever) you have to have rotten spots besides it". In case of some of the tracks ("ventolin" (medicine for asthmatic patiens) for example in which you hear a sample of a person hyperventilating), annoying bleeps, cracks and sounds are added in such way that when they fade away in a track you almost feel a releef....a contrast between serenety and rotten (no offence)

You can divide this album into three sets of songs: (1) the high-speed electronic songs, (2) the slower "chamber music" piano pieces, and (3) little bits of filler and ambient sound effects. There are nine of (1), thirteen of (2), and the rest are (3).

The high-speed electronic songs sound like a Chipmunk version of Frank Zappa's synclavier music. Sampled beats and synthesized notes burst out of the speakers in complex layers. Everything is played over spastic rhythms. It's breathtaking but also exhausting. These songs move so fast, you can't help but be impressed that they don't collapse into a wall of noise. But you can't dance to it.

The chamber music songs are elegant, patient pieces played on a variety of keyboards. The melodies are spare and the songs are short. Instead of layering the music, the keyboard music is played alone. These pieces are the best part of the album.

The final third is made up of people talking, a phone call from Richard's parents on his birthday, some ambient drones, and sound effects. The album works best when all of these songs are mixed together --- and if you listen to the album in order (instead of using the RANDOM function on your CD player) it comes pre-mixed. Ambient music alternates with high-speed electronica, then you hear a nice little piano piece . . . and then its back to the rapid-fire beats. You're always off-balance from one track to the next.

It works, but there's not much depth to this album. It feels like Richard James messing around, not committing himself to anything particularly spectacular. Again, like Zappa, this feels like an album of spare parts that's been put together just to get something new out on the shelves. That doesn't make it bad when you've got a genius at work. Even his scraps are pretty amazing. But this album is far less brilliant that it could be. (P.S. I think the title means "drug use.")

A long-awaited accomplishment from the famed underground genious proves a decent follow up to the classic "Come To Daddy" breakthrough. While (like most of his releases) there are several "space-filler" tracks filled with background voices and strange industrial/piano pieces, the double album length still allows plenty of room for more worthy tracks. An avid "Come To Daddy" fan, I wouldn't rate this as his best work but it comes closer to the latter acheivement than any of his other releases I have heard. The tunes are often long, and packed full of his trademark drum-and-bass jitterbuggery and avant-garde junkyard techno. The twisted sense of humor always accompanying RDJ's work is not forgotten, though many of the pieces evolve into beautifully haunting and innovatingly psychadelic moments. Loud, bold, and obscenely original, yet more underlined with structure and melody than some of his crude earlier works. A must have for an Aphex Twin fan bored with his more obscure releases.

Yep, this is where my taste is heading. I am restless waiting for music to really revolutionize itself, to catch up to the postmodern hipness literature and film have beaten it to. The album is half a well-crafted blizzard of drill-and-bass beats and half a plangent rush of Erik Satie-styled piano works. The two alternate like the calm and the storm.

Richard James as of this album is the bridge between the John Cage/Steve Reich/Philip Glass neoclassical avant-garde and the glossier more evolved experiments of a geeky subgenre of techno known as IDM. The best thing I can say about this album is that, listening to its thundering cataract of rhythms and their subtle variance from song to song, you're forced to approach music with entirely new ears and expectations. It's a lurching roller coaster ride on acid, tribal and sensual. And just when you think it has declared rhythm the new melody, it downshifts into piano nocturnes as lush and soothing as "Avril 14." This is heady indulgent exciting stuff.

Drukqs. Okay where to start. Some people who like Aphex Twin are going to feel slightly disappointed by this one, probably because it has no discernable structure, but yet again this is exactly where Aphex Twin has wanted to evolve. Drukqs is an album that is unique because of its lack of structure, its lack of cohesion, its lack of memorable music, its lack of listening to something that will stay in your head while you drive to work, its lack of being a CD that you can play to death, its lack of being something that gathers dust because you are sick of hearing it over and over again. In other words, Drukqs remains a thoroughly unique sound because when all is said and done the lifespan of this album is limitless and not bound by the laws of the predictable repetitive demise that most albums have. So for $20 go knock yourself out on something you can slap on and experience over and over again like new. However therein also lays the problem. If you do not like it, then it is a gigantic waste of your precious time. Like I said - Certainly original but way too unconventional for most.

90% of you out there will not like it, period. 5% will like it only to be in with the 5% who seem to like this stuff and yet never get it. That 5% who get it can be mostly described as people who want to make music (Not all though, there will be pockets who do not make music but will like it however the majority of people who love this album have certainly tried). I think Drukqs plays best to those who are interested in sound production and making music in general. If you are musically inclined towards breaking out the "Fruity Loops" or Propellerhead's "Reason" to try your hand at creating samples then you will Luuurve this album with a Kapitol "L". However most sound producers will listen to anything, so maybe that is not the right way to put this album either. It is basically treading a very fine line between rubbish and art, but certainly falls to the better side when all is said and done. It may be easy to say that this is just pure unadulterated whacking himself off by the artist involved but then along comes a track that just diminishes anything that can be considered pretentious about it. There is talent at work here, no doubt about it.

As someone who is interested in Electronica in general you may like to listen to this once, or even twice but this is not the sort of thing that you can remember because it is just so unconventional. Trying to repeat a track in your mind is like trying to count backwards subtracting 2164.23 as you go along. So Drukqs can be played over and over again and remain as fresh as the first time you heard it, but just also happens to be so strange and for such a specific taste that I can really only define this genre as Jungle music for "Aliens". It is mostly Jungle crossed with Electronica but is really less stable than either genre. It is extremely wild and mostly precarious and a fraction away from actually crossing the line of just being "Noise" but then again there is nothing wrong with an artist bringing something like this out because it makes all those other DJs breaking out "Summer Beats XL Ibizza volume 68" look simply as dull as a boiled trout in comparison.

Drukqs will challenge your appreciation of music. I did not like it the first time I heard it at all, but now it has a nice place on the shelf which I pull out every so often just to help curb the restrictive confines of what the Dance genre creates. If you find yourself getting sick of the music you love then it time to do some Drukqs.

'Drukqs' is beautiful.
It all comes down to that simple line; amoung all the processed screams and birthday songs, the chemically drenched drum beats, the indecipherable song titles, 'Drukqs' remains ultimately accesable and awe-inspiring. We have heard all of it before on previous Aphex releases, but Richard D. James has never done it before with such expertise. A haunting sense of melody and sequencing lies underneath the harsh acid beats, and some songs (especially 'Avril 14th' and 'Nanou 2') are moving enough to make even the hardest heart break. The sheer range of emotions depicted on this release is staggering- from fear, sadness and anger right to a joyous feeling of musical discovery and a celebration of life. The unadventorous may find this album to be far too obscure-sounding to be of any benefit to oneself, but those who 'get it' will be richly rewarded.
Compared to many post-classical composers, and deservingly so, 'Drukqs' is a masterpiece of music; not just electronica, but of art itself.