http://www.rollingstone.com/recordings/review.asp?aid=2043238
Aphex twin, also known as England's Richard James, was once a pioneer of
techno
and ambient electronic music, and he made records, particularly 1993's
gorgeous
Selected Ambient Works 85-92, that changed the course of electronic music.
But
since then, he has bravely charted a course toward tech-noise and slowly
veered
into unlistenability. With Drukqs, James delivers his most irrelevant album
to date:
a double CD, thirty-track compendium of indecipherable song titles,
gratuitously
weird sounds and occasional wisps of ersatz classical piano that are
aimlessly
pretty. The moody "Kladfvgbung Micshk" sounds like incidental music for a
haunted-house movie by Damien Hirst, but tracks like this inevitably lead to
tracks
like "Cock/Ver 10," a hyperactive splutter of drum-machine beats and
deflating
video-game drones. The confused and self-indulgent "Gwarek 2" is a
seven-minute
soundscape that resembles something that Trent Reznor might have recorded
after
listening to the Beatles' "Revolution 9," then erased the next day. Among
fans of
IDM, or Intelligent Dance Music, as this sort of stuff is unfortunately
labeled, rumor
has it that James merely loaded this record with outtakes that have been
eating up
space on his hard drive for years, then released the album as a deal-breaker
with
his label, Warp. Or perhaps the explanation for the incoherence of the album
lies
in its punny, unfunny title. Either way, he should have never done Drukqs,
because
his new noise mostly just sounds fukqed up.
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