To Listen: Aphex Twin — Drukqs
I’ve got a playlist that’s existed for years. It’s simply called “To Listen.” I used to keep a neat list in my pocket of albums that people had recommended, songs people had recommended, songs that had come up here or there that I wanted to follow up on. It became impossible to keep up with and impossible to honor in the order in which they were brought to me. So I started this playlist to continuously add stuff to it and catch up. The problem is, so many of it goes by me without really getting the proper attention it deserves. Most of the stuff I write about or recommend or throw out into the social quicksand is from whatever the current year is, but there’s an entire history of human creation going backwards that I forget to respect it in the proper way throughout the year. So I’m going to try to write a little bit about older recommendations that I come upon that I end up enjoying in the To Listen playlist. I’ll be honest, some of the stuff on there, I don’t even make it through. But some of it ends up being gems that I was sleeping on forever.
I’m not entirely sure, but this album was brought to my attention from Ryley Walker (whose album Deafman Glance [listen] was in my top ten of last year) and a tweet which he said he could listen to this one on repeat forever. (I think!) One issue with this playlist as well is that some of this stuff sits on there for so long that I have no idea how they made it on here in the first place. I’ll try to do better going forward.
The first one I want to write about here is Aphex Twin’s Drukqs from 2001. I’ve got the utmost respect for him as an artist, not only in his ability to create some brilliant electronic music but also in his powerful way to build a character, a thorough creative vision for his work from the bottom up.
I’m terrible at understanding and embibing electronic music at anything other than an ambient level, an emotional level, so when it comes to the more aggressive and/or compositioned electronic songs, I get a little lost. I feel no soul or spirit from it. I get the surface reaction, I get the adrenaline. But it disappears as soon as it came. This record does all of it and more. There are stretches of songs where it feels like you’re living in crystallized caffeine, lucid dreaming moments that feel frenzied and shook like sleeping in the backseat of a car in a high speed chase. Also there are pensive stretches, simple piano songs that give you pause like a billion windmills on the horizon. The broken and glitched songs are made in a way that only someone who has come to understand a dimension of sound that we all aren’t gifted enough to navigate could arrange. It’s brilliant. The way sounds are twisted and palpitated, it seems that there could have been almost no enjoyment over the work of this record, but instead some bona fide blood, sweat and tears that could only be looked back upon much later. This one would have broken any standard artist. Maybe that’s why this was his last one as Aphex Twin for thirteen years.
This record is just a hair over one hundred minutes long (100:37), so it’s a tough one to sit down and listen to in one solid stretch. I did, but I had no idea I was in for a marathon. With it being so long, some of the elements of it fall into the background, some of it even acts as a rest stop for your mind and ears to be able to reset a little bit, to readjust and grab a glass of water. Awesome record, one that you need to sit down and hear, even if in the same way that you’d digest a book: over time. Even if I just chose a handful of my favorite tracks from it, it’s a 29 minute selection, which out of 100 minutes, is just a slice. Get to it when you can! (click here to check out the album!)
By the way, the tracks are: Vordhosbn, Omgyjya-Switch7, Cock/ver10, Bbydhyonchord, 54 Cymru Beats and Afx237 v.7. (playlist)
