Drukqs

Drukqs may be the first Aphex long player in five years, but in the interim, James has gatecrashed our living rooms with the defining one-off singles and promo flicks ‘Come to Daddy’ and ‘Windowlicker’. Richard perfectly times an astonishing distillation of several divergent styles familiar to long-term Aphex watchers. Much of its minimal, elegant simplicity harks back to the days before his face graced bikini-clad dancers and child hoodlums, to a time when he stood for lush, dream-like beauty at its purest and best on Selected Ambient Works 85-92. But this is still fashioned with a twisted logic. The tracklist is a childlike scrawl under the banner “My tracks are” which seldom makes the slightest bit of sense. Offerings such as ‘Beskhu3epnm’, ‘Btoum-Roumada’, ‘Lornaderek’ and other such gloriously monikered gibberish are sprawled over thirty tracks and nearly 100 minutes of music.

But the content is superb, spooky and surreal. ‘Jynweythek Ylow’ is a basic quasi-baroque signature coming on like a horror re-make of Toy Story from some forgotten century. A seething sound-bite on ‘Cock/ver 10’, “C’mon you cunt lets have some Aphex Acid”, tips a nutter’s nod to the halcyon early days from the analogue bubble bath of all-nighter Rephlex mentalism. As insane as this all is, could this be an extravagantly conceived exercise in self-indulgence? Sure, if this was self-consciously difficult. But it is shockingly accessible, armed with a compelling power to glue itself into your player at the expense of easier listening. Drukqs is a long-long player that sounds like the ambition was disarmingly humble. It’s just that the Aphex boy had too much ace stuff to leave on the cutting room floor.