Aphex Twin - Drukqs

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. (RS)