Drukqs was not a plan. It was a pre-emptive strike. The story, repeated so often it has grown barnacles, has Richard D. James leaving an MP3 player loaded with unreleased material on a plane, deciding a leak was inevitable, and emptying the drawer before anyone else could. What arrived in October 2001 was a hundred minutes of accumulated work, thirty tracks, sequenced with open indifference toward anyone hoping to sit with it end to end. Twenty-five years later, that indifference reads as the point.
It was his fifth album as Aphex Twin and the first full-length since the Richard D. James Album in 1996, five years during which expectation had calcified into something like a demand. He answered by refusing to make one thing. Jynweythek opens on prepared piano, screws and rubber lodged between the strings of a MIDI-controlled instrument, an inheritance from John Cage routed through a machine that plays with inhuman evenness. Then Vordhosbn arrives, a drum programme fed through a wood chipper. Then piano again. Then Omgyjya-Switch7. The record works this way until it stops.
The miniatures are how most people came to it. Avril 14th runs barely two minutes, closer to Satie than to anything on Warp's roster at the time, and has since been sampled by Kanye West, played at weddings, and worn smooth by streaming. Kesson Dalek and Petiatil Cx Htdui work the same seam. QKThr is its own quiet monument. Around them sit 54 Cymru Beats with the brakes cut, the long musique concrète drifts of Gwarek2 and Ziggomatic 17, and Lornaderek, a birthday voicemail from his parents, left intact and unedited. Titles pulled from Cornish and Welsh thread through the whole, an insistence on a Celtic geography rather than a metropolitan one, alongside letter-jumbles that resist any reading at all.
Critics at the time largely filed it as a clear-out, and the word stuck for years. Distance has been kinder. What sounded like incoherence now sounds like a musician working several practices at once and declining to arbitrate between them - the composer, the programmer, the archivist, the person leaving the answering machine on.
The 2CD has never really gone away. The 4LP was another matter. Warp pressed the original box once, in 2001, and it went. It picked up the "chocolate box" nickname for the obvious reason, and for years copies climbed on the secondary market until the numbers stopped being funny. This reissue brings the album back across physical formats for the first time in years: a standard 4LP on black vinyl, polylined inners in a gatefold sleeve, and a 2CD in a case-bound sleeve with an eight-page booklet. Both carry the original thirty-track sequence. With Selected Ambient Works Volume II restored in 2024, Drukqs was the last gap.
