drukqs

Drukqs is a troubled and troubling record. Much of it sounds to me like the work – or diary – of someone who is acutely depressed and attempting to escape into their work. It’s difficult to listen to at times, especially the first disc, because the various attempts at escaping gravity never quite come off until the beginning of the second one – the frenetic, too-fast pace of something like the “St Michael’s Mount” track has awareness of its own futility written all over it, even before it breaks down into broken-up, blistering dashes of sound. That said, the final ascent through ‘Meltphace 6’, ‘Taking Control’, and the last pair of electronic tracks are exhilirating. The final piano piece adds a delicious sense of completion.

This is the only way I can make sense of the record in its issued form, and while it took me a while and it’s 90% conjecture and bullshit, I’m rather satisfied with it. There are enough strange, half-hidden things that happen in the audio itself – all the piano pieces are recorded in very definite spaces, and in several of the pieces the spaces themselves change – to suggest forcefully to me that there’s a concealed meaning there somewhere. After all, most of his albums work as ‘stories’, even a self-professed compilation like I Care Because You Do.

He was in a bind, it seems to me, because the enduring legacy of the ‘Windowlicker’ and ‘Come To Daddy’ releases was that a significant quantity of people were expecting the next sensation from him, the “I want something I’ve never felt before, something better than the last one” problem. Drukqs seemed to piss enough people off that he’s felt free to retreat to the Analord/The Tuss thing, which I haven’t heard enough of to reach an opinion about.

You can, of course, as I did and still do, treat Drukqs as a leisurely scrapbook of singleton pieces, pull out all the brisk drum-machine songs and load those into an iTunes playlist. Nothing wrong with that at all. But at the end, there’s something vaguely unaccounted for, something somehow unsatisfactory, and if you’re anything like me, you end up coming back to it again and again.

(P.S. The thing I really like, though, is the suggestion towards the end of the record – and I didn’t really pick up on this until I finally knuckled down and listened to the whole bastard thing in one sitting – that things really are ... "getting better". That last electronic piece - ‘ziggomatic’ or whatever it’s called - becoming finally and unambiguously joyous. Gorgeous.)