It feels good to have a new double cd of Aphex Twin in your hands. Thoughts eventually wander to a time around 1992 - 1994 when the fan of Richard James' music was bombarded at an amazing rate by his releases under a host of different names. Then after the 1996 'Richard D James' album he seemed gone, ominously telling interviewers he was thinking of retiring from music, saying he didn't feel the need to release music he made. And so at record stores one would over a period of five years overhear a desperate query in regards of a possible release date of "the new Aphex". One local record store even went so far to sarcastically write on its upcoming release date board behind Aphex Twin: 2005. Finally replacing it with a terse: never!

You feel the case, study the front: no Aphex logo on the cover, gone are the scary faces, and it appears under a strange one word title that only starts to make sense when you speak it out aloud. You wonder if it really ought to be here. Certainly James in recent interviews has playing his trickster role again, claiming the album is a result of him losing a mp3 player with over 100 of his tracks on a plane and deciding he might as well release the best tracks before they would turn on the internet. And sometimes the album feels like a mixed bag thrown together from tapes of different periods just to satisfy demand (or whisper: make a quick buck). In short we will return to the threads that run through the album, which are woven far tighter than one realizes after a casual listen, but somehow 'Drukqs' also feels haunted by a sense of closure, a visit to and reinterpretation of past models and through the piano tracks going full circle by apparently stripping the music of all technology, leaving only melody, confronting and embracing, instead of killing, the Father. In the case of the prince of ambient, the figure of Erik Satie.