Warp reissues Drukqs on October 30, twenty-five years after Aphex Twin released 30 tracks that most listeners have since met four or five at a time.
The four-LP edition comes on black vinyl in polylined inners and a gatefold sleeve. A direct-to-fan four-LP version ships in a lift-off lid box with a six-panel poster and an AFX logo stencil. There is also a two-CD set in a case-bound sleeve with an eight-page booklet, and a double cassette in a butterfly case with printed inlays. Banquet Records lists the CD at £22.99 and the four-LP at £61.99 under catalogue number WARPCD92R, and calls it the first time the album has been available on a standard vinyl format.
Two minutes and five seconds of piano is the most-heard thing here by a wide margin. Avril 14th has had a second life that has almost nothing to do with the record it came from, and DJ Mag notes certain Drukqs tracks drawing renewed attention through TikTok. Encountered on a playlist it is a mood, sitting between whatever the algorithm decided goes next to it. Encountered on the album it is one moment in a run that opens on Jynweythek and does not stop until Nanou2, with the piano miniatures and the hyper-edited breakbeat programming cutting across each other the whole way.
The 2001 problem was never the music
Drukqs divided critics on release and has since earned a considerably warmer reputation, per DJ Mag. Richard D. James described it to The Face at the time as "a ragbag of stuff he's been working on since 1997," and the record went out partly to get ahead of a leak after he left an MP3 player loaded with unreleased material on a plane.
That origin story has done a lot of work for people who wanted to file the album as an accident. Twenty-five years on, the accident is sequenced across four sides and everyone has had time to hear it.
A poster, a stencil, and an eight-page booklet are not merchandise in this context. They are the apparatus a record used to arrive with, and they set the terms for how you meet 30 tracks: as four sides you have to turn over, rather than as a scroll you can leave running. Nothing in the announcement mentions a remaster, so the argument for buying it is the object and the order, not a new mix.
DJVibe has been on this beat a while. In December 2002 we ran Warp's announcement of 26 Mixes for Cash and printed the entire tracklist, all 26 titles across both discs, because that was the useful thing to publish about a compilation.
Nobody has heard this pressing yet. But the stencil is a tell. You do not pack a six-panel poster and an AFX logo stencil into a lift-off lid box for someone who was going to listen on shuffle.
