However probably the most overt manifestation of Drukqs’ classical impulse got here with the introduction of a method virtually synonymous with a sure pressure of Twentieth-century avant-gardism: ready piano. Within the late Thirties, a decade earlier than Stockhausen’s earliest digital experiments, John Cage started composing works for pianos whose strings had been bodily muted with objects like screws and climate strippings, giving them an alien percussive high quality that may sound loads like a synthesizer to fashionable ears. James took this defamiliarization of the piano a step additional by making ready the strings of a Disklavier, an acoustic grand piano whose playback could be programmed digitally by way of MIDI, the identical language that digital devices use to speak to one another. Of Drukqs’ 30 tracks, 12 are compositions for the Disklavier in varied states of preparation. There’s nearly as a lot acoustic music on the album as there’s digital.
“Jynweythek” opens Drukqs with an indication of James’ new toy. A lot of his greatest work through the years had balanced his prankish, maximalist rhythmic sensibility with melodies of beautiful delicacy. It’s simple to think about classics like “Flim” and “4,” with their frenetic drum tracks eliminated, as twinkling music-box accompaniment to snowfall over tiny villages encased in glass. Sure of Drukqs’ prepared-piano tracks observe Cage’s use of the instrument as a route away from typical tonality, however “Jynweythek” goes full Tchaikovsky: slip it between Nutcracker numbers and you possibly can idiot half the viewers. As soon as once more, James contrasts the strangeness of 1 musical component with the familiarity of one other, thereby heightening the consequences of each: classical counterpoint, as delivered by a refrain of animatronic singing icicles.
At first blush, “Jynweythek” could seem an excellent deal less complicated than the Aphex Twin we’re used to—the virtuosic IDM with microscopic drum fills shifting shapes in each bar—however finally it reveals a unique type of breathtaking precision. Each transfer made by one voice of the piano is orchestrated to solid some new gentle or shadow on the others; one false observe would throw the elegant steadiness out of whack. And although nobody would mistake “Jynweythek” for breakcore, like the opposite prepared-Disklavier items on Drukqs, it stays recognizably of a chunk with James’ purely digital music, partially due to the strict tempo of the instrument’s MIDI playback, extra rigidly fastened to the grid than any human would play. James makes use of this potential fault as a guideline of his writing for the Disklavier, stuffed with crisply interlocking ostinatos. By muting sure strings so completely that their pitches disappear, he even creates echoes of his acquainted drum programming, little clicks and clacks that propel the music by its suggestion of wintry stasis. The title of “Jynweythek,” like many in James’ catalog, is in Cornish, the ancestral Celtic language of the southwestern English area the place he grew up. Translated into English, it means “mechanical.”
