But the most overt manifestation of Drukqs’ classical impulse came with the introduction of a technique practically synonymous with a certain strain of 20th-century avant-gardism: prepared piano. In the late 1930s, a decade before Stockhausen’s earliest electronic experiments, John Cage began composing works for pianos whose strings were physically muted with objects like screws and weather strippings, giving them an alien percussive quality that can sound a lot like a synthesizer to modern ears. James took this defamiliarization of the piano a step further by preparing the strings of a Disklavier, an acoustic grand piano whose playback can be programmed digitally via MIDI, the same language that electronic instruments use to talk to each other. Of Drukqs’ 30 tracks, 12 are compositions for the Disklavier in various states of preparation. There is almost as much acoustic music on the album as there is electronic.
“Jynweythek” opens Drukqs with a demonstration of James’ new toy. Much of his best work over the years had balanced his prankish, maximalist rhythmic sensibility with melodies of exquisite delicacy. It’s easy to imagine classics like “Flim” and “4,” with their frenetic drum tracks removed, as twinkling music-box accompaniment to snowfall over tiny villages encased in glass. Certain of Drukqs’ prepared-piano tracks follow Cage’s use of the instrument as a route away from conventional tonality, but “Jynweythek” goes full Tchaikovsky: slip it between Nutcracker numbers and you could fool half the audience. Once again, James contrasts the strangeness of one musical element with the familiarity of another, thereby heightening the effects of both: classical counterpoint, as delivered by a chorus of animatronic singing icicles.
At first blush, “Jynweythek” may seem a good deal simpler than the Aphex Twin we’re used to—the virtuosic IDM with microscopic drum fills shifting shapes in every bar—but eventually it reveals a different sort of breathtaking precision. Every move made by one voice of the piano is orchestrated to cast some new light or shadow on the others; one false note would throw the elegant balance out of whack. And though no one would mistake “Jynweythek” for breakcore, like the other prepared-Disklavier pieces on Drukqs, it remains recognizably of a piece with James’ purely electronic music, in part because of the strict tempo of the instrument’s MIDI playback, more rigidly fixed to the grid than any human would play. James uses this potential fault as a guiding principle of his writing for the Disklavier, full of crisply interlocking ostinatos. By muting certain strings so thoroughly that their pitches disappear, he even creates echoes of his familiar drum programming, little clicks and clacks that propel the music through 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 region where he grew up. Translated into English, it means “mechanical.”
