Aphex twin, also known as England's Richard James, was once a pioneer of techno and ambient electronic music, and he made records, particularly 1993's gorgeousthat changed the course of electronic music. But since then, he has bravely charted a course toward tech-noise and slowly veered into unlistenability. WithJames delivers his most irrelevant album to date: a double CD, thirty-track compendium of indecipherable song titles, gratuitously weird sounds and occasional wisps of ersatz classical piano that are aimlessly pretty. The moody "Kladfvgbung Micshk" sounds like incidental music for a haunted-house movie by Damien Hirst, but tracks like this inevitably lead to tracks like "Cock/Ver 10," a hyperactive splutter of drum-machine beats and deflating video-game drones. The confused and self-indulgent "Gwarek 2" is a seven-minute soundscape that resembles something that Trent Reznor might have recorded after listening to the Beatles' "Revolution 9," then erased the next day. Among fans of IDM, or Intelligent Dance Music, as this sort of stuff is unfortunately labeled, rumor has it that James merely loaded this record with outtakes that have been eating up space on his hard drive for years, then released the album as a deal-breaker with his label, Warp. Or perhaps the explanation for the incoherence of the album lies in its punny, unfunny title. Either way, he should have never donebecause his new noise mostly just sounds fukqed up.



