Drukqs is a great album btw, if you're at all interested in music you should give it a listen. It's got everything from tender prepared piano pieces to his signature drill and bass. Syro from 2014 is also an amazing album.
He's got a catalogue of bangers I've always loved, but Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 was so unique when it was released it really took me by surprise. It was hypnotic, sometimes eerie, other times introspective and beautiful.
If you're to believe the account Richard James gave, he claims to have used sleep deprivation and lucid dreaming to compose the album. I used to listen to the entire thing beginning to end on headphones, and I believe it!
SAW2 is maybe one of the most important collections of ambient electronic music ever made. It's an astonishing exploration of the genre.
I've thought it to be compared in some ways to Bach's "The Art of Fugue" which pushed its own genre so hard that its often considered to be pinnacle work on Fugues and sort of forced later musicians to move along to newer forms.
While I personally prefer SAW85-92, I have to recognize the ways in which SAW2 pushes ambient and electronic music, even today, to areas that force it to be defined and to redefine itself. SAW85-92 sounds very much like a product of the time, but SAW2 sounds absolutely contemporary even today. It somewhat closed the book on Ambient electronica and then shoved that book firmly into the avantgarde. The individual pieces range from unsettling to mind-alteringly beautiful.
"...I Care Because You Do" just sort of continues the leap forward. "Start As You Mean to Go On" feels to me like plugging yourself into a power outlet in a hurricane. IMHO, RDJ is at his best when he combines a kind of odd, almost apathetic, idle but tuneful, framework to a song, then ignites it into a frenetic mind blending fire with absolutely bonkers rhythmic lines, or sometimes just leaves it to chill like with "Aberto Balsalm".
It's wild to think we're talking about music older than people who have graduated college and are considered almost mid-career in some fields. And yet he's still making mindblowing stuff https://youtu.be/e_Ue_P7vcRE
Random tidbit: around when the album came out I chucked it on my friend's CDJs (IIRC I skipped straight to Mt St Michael) - by chance the CDJs were set at some lower speed, maybe 50-75%
Highly recommend trying it out - being able to hear how much groove and complexity sits behind those super fast tracks is quite enlightening. We ended up listening to both discs of the album like that, just boggling the whole time
I love most of his work. Drukqs is his weakest (but still good!) album IMO - Avril 14th is a great track. His Analord series is also amazing and Rushup Edge under another alias - The Tuss.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but this take seems absolutely out of pocket to me. Drukqs is Rich’s most well-rounded, polished, and arguably revolutionary project. From a sound design and arrangement perspective it still sounds contemporary, more than 20 years on. It’s also the only one of his albums besides SAW 85-92 of which I like every track (and love most of them).
You do you, but maybe give it another dedicated listen and you might change your mind! :)
Interesting... Drukqs was my introduction to RDJ when it was released and to be honest I have never really gone back to give it a dedicated listen. Perhaps his other works stand out more to me because it was released (or I discovered them) later. Thanks for the comment; I'm going to revisit the album and maybe reconsider!
For some people freedom means being able to violently deny others to roam the land, to deny access lakes, to deny foraging for berries and mushrooms and even to deny them access to the coastline and the ocean.
For them, freedom might entail being able to deny these basic modes of being e.g. based on monetary worth, social standing or even ethnicity (like country clubs in the US).
If that's what you consider freedom, I don't think I'm going to be able to convince you otherwise.
I already explained what I meant by damage. Being unable to see how the freedom of a tiny minority shouldn't trump the freedom of basic modes of being of the vast majority, that's damage.
In Greenland they had a system to encode what purpose a building had. For example, if you were in a medical emergency, you would look for a yellow building.
> Red buildings signified churches, schools, teachers’ or ministers’ houses. Yellow colours were assigned to hospitals, doctors, and health care personnel. Green was at first the symbol for radio communication and later became the colour of telecommunications. The colour blue was often reserved for fish factories. Police stations were black.
Is there a reason why they used those specific colors? I don't understand why a hospital would be yellow or a police station would be black by default. My guess would be white and blue, respectively.
Snow in the air is probably a bigger problem than snow on the ground, blizzards with 20m or less visibility aren't that uncommon far north, really easy to get lost and die during those since the snow also blots out the terrain unlike fog.
Imagine trying to find a hospital under these conditions, vibrant color coding helps save lives then:
The Svalbard undersea cable system connecting the archipelago to the mainland was unexpectedly severed in January of 2022. A preliminary police investigation implicates human activity.
Drukqs is a great album btw, if you're at all interested in music you should give it a listen. It's got everything from tender prepared piano pieces to his signature drill and bass. Syro from 2014 is also an amazing album.