Snared
So, I suppose I’m officially a Venetian Snares fan. As I said in my year end musical round-up, I’ve never been too into him, up until Huge Chrome Cylinder Box Unfolding hit last year. He’d done some interesting work previously, but he’d always struck me as something of a smart-ass noise terrorist, in the tradition of Kid 606 or Aphex Twin, without the serious side to back it up with and the range to branch into subtler forms (like the Kid’s Why I Love Life and Mille Plateaux records, or the Twin’s Ambient Works). He’s certainly talented, and he’s amazingly prolific, but he always seemed somewhat one-note to me.
But his new record, the frustratingly titled Rossz Csillag Allat Sz?letett is truly a step beyond his previous work. The idea is a lttle gimmicky. It’s basically all orchestral samples that sound like they originate in film scores, mostly in the Bernard-Herrman-does-Hitchcock vein, coupled with sliced up Amen breaks. At a glance, it reads like a variation on one of a thousand Amen records, notable Hrvatski’s breakbeat workout/deconstruction Oiseaux, ’96-’98, which mined similar territory.
There are two things that set this record apart though. First, almost every track is in 7/4 time. I know Aaron Funk is widely known for working in odd rhythms, but the songs flow so naturally here. 7/4 can be an awkward time signature in the wrong hands, but here he hits every accent perfectly, slicing single beats out of staccato string passages with no apparent effort, and leaving a perfectly grooving piece behind. There are no lagging, stuttering feelings to be had from the shortened meter, and in fact, most non-musicians will probably notice nothing rhythmically out of the ordinary.
The second is the thematic content. These tracks are all Songs, not just tracks. Somehow, Mr. Funk has managed to create a record that adheres very well to pop structures for the most part, without sacrificing the grating, experimental style he’s known for. He’s broken away from the noise-for-it’s-own sake genre and brought the aesthetic over to the realm of artistic statement. Previous work like Find Candace have toyed with thematic, almost narrative cohesion, but here, through a clever selection of vocal samples and liner notes, the entire album is unified in concept, and even the over-use of the single most iconic breakbeat in electronic music makes sense.
In a way, this is Funk’s most cohesive and personal statement yet. If, as the liner note imply, this album was inspired by moments of grief or loss, then my condolences. And on the other hand, I also want to offer congratulations on what I think is a high point in his constantly multiplying musical output.
