[Timesig]
A master of the splintered — and often warp speed — break assault, Aaron Funk’s music under the Venetian Snares moniker ranges from the highly inventive to the viscerally demented. Particularly beloved of the worldwide free party scene, his work is often hallucinatory and physically enveloping nervous assault that heads straight for the cranium. Displaying a schizoid approach to any kind of formal organization and a chaotic sound palate that plunders myriad musical landscapes, Venetian Snares has long been a favored artist for those looking for heinously subversive electronic kicks.
His stock in trade is not mere naked aggression. Indeed, the best of his work is tempered with a sincere and surprisingly graceful melodic bent — 2005’s Hungarian folk influenced Rossz Csillag Alatt Született being a perfect case in point. However, an uninspiring Snares record — and there are a few in a discography of more than 20 LPs and countless singles — can be exasperatingly hard work: cluttered, unfocused and grating. With Fool The Detector he instigates a full-scale interplanetary advance by means of four new pieces, exercising restraint, tension and perhaps even a little dramatic romance.
“Ego DSP” leads with a scattered section of rising breakwork, all framed by great orchestral sweeps. A spoken vocal talks in forbidding tones about telepathy and curses, as shifting currents of fragmented hits come into the foreground. The effect is menacing psychodrama rather than gratuitous gornography. The title track continues in the orchestral vein, albeit ramping the intensity with a full two minutes of beat-free string swells by way of an intro. The elements are all massively processed, the result being that the selection of pops, trills, vocal cut-ups and individual bass stabs end up part of a rhythmic cacophony.
But while the first two tracks are full on, “Chriohn” is set to a slower pace and brings Funk’s immense skill as an engineer to the fore, as each single element, of which there are hundreds, is afforded its own space. It is undoubtedly this EP’s melodic and epic centerpiece. The progressive apple cart is somewhat spooked by “Index Pavilion,” however. Leaning heavily on a nasty combination of hackneyed sci-fi beeps and distorted gabba-esque kicks, it evokes a brutal and acidic atmosphere that does not sit with the rest of the set. Breakcore or IDM often seem unsatisfactory terms when discussing music as idiosyncratic as this; it feels more like a soundtrack to some unhinged outpost of the Burning Man, the sound of multiple psychedelic epiphanies and nightmares made flesh. And while this remains unlikely to convert any new subjects, it remains an accomplished and at times astonishing EP from a maverick of the electronic landscape.
