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— The Analog Vault // Essential Listening —

Classical melancholy collides with breakcore velocity on Rossz Csillag Alatt Született, Aaron Funk’s 2005 release for Planet Mu. Strings sigh and brass swells before metrically wild drums slice through, editing virtuosity into balletic violence. Inspired by imagined lives in Hungary - the title translates to “Born under the wrong star” - the album threads pathos through dissonance, turning chaos into catharsis.

Where extreme electronics often chase aggression, Funk made beauty from fracture. Nearly two decades later, Rossz Csillag Alatt Született stands as Venetian Snares’ most celebrated work, a cult bridge between modern classical and avant-club extremity. — The Analog Vault

What if, for just a day, we could both be pigeons? Sometimes one moment in time can take on such an important significance that it becomes an endless world unto itself and everything outside of that moment, past and future spots in time, become the folklore of that world. What if we could both fly over the Királyi Palota and see it just as these pigeons do? A beautiful culture of dissimilar angles as donkey angels above this city. But even in the world of the infinite moment, we cannot choose the feather of our bird and the pigeon may long to be the goose, the donkey the pigeon and so on.

Furthermore as our world blossoms out of this single tick in time, it is for one pigeon a swirling romantic flood of euphoric possibility and fascination, for the other an inferior life of shitting on everyone from the sky, awkward and ashamed, resigning themselves to be the wretched nuisance they are painted as by those they shit on. Ultimately, as quickly as our world blooms, our world is discordant, and our pigeons are wounded, and as our world dies, we die, and we are extinct. 

If only we could kill ourselves over and over until we get it right. So just as an entire genre of music can be born out of one sped up ten second breakbeat, a full symphony orchestra can come together in harmonic unison to create that perfect moment in time, thus every moment can give birth to an entirely new world, and every world can house the perfect moment, and just as that breakbeat may be broken beyond any recognition, that orchestra may combine to bring forth a dissonant barrage of colossal sorrow, and so the moment disintegrates it’s world and that world suffocates the moment under it’s collapse.

These are love songs and grief songs. — (via Label)

Aaron Funk, most commonly referred to as Venetian Snares, has made some really intense, noisy, and from time-to-time danceable tracks over the years. He's produced some vicious abstract gabber type releases (Vs. Speedranch's Making Orange Things), variant experimentalist drum and bass (Chocolate Wheelchair, Doll Doll Doll), and even a few concept albums (Songs About My Cats, Winnipeg Is A Frozen Shithole EP). Never content on doing the same thing twice, he has followed up the industrial chill of last year's Huge Chrome Cylinder Box Unfolding - isn't he just the man with the snappy, radio-friendly titles - with a classical concept of love and grief songs.

With the album title and every song in Hungarian, the foundation of each track being classical music tinged by Hungarian folk (as opposed to the typical Snares epileptic electronic torture) -- for which Funk learned the trumpet and electric violin -- accentuated by his signature ballistic drums that Funk keeps in careful check most of the time here, Rossz Csillag Alatt Született is surely his most accomplished album to date. Now I love the jarring insanity he usually comes up with, but averaging two full-lengths a year for six years as well as unique EPs and remix work, it seems occasionally like there's a bit of quantity over quality going on; but to pull an album like this out of nowhere is something approaching divine intervention. This is an album of uncouth beauty that is at once sublime, timeless, cinematic, sporadic, and moving from start to finish for the uppity junglist or the CBC Radio 1 listener in your family. Drill and bass has never and probably will never again be so elegant and emotional.

It's certain that if Rossz Csillag Alatt Született was written in the late 18th century, the poncey court critics would've lost sleep spewing a steady stream of praise ripe with the most obscure and descriptive words in their natural tongue before committing seppuku at the behest of Venetian Snares' cover of Rezsó Seress' "Öngyilkos Vasárnap," better known as "Gloomy Sunday" the Hungarian suicide song, as would've been the style at the time had Seress also been born 150 years earlier, I'm almost positive. After a handful of years in the popular underground limelight, I believe Aaron Funk has created something bigger than himself. — (via Tiny Mix Tapes)

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Label: Planet Mu
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Album, Repress, 20th Anniversary
Reissued: 2025 / Originally released: 2005
Genre: Electronic, Classical
Style: Breakcore, IDM, Modern Classical

File under: TAV Essential Listening
File under: Electronic
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