Review

Venetian Snares

Traditional Synthesizer Music

Timesig • 2016

The growing enthusiasm concerning klutzy modular systems has encouraged electronic technicians from all over the world to do rather immersive drone-studies, involving only minimal variations over longer periods of time. However, Aaron Funk a.k.a. Venetian Snares has followed a different path: For his idea of »Traditional Synthesizer Music«, the Canadian breakcore-veteran managed to ignore the need for deceleration around him. Instead, he has provided his live-recorded tracks with notoriously hectic beats, in order to make up melancholy and fumbling synthesizer melodies in real-time. Often enough, those arrangements contrast the rather breathless rhythm-foundations they are built upon in the most productive manner. At times, the music bubbles as if made for children; at other times, the music seems to come straight from a good old science fiction soundtrack. Still, Venetian Snares restrains himself more than usually, reminding the listener every now and then of IDM’s early heroic phase – at least, until he gets crazy on the drum computer once again. Either way: it never gets meditative. Instead, you can marvel at the hand-made analogue sounds, of which Venetian Snares literally makes the best by inventing enraptured little paradises, playing with one another wildly and freely .