Winnipeg's Aaron Funk has an obvious darkness in him — the breakcore legend has a child-killing-themed album called Doll Doll Doll — yet he has as much of an adventurous absurdist streak, too. While retaining his sense of menace throughout Traditional Synthesizer Music, his umpteenth album as Venetian Snares, he also sounds positively refreshed and reinvigorated.
Granted, the title of "Everything About You Is Special" may be sarcastic, depending on what you read into it, but between that track, "She Married a Chess Computer in the End" and "Magnificent Stumble v2," it sounds like Funk is honestly having fun jamming these tunes out.
He is really jamming, too: The genesis for Traditional Synthesizer Music began when Funk designed his own drum synth, and then incorporated it into his monolithic modular rack, whose arrangement of synths, EFX, drum machines and doodads he'd tear apart and rebuild for each track on the album. He recorded several versions of each composition, and live-tweaked in the studio so that every version was quite different.
Fans will still recognize his inimitable approach to propulsive off-kilter rhythm and dissonant timbres, organized into fluid yet alien structures, but the sound is deeper, and its inherent joy all the more resonant.
(Timesig)Granted, the title of "Everything About You Is Special" may be sarcastic, depending on what you read into it, but between that track, "She Married a Chess Computer in the End" and "Magnificent Stumble v2," it sounds like Funk is honestly having fun jamming these tunes out.
He is really jamming, too: The genesis for Traditional Synthesizer Music began when Funk designed his own drum synth, and then incorporated it into his monolithic modular rack, whose arrangement of synths, EFX, drum machines and doodads he'd tear apart and rebuild for each track on the album. He recorded several versions of each composition, and live-tweaked in the studio so that every version was quite different.
Fans will still recognize his inimitable approach to propulsive off-kilter rhythm and dissonant timbres, organized into fluid yet alien structures, but the sound is deeper, and its inherent joy all the more resonant.
