Bleep

2004's Rossz Csillag Alatt Szuletett is perhaps one of Aaron Funk’s finest pieces of work under his long-running Venetian Snares moniker. The title translates loosely into English as ‘star-crossed’ or ‘born under a bad star’, a fitting title for an album inspired by a journey to Hungary, earnestly reimagining the nation’s deeply held melancholia. But far from being music made for moping around the streets of Budapest, Funk’s combination of delicious symphonic strings, ambient soundscapes and his bloodied, rugged approach to carving breakbeats as sharp as broken glass sounds oddly uplifting — and its most extreme, utterly menacing.

What's immediately apparent is just how singular this record sounds compared to Funk’s work before and since. Of all the jarring sonics he’s capable of producing, none come quite as beguiling as the creaking, wood-chipper operetta piece ‘Felbomlasztott Mentökocsi’, a shrill, funereal atmosphere unbroken by the presence of a beat, yet still possessing the choppy velocity of Funk’s more discernibly breakbeat furies like ‘Szerencsétlen’. More remarkable still is when these distinct modes combine into ‘Hajnal’, a near-8 minute cluster of strings, jazz drums and that warped junglist sensibility we know and love.

Breakbeat nihilism and fathomless invention go hand-in-hand for Venetian Snares, and we’re hard pressed to think of any electronic records which achieve gorgeous, baroque beauty quite like Rossz Csillag Alatt Szuletett.