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.