Hungarian music history has produced its own version of the Werther effect: the lyrics to the song »Szomorú Vasárnap« (»Sad Sunday«), written by László Jávor in 1932, are said to still regularly prompt people to commit suicide. Which is why Aaron Funk also took up the material when, inspired by a trip through Hungary, he began working on the LP »Rossz Csillag Alatt Született«, released in 2005. Starting with a fantasy of himself as a pigeon fluttering through Budapest’s castle palace (okay!?), the producer, who was already firmly established as an indisputable force in the breakcore scene at the time, wrote what is probably his most ambitious album ever. The absurdist humour that had so clearly characterised many of Venetian Snares’ releases gave way to the strange melancholy of a sad Sunday and was reflected in the selection of a range of samples from the classical canon, starting with Georg Philipp Telemann and ending with Bela Bartók. Venetian Snares took this source material, chopped it up into its component parts and brought it together with brutal consistency with tangled stutter beats counterpointed again and again by bitcrusher effects and hoover sounds. Hardly any bar sounds like the previous one, but the paranoid to even psychotic atmosphere lingers throughout the album as rarely in Funk’s broad back catalogue – dark jazz borrowings, foreboding IDM, total freak-out moments, everything nestles together almost lovingly. »Rossz Csillag Alatt Született« (roughly: »Born under the wrong star«) spreads crazy contrasts in overdrive, but integrates them with masterful consistency. Nowhere else is this more insistent than in the stop-and-go hip-hop of »Öngyilkos Vasárnap«, on which Funk Billie Holiday’s version of “Szomorú Vasárnap” seems to virtually stab her voice with whipping staccati. Whether this drove his listeners to suicide is not conveyed. The only thing that is clear is that the album continues to lead a surreal life of its own – as a milestone of 21st century electronic music.
NHK’Koyxeи
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