Completing
his third instalement for Planet Mu in a year, Aaron
Funk unleashes yet another dimension to his eccentric
musical persona with Winter In The Belly Of A Snake.
Not that his devoted fan based will complain to be showered
with new music so often, as the interest progressively
shifts from a slow-moving and not-so-pioneering Aphex
Twin to his bastard son Venetian Snare. With a series
of albums denoting good sense of humour and complete
commercial insanity, Funk seems determined to take over
the electronic scene. One can only wonder how long the
man can maintain the momentum before diluting his inspiration
into some totally nonsensical record.
Fear not for now as Winter In The Belly Of A Snake
is yet another mind-blowing record. If the cataclysmic
drum constructions are still very much de rigueur, this
album is darker and, surprisingly, more melodic and
accessible than its predecessors. To illustrate this,
the album kicks off with Dad, a song –
yes, a song! – dedicated to Funk’s late
father. Dealing with the notion of death and the unavoidable
flow of memories and regrets accompanying someone passing
away, this song shows Funk at his most vulnerable, condensing
a whole range of emotions into a few sentences floating
over a sonic structure reminiscent of Autechre’s
Acroyear 2 on acid. Adopting a similar tactic to Tom
Jenkinson’s recent Do
You Know Squarepusher, Funk inflicts numerous effects
on his voice, treating it in the same way as he does
with his sounds. Here though, the result is much more
comprehensible, leaving the man’s feeling more
exposed than you would expect to hear on such a record.
Most definitely key to why Venetian Snares has become
such an enduring name on the electronic scene in such
a short time, Funk’s incredibly human touches
are emblematic of his work, giving a very personal twist
to a genre that sometimes suffers from over-complacency.
With his rendition of The Misfits’ She,
he reaches even darker grounds, adopting Glenn Danzig’s
guttural tone while he uses strings to further reinforce
the perversity of the lyrics. The rest of the album
is more familiar territory for Funk. With playful sonic
constructions remaining at the heart of his work, he
juggles between totally innocent structures (Stairs
Song, In Quod, Cashew, Fraujäger)
and more introvert moments (Gottrahmen, Suffocate,
January), sometimes revealing some pretty fascinating
emotional tones, as on the stripped down Warm Body.
Despite releasing albums faster than it takes for a
manufactured pop band to achieve world domination and
disappear, Aaron Funk remains firmly focused on his
music, giving each of his record a different tonality
and atmosphere to the one before. With Winter In
The Belly Of The Snake, he presents his most complex
and best work to date. Yet, this album is more accessible
than its predecessor because of the less abrasive sounds
and beats used. Far from having reached his full potential
yet, Funk unveils little by little different sides of
his musical talent, making him one of the most exiting
musicians to have emerged in the last ten years.
5/5
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