Venetian Snares is the main pseudonym of Canadian electronic music producer Aaron Funk (born January 11, 1975). He mostly does Breakcore tracks and is credited with making the genre what it is today, but he also makes Glitchcore, IDM, Noise, Dubstep and Orchestral music. Classical music is also frequently sampled in his Breakcore work, along with various Hip-Hop A Cappellas and Jazz.
A link to his Bandcamp, which contains most of his discography.
Tropes:
- Amen break: This man has made an entire career out of mutilating the Amen.
- Bilingual Bonus: The lyrics to "Welfare Wednesday." "Punani" is Italian for vagina. Does the song make sense now?
- Blatant Lies: During interviews, he will often make patently ridiculous claims.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Just watch this interview and suddenly his music will make a lot of sense. The man claims himself to be a hillbilly, for crying out loud.
- Concept Album: Most of them are this to some degree, although the big one people talk about is Find Candace, being about Candace Newmaker.
- Crazy-Prepared: The liner notes for "Shitfuckers!!!" entail how to give an enema.
- Epic Rocking: A good chunk of his tracks are over 5 minutes in length. Special mention goes to A Giant Alien Force More Violent And Sick Than Anything You Can Imagine, which is over 15 minutes long.
- Everything Is an Instrument / Intercourse with You: He and Hecate, an industrial / dark electronic artist, released an album called Nymphomatriarch. It was made solely out of recordings of them having sex between shows while on tour. It's one of the best-known works of either artist to date.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Traditional Synthesizer Music, recorded on a huge, primarily analog, modular synth.
- Foreign Language Title: Rossz Csillag Alatt Született, whose tracks (along with the album itself) are titled in Hungarian.
- Genre Roulette: Breakcore, IDM, Noise, Glitch, Ambient, Acid, Electro, Dubstep, Modern Classical...
- Hidden Depths: As proven by Winter in the Belly of a Snake (and eventually My Love Is a Bulldozer), Funk has some impressive singing chops.
- I Have Many Names: Vsnares, snares, Snares Man!, BeeSnares, Ventriloquist Snakes, Puff, Last Step, Hauwerchuk, and Senetian Vnares.
- Intentionally Awkward Title: Winnipeg is a Frozen Shithole, an awkward enough title in its own right, contains a song titled, Die Winnipeg Die Die Die Fuckers Die. In the years between Greg Hates Car Culture and Making Orange Things, he put out a 12" titled Shitfuckers!!! and a split with US musician Stunt Rock, titled Fuck Canada Fuck America. And of course the above mentioned Rossz Csillag Alatt Született. It's not awkward for Hungarian speakers, of course, but for everyone else...
- Kind Hearted Cat Lover: His album Songs About My Cats is about, well, his cats.
- Last Note Nightmare: "Hand Throw" is, at first, an abrasive but fun sounding track. Towards the end, the abrasiveness is taken up to eleven and the track essentially turns into Speedcore.
- Loudness War: His releases are some of the loudest in history; of course, considering the type of music he's playing, it's entirely intentional.
- Mind Screw: "Huge Chrome Cylinder Box Unfolding," full stop.
- Minimalistic Cover Art: printf ("shiver in eternal darkness/n");◊
- Non-Indicative Name: My Downfall (Original Soundtrack) isn't actually a soundtrack album to a work titled My Downfall - it's meant to be Self-Deprecation about the album being the soundtrack to Aaron Funk's own personal downfall.
- Place Worse Than Death: His hometown of Winnipeg, as discussed on Winnipeg Is A Frozen Shithole.
- Sampling:
- To the point where one album was built almost entirely out of classical excerpts.
- Possibly overlaps with One of Us: There were a few songs on Doll, Doll, Doll that sampled EarthBound and Fallout 2.
- Some songs from Huge Chrome Cylinder Box Unfolding feature samples from Super Mario Bros..
- And on Meathole, he sampled Current 93 and Nurse with Wound.
- On Chocolate Wheelchair, he samples the themes to Coronation Street and Sesame Street, “I’m a Slave 4 U” by Britney Spears, “Too Young To Fall In Love” by Mötley Crüe, and Herbie Goes Bananas, among others.
- Scary Musician, Harmless Music: Venetian Snares normally makes music just as aggressive and unfriendly as he looks, but a few of his tracks (I'm Sorry I Failed You) are soft and melodic, often built out of orchestra samples. Then again, when one reads interviews with Funk, he's less scary than really snarky, so it goes both ways.
- Serial Killer: Discussed on Meathole.
- Sensory Abuse: He has made this into an art form.
- Taken up to eleven on his collaboration album with Speedranch, Making Orange Things, with all of its tracks either being ultra fast and abrasive breakcore/speedcore and/or borderline Harsh Noise.
- Stylistic Self-Parody: "Plunging Hornets", in which the sampled audio makes fun of his own songwriting tendencies.
- Uncommon Time: Inverted — 7/4 is his most common time signature, and he tends towards others as well, such as 11/4 or 10/4, but once in a blue moon, he'll play in 4/4.
- In even rarer cases, he not only plays it straight, but turns it up to eleven. Case in point: "Nineteen 1319," A song written in 13/4 and 19/4 time, alternating between the two.
- Perhaps a straighter example is Mercy Funk, from Find Candace, which quoting Wikipedia goes like this: note
- Word Salad Title: There is no such thing as a "Cadmium Lung Jacket" or a "Huge Chrome Peach." And there certainly is no "Cavalcade of Glee and Dadaist Happy Hardcore Pom Poms."
- Would Hurt a Child: Wrote two albums on the subject.
