It’s not really that surprising that the recent surge in re-animated interest in IDM has been perhaps more vigorous than when Squarepusher and Aphex Twin first emerged from the wilds of England, wielding primitive sampling machines and keyboards and creating heart-rate threatening deconstructions of the exact opposite to what “popular music” (by the mid’90s either increasingly radio-friendly bands hanging over from the grunge era or a myriad of sound-a-like boy/ girl groups) was. Aaron Funk, the Canadian musician behind Venetian Snares, has been immersed in IDM sub-culture since he started circulating cassettes in 1992, and several deliriously active years and one David Lynch-appropriated film score later, we arrive at Your Face, a throwback to proper, head-fucking, destructionist but also substantial electronic music.
The songs on Your Face largely concern themselves with spanning the width of IDM influence and creating a new identifiable whole. Though the Squarepusher comparisons are likely to sail through the roof, these songs do for the most part hold their own. If you like, these are the rotting corpses of several dialectic elements of IDM songs dug up, mercilessly disembowelled and re-fixed with focused but comparatively wayward vision.
Opener “Your Face When I Finally” begins like a weird, trippy off-cut from a Nintendo Game-cube game soundtrack before breaking down, both mentally and physically, into an increasingly scatter-brained myriad of structure-less abuse, at all times recalling IDM, acid house and Mario Kart. Like the other dissenting moments on the record, it flirts with moments of melody but relies most heavily on its sense of brick-to-skull intensity.
“Red Orange 2” draws from garage and jungle and there’s a sense of mystical dub inflection in the brass-esque synth parps that form much of the atmosphere. It’s sample of “it opens up like an orange” leads one to consider the ambiguity of Your Face, and what these compositions are actually supposed to reflect; maybe they’re deliberately without meaning? The track picks up pace and while the melody remains present it becomes more diversely part of the whole; it’s just as much about the changes in bass and tempo as it is about the reflective tint of the synths.
The squelchy, acid-fried underwater wig-out of “Become Magic Dolphins” is the most coherently beat central moment here. “Misericordial” is a morose trek through forlorn memories entailing a more considered and melodic approach to odd-ness (see also “Former Eagle”). It’s one of the first examples of synth layers working together to achieve an actually comprehensible core. The sugary closer “Your Face When I Finally (Glass Version)” is a meditative, beat-less and shimmering re-fix of the opening track and somewhat serves as a reward for those who have enjoyed the slabs of abuse launched at them occasionally over the previous 25 minutes.
I once tried to play Scott Walker’s Bisch Bosch at the dinner table with my family; the following 20 minutes was conversation about whether it was actually music or not. I won’t be making that mistake with Venetian Snares’ Your Face.
Rating: 3.5/5