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**Venetian Snares - Rossz Csillag Alatt Született**
★★★★☆

There's something profoundly unsettling about Aaron Funk's decision to marry his grandmother's classical records with the most abrasive electronic music known to humanity. Yet on "Rossz Csillag Alatt Született" – Hungarian for "Born Under a Bad Star" – the Canadian producer known as Venetian Snares achieves something approaching the sublime, crafting what might be the most emotionally devastating breakcore album ever committed to disc.

The backstory reads like something from a particularly melancholic European art film. Following his grandmother's death, Funk inherited her collection of classical vinyl, dusty relics of a bygone era that spoke to him in ways his usual diet of Aphex Twin and Squarepusher never could. Rather than simply sample these orchestral pieces, he chose to build entire compositions around them, creating a dialogue between the elegant and the chaotic that shouldn't work but absolutely does.

Breakcore has always been electronic music's most wilfully difficult child – a genre that seems to exist purely to punish the unprepared listener with its fractured rhythms and aggressive textures. Funk had already established himself as one of its most uncompromising practitioners, delivering albums that sounded like drum machines falling down flights of stairs. But "Rossz Csillag" finds him in a remarkably different headspace, using his trademark time signature manipulations and breakbeat surgery not as weapons of sonic assault, but as tools of genuine emotional expression.

The album opens with "Felbomlasztott Mentokocsi," where a mournful string arrangement provides the foundation for Funk's rhythmic gymnastics. Rather than overwhelming the classical elements, his programming seems to dance around them, creating polyrhythmic conversations that feel both ancient and futuristic. It's immediately clear this isn't going to be another exercise in digital brutality – this is music with genuine soul.

"Szamár Madár" stands as the album's most successful marriage of its disparate elements. Built around a gorgeously melancholic orchestral piece, Funk's intervention feels less like sampling and more like conducting, his beats providing punctuation and emphasis rather than domination. The result is genuinely moving in a way that electronic music rarely achieves, tapping into something primal about loss and memory.

The centrepiece "Hajnal" pushes this approach even further, allowing vast stretches of unadorned classical beauty to breathe before introducing subtle percussive elements that feel like rainfall on the original composition. It's Funk at his most restrained, proving that sometimes the most radical thing an artist can do is know when to step back.

Not every experiment succeeds entirely. "Galamb Egyedül" feels slightly overworked, its classical source material struggling under the weight of Funk's more aggressive programming choices. And purists from both camps – classical and electronic – might question the entire enterprise, wondering whether these beautiful orchestral pieces needed such radical recontextualization.

But these are minor quibbles with what amounts to a genuine breakthrough. Funk's programming throughout remains typically virtuosic – his ability to slice and manipulate breakbeats into impossible configurations is undiminished – but here it serves a higher purpose than mere technical showboating. The complex time signatures and stuttering rhythms become expressions of grief, confusion, and ultimately acceptance.

The album's influence on electronic music has been profound and lasting. It opened the door for countless producers to explore more emotionally direct territory, proving that experimental electronic music didn't need to sacrifice feeling for innovation. Artists from Forest Drive West to Iglooghost owe a debt to Funk's willingness to bare his soul through his machines.

More broadly, "Rossz Csillag" stands as one of the finest examples of how sampling can be used not just as a production technique, but as a form of dialogue across time and genre. These aren't just classical pieces with beats added – they're genuine collaborations between Funk and composers who died decades before his birth, mediated through the vinyl that once provided comfort to his grandmother.

Fifteen years later, "Rossz Csillag Alatt Született" remains a singular achievement – an album that shouldn't exist but absolutely needed to. It's electronic music with a human heart, breakcore with genuine soul, and a fitting memorial to both a grandmother's musical taste and her grandson's remarkable ability to find beauty in chaos.