Venetian Snares and Otto Von Schirach represent two
significant aspects of what’s left of IDM (Intelligent Dance
Music), a loose rubric of electronic music that’s mainly the province
of misfits who—broadly speaking—dislike dance music’s sleek
4/4 functionalism and mainstream electronica’s syrupy song stylings.
Both acts favor a kind of hyperkinetic maximalism (especially Von
Schirach), whose rapid, crazy-angled rhythms and extreme textures
threaten to subvert your equilibrium and sanity. These provocative
producers push buttons in order to push your buttons.
Von Schirach came up through Miami highbrow lab Schematic
Records, but he was always the rowdiest joker in a bunch that
included Phoenecia, Richard Devine, and Dino Felipe. Amid Schematic’s
PhD-level sound designing, OVS was the guy who’d sample his
grandmother’s farts in order to build percussion tracks. He’s the
dude who told me in an interview, “I just finger-fuck my [laptop] until
it screams out some tornado of sliced puke nuggets.” Word.
Von Schirach’s early works—especially 8000 B.C. and
Escalo Frio—remain his most interesting. There he balanced
his slapstick tendencies with his risk-taking imagination, resulting in
cuts that sounded like alien digestive systems regurgitating in weird
time signatures devised by a MENSA-smart crystal-meth addict.
Were you double-jointed and blessed with six limbs, you could dance to
this shit. Mostly, though, his material’s primary purpose is to violate
your ears and disorient the hell out of you.
Later OVS releases such as Maxipad Detention and Oozing
Bass Spasms find him mutating ghetto-tech to more
ass-squeezing ends. In his filthy hands, bass is a
four-letter word. If his early output was akin to Cronenberg and Lynch
at their ickiest, Von Schirach’s latest productions are XXX-treme to
the Max (Hardcore). Clubs should dispense full-body condoms for his
sets.
On the other busy hand, Venetian Snares (Canadian track machine
Aaron Funk) channels his spastic production tics into
compositions that splat with slightly less grotesque impact and rely
less on lurid FX. Far from a one-trick pony, Venetian Snares started as
a drill ‘n’ bass/breakcore daredevil. His tracks matched Photek’s for
rhythmic complexity, but they hit with the Van Damme–like
crushing impact of artists like DJ Scud and Alec Empire.
While some of Venetian Snares’ work is geared toward a sort of
mentasmic gabber mindset, he’s also composed some sophisticated
orchestral pieces on albums such as My Downfall and Rossz
Csillag Alatt Született. Venetian Snares’ latest album,
Detrimentalist (which gives this tour its name: Detrimentalist
Disco Wibble), combines early jungle’s chaotic clatter and ragga’s
alpha-male energy with Squarepusher’s manic, impossibly intricate
breakbeats.
That two dudes as strange and uncompromising as Funk and Von
Schirach can headline a national tour is a triumph of the freaky geek.
