Now available on his Timsig imprint as of December 6, 2019 as the 20th Anniversary Edition, Venetian Snares really opens up with Igloo contributor Godefroy Dronsart for a question and answer session that dives into the past and the adventures of right now.
Greg (still) hates car culture
Greg Hates Car Culture was Venetian Snares‘ first ever vinyl release. Long out of print, it came out in 1999, as the third release on Minneapolis label History Of The Future—an album that lets you hear the raw energy of a musician at the birth of his sound. Now available on his Timsig imprint as of December 6, 2019 as the 20th Anniversary Edition, Venetian Snares really opens up with Igloo contributor Godefroy Dronsart for a question and answer session that dives into the past and the adventures of right now. To quote the press-release: “Aaron Funk’s hallmarks were there from the start. His absurdist sense of humour, the razor sharp edits and his use of odd time-signatures. There is a rawness (here,) not often captured on later records, where you can imagine Aaron playing live in front of a room full of young breakcore fanatics. Indeed most of the tracks here were recorded live, tweaking his effects and EQ on the fly, to DAT from his Amiga.”
Godefroy Dronsart :: So, how are the cats?
Aaron Funk / Venetian Snares :: They’re good! I’m sitting with my cat Mira right now. She’s sweet.
I guess the first order of the day is Greg Hates Car Culture and the reissue through Timesig—is it ok if we start with that?
Sure, let’s start with that.
So the record is twenty years old at this point. So, after twenty years, does Greg still hate car culture?
He does! He really does! I actually met up with him to take his portrait for the art because I thought it would be cool to actually have a picture of him on the sleeve. The original record had no sleeve at all, so it was nice to get some cool shots of him. Had him out in traffic, yelling at cars, but I ended up using this really nice, peaceful photo of him.
Yeah, I was surprised at this sort of HD picture! So Greg is a real person?
He is a real person, his name is Greg Hanek. Previous to that record coming out I used to play some improvised jams with him and other people. I guess around the early or mid-nineties I wandered into a bar and it was him and a bunch of guys with all these different instruments just laying on the stage and they kept picking them up and changing instruments through the entire thing. I thought “Wow, this is neat!,” so I spoke to him after and he told me “…if you want to come, just bring an instrument and you’re free to play any instrument you like!.” There was like some synths and bass guitars, tape players, just whatever. It was really fun, I got to know him through that and did things with him off and on throughout the year. But yeah, he still hates car culture. He hates a lot of shit! He hates cell-phones, he doesn’t have a phone, he thinks that’s completely wrong, and he doesn’t have internet at his home. He has internet at his job, if you want to get a hold of him, he works in a bookstore. But he’s a really cool guy, he’s a painter, a filmmaker, and a really great improviser as far as music goes.
That’s interesting—I was listening to the record this past week, and I was expecting this blast of violence, and while it is tense and violent, there’s a real improvised feel to it, in the dynamics.
Yeah, except for one all those tracks were recorded live, ‘cause that’s the only way you could record things—I had a computer but I used it as a sequencer and a sampler. You couldn’t make music in the computer, but I could use the computer to generate sequences. It was an Amiga, so it had like one megabyte of RAM, it had to be 8-bit samples. If I was sampling breakbeats I would sample it at kind of a high sample rate but anything else I would sample at the shittiest quality. You could only have two tracks on the left and two tracks on the right as far as samples went, so I ran these tracks to different channels on an effects processor to have filters and delays and reverbs, and I mixed like that. But I mixed what I was running it through live, so the filters and effect, and tweaking my synths live, and the mix, it was going onto a mixer and to a DAT tape. So it was kind of improvised—I had the same structure, but no take would be the same, you know?
That’s funny, it immediately makes me think of your more recent interest in modular gear. You know where you want to go, but it’s never going to be the same thing.
Oh my gosh, with a modular synth you can set up voltages to be your hands! Oh my god, you know what I was thinking about? You know how everybody is talking about sex robots?
Yeah?
I was thinking “Man, it would be amazing to have a studio robot!” Like you could get a robot to tweak something between this parameter and this parameter at this precise moment. A robot would be very precise, it would be very cool. You wouldn’t have to deal with total bullshit like “oh this piece of equipment broke, now I have to fix it”. A robot would just download everything about it into their mind and get the tools and go through it.
Oh so—not a machine-controlled mixing desk, but a literal android walking around the studio?
Yeah yeah! Like a human-looking robot!
Hah, well I’m not sure if audio engineers would like the idea…
Yeah but for someone like me, I am always my own engineer! So that would be useful.
If you were to make it I wonder what it would look like?
I don’t know—it would be cool if it looked like C3PO!
He is the model of the robot for a lot of us! So you’re your own engineer, and of course a musician, but this reissue also comes out on Timesig, which is your label. How did you make the jump and start that project ?
Well, Mike and Thomas from Planet Mu run it for me, and I curate it. So I release music that I like, and my music. I don’t take any money from it unless it’s some of my stuff.
Have you found that going into that project impacted your music-making in any way?
Honestly, there’s just a lot of music I like that doesn’t really fit in with Planet Mu. It’s nice to have a way to get that stuff into the world—there’s been a couple of Datach’i records and a Richard Devine record, and my more recent collaborative records. I think I’m going to keep on releasing my own stuff on Timesig.
I’ve listened to pretty much everything that Timesig has released, it’s all great. Weirdly I think my favourite album from you is Traditional Synthesizer Music.
Oh really?
Yeah it’s so outside the VS canon (Aaron laughs). I listened to it and thought “this is my Aaron Funk record.”
That’s nice! That record gives me a really nice feeling, it was a really nice adventure to make that. There’s a couple things things that didn’t make it to the record, which sucks. I had a really good tune, and one of my envelopes exploded. A capacitor exploded and I had to stop everything and take it apart. It stinks when that happens.
I think the label is going to kill me because we were supposed to talk about your early years and Greg Hates Car Culture … Actually did you decide to do this reissue for yourself, or is it because a lot of people asked you to ?
Well when it was released, there were only 500 copies of it. It’s become pretty rare, some people are selling it for a lot of money. And honestly, the first pressing of it did not sound good to me. It was really a bad pressing. So I’m pretty excited to have it mastered by Bo Thomas and having it coming out properly on a double LP, where the grooves can handle the music. I was thinking “I’ll just wait for it to be 20 years old, and do that.” And I put some bonus tracks on there too.
Do you have a favourite among the three bonus tracks ?
I like that track “Punk Kids” a lot, ‘cause it’s really funny. I sampled an old man ranting on the radio. It’s pretty similar to Greg hating car culture or phones, this guy calling public radio to rant about punk kids messing around in his neighborhood. Pretty damn funny. Actually when I made all of these tracks my job was driving a bakery truck, so I was listening to that station called CJOB, if I wasn’t blasting music. And people calling the radio was ripe for samples.
My favourite is probably “Milk”—I wasn’t looking at the screen when I was listening to it, and just thought “Wow … This is still going” It’s more than 8 minutes, and it’s like this small bubble of a live set.
It’s a really long track because I was super jamming on it! A lot of filter tweaking!
Are the tracks all from the same period ?
The majority of the tracks I made around ’97 I think? Some around ’96 or ’98, except for one track, “Aqap.” To me, it doesn’t even fit on there, but I guess the guy who was running History of the Future really liked that track. Now I guess I wouldn’t put it on. I made it on a PC, I had a Windows 98 computer with a 4 gigabyte hard drive. So as a result that track feels more hi-fi.
Was it all soft synths ?
Dude, soft synths and VSTs didn’t exist back then! (laughs)
Well I’m sorry, I’m 28, I don’t know anything!
So you were 8 when this record was released?
I was 8, and I did not hear about its release!
(laughs) You missed it? Shit! How did you sleep on that man?
A lot of my 8 year-old friends would make fun of me at recess because I wasn’t listening to Venetian Snares like the other cool kids in my French suburban town.
What were you listening to when you were 8?
Nothing really. I guess whatever my sister was into, like pop punk bands, Green Day or The Offspring. I did not become really interested in music before high school when I got really into heavy metal. And now I listen to experimental noise.
That’s cool. It’s always interesting to hear people’s listening progression. You started with pop punk and that led you to metal and that led you to noise.
Yeah, and it the middle there was prog and jazz and electronic music. A friend of mine asked “Have you heard of this dude, Venetian Snares?” So I said “No, but it’s a cool name.” He put on Infolepsy and that was a ton of fun.
It’s so great that there is a world of music to explore. Like to go backwards and explore all that is exciting.
When you do reviews you kinda miss out on that because you’re always listening to the new stuff. But sometimes the Youtube algorithm is weirdly good, it asks “Have you heard this African funk record from the Seventies?”And obviously I haven’t, and it’s great shit.
I agree! I’m actually really feeling Youtube’s music service lately. When you look at something like Spotify, it always tries to lead to some bullshit that they were fucking paid off to push, but the Youtube algorithm points you in cool directions, not stuff they’ve been bribed to promote.
Do you use a streaming service?
Yeah, I pay for Youtube music. I heard Tidal was pretty good but I haven’t tried that.
As an artist, do you feel like streaming revenues make a difference?
No. Streaming makes me very poor. (laughs) The people who are really profiting off of that are the companies who own the service. Or people who own shares in those companies. But I don’t see much of those.
I looked at the number of plays per month required to pay a living wage and yeah, that’s not happening if you’re not a massive star. What are you listening to these days actually?
I discovered this label recently called Analogical Force. Do you know them?
I’ve reviewed stuff from them! They’re great.
I’ve been listening to their whole catalog lately. It’s really cool.
They’ve been putting out EPs this year which rock.
I’ve listened to Bot1500, that was cool.
I remember reviewing the one from Ruby My Dear.
Oh yeah! Actually I don’t know if I’m allowed to say—I had something applicable to that to tell you, but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to. So I won’t tell you anything.
Well, now I’m not going to sleep.
I like this person called James Shinra. It sounds like he’s making it in Ableton, but he wants it to sound like analog stuff. It’s this interesting approximation of what analog stuff does, but recreated in a digital way. I really like it. It’s his own music.
Do you mean it has a digital sheen on it?
No, because he gets it sounding legit analog, but you can tell that’s not what he’s working with. That’s really amazing to me.
What are you looking for in music?
I don’t know. Who knows what music will connect with you? When you look for something in music, you probably won’t find it, unless of course you’re making it yourself. I’m always open to hearing music. The job of music is to tell you something new, rather than you being “I want music to tell me this!” but you already know that, so who cares.
Crying at raves
Is that why you started making music in the 90’s? To make stuff you weren’t hearing anywhere else?
I guess so. It wasn’t conscious, in my head I was thinking “I’m making jungle!” I started out making rave music. And then I realised “Oh, you can change the patterns on this and it was way cooler.” I didn’t have to make 4/4 music anymore and that was very exciting to me, this push and pull was happening. When I was making rave tracks, I didn’t feel like they were mine. I felt they were part of a thing that was happening, a pre-existing thing. And when I got outside of that, it started to feel more like it was mine. Jungle was getting crazier and crazier, so I just got crazier and crazier! Drum and bass was happening and people were taking all the fun stuff between the kick and the snare on the one, and I went into a totally different direction—I’m just going to smash this shit up way more. That was super exciting to me, but it was not well-received where I lived. I would get booked to play at raves, because people thought “…oh this guy makes electronic music, let’s get him to play a rave!” and it would give people nightmares, people were crying.
For real? Crying?
Yeah! People would be like “you ruined my fucking ecstasy!” (both laugh) It was a crazy thing back then I guess.
That’s very interesting to have on one’s CV. Or on a business card. “Aaron Funk – My Music Make People Cry”. That’s a power move.
I think people can handle my music now, for sure. People caught up to it. But yeah, 20 years ago, no. People just didn’t understand it at all.
Was there a moment when someone told you that the music you were doing was called breakcore ? Or is it a category that emerged organically ?
I guess I started getting lumped in with breakcore, which was happening in Europe and the UK. But it seemed to me at the time that everyone who started getting called that sounded distinctly different from each other. It didn’t sound predefined. If you tell me something is breakcore now, I know there’s going to be a fucking 909 bass drum distorted to fuck and the Amen Break at 230 BPM. Then, it was all over the place. Some of it was pretty much noise, like someone would run a drum machine through a broken guitar amp and shooting at it with a gun or something. I remember hearing about a record from this guy called Nomex which apparently was just him in the catacombs in Paris throwing bones at the walls.
But that is just a good noise record!
Crazy shit!
Mud-wrestling in an old Wisconsin barn
So were you booked to play in Europe? More than in Canada?
I guess I was booked there first around 2001, and then I got booked to play there all the time, more and more. But before that I used to play in America a lot. There is this crew in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Addict records people, Doormouse and Unibomber, those folks would bring me down there to play. That was before I even had any records out or anything. Those parties were crazy. We were in some weird farm, in an old barn in Wisconsin, and they dug a mud-wrestling pit there. People would be out of their minds mud-wrestling each other! One time I was playing there and people picked up a car, someone drove a car in the pit and people just smashed it up. People would get super cut up, it sounded like a bad idea, like you would get a flesh-eating disease! I felt like I was going to some Mad Max-type shit or something.
And then in Europe, was it more like awkward people in glasses looking like Mike Paradinas in the audience ?
(laughs) Not really. I feel like my music generally attracted a lot of super hyper people. I’ve never played many shows where people would stand around stroking their beards. People like to let go and dance.
Earlier you were talking about sampling, and there’s a lot of vocal samples on Greg. Is it because it was simply available on the radio ? How did you approach working with voices from movies, radio shows, spoken word?
I would usually just hear something and think “Oh I want to make a track with that”. And that can come from anywhere. I remember at the time I had this cassette walkman that you could record on. I would just bring that everywhere. When your friends are really wasted and talking crazy shit, I would just record that and sample it.
How old were you when you were doing that?
I guess in my early 20s.
And you’re playing jungle already?
Yep.
I was wondering, Greg Hates Car Culture is your first record, who did you listen to at the time? Who were the people who made you want to start music?
Oh man, just going to parties and listening to jungle DJs, going to raves in the early 90s, it was really exciting to me. The music on this record wasn’t really influenced by anyone in particular, to me I was just continuing jungle. To other people, it wasn’t that, and in hindsight, it’s not that, but that’s where I was at at the time. And I was really interested in gabber and hardcore too. I had this friend from Belgium, he had a cousin in Amsterdam who would record the radio on cassette and send it to him. It was fast and crazy and exciting. This was before the Internet. It was a weird exotic thing from across the ocean. I didn’t know what any of the music was, or what the record was, it was just magic and heavy and exciting. That was probably a big influence on me too. Even though I never made gabber or acid, I incorporated it into my version jungle.
Yes, there’s a clear influence of acid in ‘Greg’, which is interesting to hear later on in Last Step. Back to today, is there anyone who you find exciting?
I’m excited about the people I release on my Timesig label, for sure. Did you know that guy, Qebrus? He sadly passed away. But he was on his own shit, he was making some really out there music, his music was incredible. If you like crazy weird music, you would his stuff. He came to my show when I was on tour and I hung out with him. He was too crazy for the world maybe though. He’s probably making music somewhere else in spirit form. His music was just alien.
Opening portals and special energies
When you talked about him in spirit form it reminded me of that ghost problem you had in your studio some time ago.
Yeah, I had to move my entire studio. It was sort of a comb filter in the listening spot I used for eight years. One day I just sat and everything sounded weird. I thought maybe I opened up a portal to another version of this and there’s me on the other side listening to the other half of the frequencies. There was no scientific explanation. Actually my studio hasn’t been working for the past two years because a pipe exploded, but it’s fixed now.
Things seem to regularly blow up next to your music.
Maybe! I try to put special energy into my music, but maybe I’m connecting to some shit I don’t understand, some evil shit.
After this reissue, what are the plans for you and Timesig?
VS Whatever homeless music I find that would like to give a home to. And my own music.
Do you already know what is the next Venetian Snares reissue?
Not really. Do you have any requests?
Sadly, I don’t own a vinyl player, so not really. I was looking at the notes, and “Milk” was previously unreleased. How do you keep stuff for 20 years? Do you have a lot of material under wraps?
I guess I do. I gave that track to someone at some point and it made it around, people kept asking me what was up with it. As time went, it didn’t fit with anything I was doing. Usually when I release music, all the tracks are related to each other, and telling the story of that. There’s probably a whole bunch of shit like that, but I don’t even have a DAT player anymore. It was a cool format, but it broke all the time.
Have you digitised your catalog or is it old tapes in crates?
I have a giant bin of tapes, but I never wrote anything on it. I was using DATs from ’96 to 2000 so those are mostly labelled, but for cassettes, no idea of what on there. And I don’t really like the idea of hanging out and archiving stuff. I’d rather make music now.
Do you feel like your approach to making music has changed over the years?
Definitely, it always evolves. I got to a point where I was only making live music. Ten, twelve years ago I made my tracks in a computer, but at the same time I would jam with an 808 and a 303 and other synths. And then I just only used a computer to send a clock around the room and record stereo live jams—which is what I was doing around the period of Greg Hate Car Culture. And now I got a new computer, so I’m jamming, recording it, and then destroy it. And that’s really fun.
Can’t wait to hear it.
You might hear it in like, 3 years or something? Who knows. Or my computer will explode. The last time I had a computer with plugins, they were from 2004 so it sounded a bit shit. But I’ve been exploring and discovering really neat stuff. I guess it has come a long way.
Have you ever played acoustic instruments?
Not if I can help it. I don’t really like guitars and stuff.
Playing or listening to it?
Any of it! I guess I’d play it if it didn’t sound like a guitar. I heard this really cool treated guitar music, where people would just shove coins and pins in it. That was great.
Prepared guitar.
Yeah, I don’t want to hear some stupid guitar played through some stupid guitar amp. I like projects like SUNN O))), Burial Chamber, I like that kind of guitar music, that sounds like a giant sound crushing you. But yeah, I don’t really care about instruments.
I remember a guitar website which had paid a guy for a prepared guitar course, so he had all of these crocodile pins and stuff on his strings, and the comment section was like “What is this? We want blues licks!”
Why do people always have to be: “You’re not adhering to the thing you’re supposed to adhere to?” That sucks. Wouldn’t it be funny to be like an evil Santa Claus and slide down every guitar player’s chimney and cut their guitar strings with some scissors?
(laughs) Please don’t come to my house!
(laughs) I’m coming there! I’m coming! I’m going to plug your toilet with Ernie Ball guitar strings!
Can you please stop trying to make me lose sleep.
(laughs)
Any last words or finishing thoughts?
I don’t really care. If people want to check out a better-sounding version of a record I made 20 years ago, they can. But if they don’t want to, I understand! To me, it’s funny to listen to music I made over 20 years ago, it’s crazy. Sometimes I listen to older stuff and think “How the hell did I make that?” Because you have your palette, and your vibe, and you just follow it, you know?
Yeah. It’s the same in music, painting or poetry, you’re going towards something which won’t be there later on.
Exactly. Records are neat, they’re like a document of that.
Also it serves as a memory of playing gigs where people were mud-wrestling and wondering if you were going to make it out alive.
And that’s a good memory to have! It was an adventure. But I’m really into my adventures of right now.
Greg Hates Car Culture is available on Timesig.
