Venetian Snares, aka Aaron Funk, continues his successful run on Planet µ with The Chocolate Wheelchair Album, this time around capturing the spirit of ecstatic jazz in an electronic context. John Coltrane probably couldn't conceive of the music that Funk has created here, but 'Trane's last works (Interstellar Space, particularly) mirror the everything-happening-all-the-time atmosphere of this album. The beats seem to ram through at their own pace, sometimes slowing, sometimes speeding, not really adhering to a straight tempo, but constantly around or above 150 bpms. Individual tracks blur together in a chaos of blastbeats and sampled vocals, making this more of a suite than a collection of tracks. Similar in its unpredictability to the rest of Funk's discography, Chocolate Wheelchair distinguishes itself with the tracks featuring vocal samples, like the ridiculous "Einstein-Rosen Bridge," which manages to sound like a rave track from early-'90s Berlin but somehow disco-fied. The Mötley Crüe samples on "Too Young" may be the foundation of today's mash-up scene. The case could be made. But Funk stands outside of the narrowly defined genres of drill'n'bass or hardcore, and laughs infectiously. Besides being intensely danceable, if nothing else, Funk's music is funny as hell. He's the Rashied Ali of sampling and sequencing, and this is his New Directions in Modern Music. This is one of the better albums in the sizable Snares discography.
© James Mason /TiVo
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