Venetian Snares X Daniel Lanois (vinyl)

Superproducer Daniel Lanois first expressed interest in collaborating with breakcore artist Venetian Snares (Aaron Funk) after hearing the latter's 2005 masterpiece, Rossz Csillag Alatt Született. The two musicians began recording improvised sessions in 2016, and premiered their collaboration with a 2017 live performance at The Great Hall in Toronto, which quickly sold out in advance. Their first album together is an uneasy but fascinating soundclash, with Funk's modular synthesizers and tumultuous breakbeats offset by Lanois' soothing pedal steel vistas, rather than the menacing textures or rave hallucinations usually heard on Venetian Snares recordings. Pieces often start with soft, rolling waves of steel guitar before impossibly complex drum programming blasts in and disrupts everything, pitting a graceful glide against gnarled chaos. Funk also processes and distorts Lanois' guitar playing in real time, transforming it from rays of golden light into an apocalyptic hellstorm. It gets no more brutal than "Mothors Pressroll P131," an onslaught of acid gabber with some of the hardest, nastiest breaks Funk has delivered in years. "Night MXCMPV1 P74" is much calmer, with soothing guitar and synths forming a blanket around the scattered yet controlled micro-breaks, which sometimes sound like softly breaking glass. At 33 minutes, the album is an intense but abrupt ride, with both musicians soaring into bold new territories. For dedicated fans who couldn't get enough, pre-orders of the album were bundled with a bonus disc containing eight additional tracks from the same sessions, which are just as mindblowing as the album proper, if not more so.