Bleep Years day three: Venetian Snares' Szamár Madár (2005)

Is this Bleep Years crap over yet? No, dear reader. It has barely just begun. Here's another year in my two-decade trawl of musical memories.

2005: Venetian Snares' Szamár Madár

Somewhere between his Planet Mu albums Winnipeg Is a Frozen Shithole and Cavalcade of Glee and Dadaist Happy Hardcore Pom Poms, the prolific junglist Venetian Snares came up with an album of Hungarian breakcore called Rossz Csillag Alatt Született. No. Stay with me.

Breakcore artists (think drum 'n' bass mainlining a liquidised Duracell bunny) were often accused of anger and noise over emotion and delicacy. This one track from Rossz Csillag, called Szamár Madár, put that preconception into a cocked hat, sold the cocked hat to Roy Chubby Brown and had Roy Chubby Brown thrown into a meat grinder. Szamár Madár has emotion exploding from every bass note.

Half of the track is a nagging orchestral line and half of it is mentalist snare rhythmics, making this both listenable and hardcore. By 2005, I was co-running regular nights in the Northern Quarter and I knew it was a good crowd if I could play this track without people complaining.

More importantly, this track taught me the true beauty of difficult electronic music. For me, this became as listenable as Colplay would be for other, more cloth-eared pathetic people. In 2005, a year in which I was unhappy in my job and wondering where my DJing was going, these Hungarian chords sáved my sánity.