House of Dioxin

Wanted to put in a good word for a couple of CDs I was listening to for the station today.
First up: the new Venetian Snares disc, Cavalcade of Glee and Happy Hardcore Pom-Poms. As much as I love the title (even better than his previous, Huge Chrome Cylinder Box Unfolding) the album's even better. As I said in my review for XDU, it might seem like the sort of thing that only people who like that sort of thing will like. Apart from one track, which includes lots of Nintendo-esque sounds, Aaron Funk (aka VS) doesn't make too many crossover moves. Read any amount of stuff on VS and you'll see references to Squarepusher, Aphex Twin or μ-ziq (aka Mike Paradinas, who also runs the Planet Mu label, home to VS). I'd say his stuff is neither as hermetic as Squarepusher nor as expansive as Aphex. Title notwithstanding, there's not really much of a "happy hardcore¹" feel to this stuff. Within the larger (still small) world of IDM, Venetian Snares gets tagged with micro-sub-genre labels like breakcore or drill & bass. VS seems unlikely to ever reach the move-the-crowd peaks of acts like Mouse on Mars or Luke Vibert. He's maybe not quite an idiosyncratic genius like Richard D. James. But, esp. with this latest, he's managed to drop enough glitches, blurps and squelches to keep the base happy while expanding the sound with offbeat vocal sampling, swathes of 90s ambient/chill (think Plaid or Irresistable Force), and in general more of a focus on melody as a setting for the inhuman percussion breaks.

¹ Happy hardcore was, IIRC, a micro-sub-genre of early 90s techno. If gabba was rave-on-bad-speed then happy hardcore was gabba-on-E