Miami is well renowned for its beach culture. First time visitors to the city usually head straight to South Beach to check out the beautiful people alternating on improving their tan or physique. But those in the know have associated Miami with something else for some time now; electronic music.

When the lights go out in Miami the parties start, and this has been the springboard for the electronic music scene to really take off. South Beach and Ocean Drive at night transform from beach culture to club culture, and throughout Miami bars and clubs play a mix of house, salsa, jazz and techno loud into the night.

The dance scene in Miami is really setting the standards for the rest of the world to follow. This is typified by the growing success of festivals such as the Ultra Music Festival. This legendary dance festival is now in its 11th year – which attracted more than 55,000 revellers in 2008 – winning the coveted accolade of Best International Dance Event. Some of the biggest names in dance music have performed the festival over the years, including Tiesto, Underworld, Carl Cox and Paul Oakenfold.

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As the forerunner of modern electronic music, synthpop was the first genre of music dominated by synthesizers. Early synthpop has its origins set firmly in the age of vintage analog synthesis, when the music software of today was still decades away from becoming a reality. Some of the first “pre-synthpop” recordings of the early 1960s were made using synthesizer technologies that would be considered primitive by today’s standards. It was not until the 1970s when companies such as Moog, ARP, Korg, Roland and others began producing a new generation of powerful synths that the idea of composing entire songs with electronic equipment found a large following.

Some of the most popular synthpop bands to emerge in this time were Depeche Mode, New Order, Duran Duran, Pet Shop Boys and Kraftwerk, all of whom had great influence on the genre’s development and remain popular today.

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Venetian Snares is an electronic music project of Canadian musician Aaron Funk, who is based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Funk is one of the foremost names in breakcore and electronic music today and has released dozens of albums since his official debut on a record label in 1999 with the release of the vinly “Greg Hates Car Culture” (although he had been self-releasing music since 1992).

When Mike Paradinas (of the IDM project ?-Ziq), head of the record label Planet µ, stumbled upon a Venetian Snares vinyl in a music store in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he contacted Aaron immediately and signed him to his label. Besides Planet µ, Aaron has released music on a variety of record labels including Hymen Records, Sublight Records and Zhark International. In addition to Venetian Snares, Funk also has a number of other pseudonyms and side projects, such as Last Step and Vsnares, among others.

Venetian Snares is renowned for precise and meticulous drum programming and the use of amusing media samples at high BPMs and often uncommon time signatures (such as 7/4). Funk composes most of his music on trackers, which are music sequencers that typically arrange samples and notes into a vertical timeline. Some of Funk’s preferred trackers include MED Soundstudio (a Windows port of OctaMED) and Renoise. Prior to 1999, Aaron’s music was predominately composed on the original OctaMED running on an Amiga 500.

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