Like Yello, Pépé Bradock, and Aphex Twin before him, Buttechno is an electronic artist who takes his music both very seriously and with a welcome dollop of humor. His careful attention to the craft of production is accompanied by a tongue permanently in search of cheek.
The prolific Moscow producer’s two contributions to Happy New Year! We Wish You Happiness!, a scene-setting 2018 compilation on Nina Kraviz’s Trip label, marked Buttechno (aka Pavel Milyakov) as the jester in the Trip camp, his songs bursting with mutant gabber, silly noises, and arcade-level Autechre experimentation. badtrip, a double EP that marks his first full release for the label, confirms his trickster reputation. While there’s nothing laugh-out-loud funny here, all nine tracks are marked by the kind of puckish mischief you might find in Aphex Twin’s “Milkman” or Captain Beefheart’s legendarily opaque Trout Mask Replica, with an admirable degree of chaos underlying their punishing techno sound.
“U.D.U.” is key to understanding the EP’s happy pandemonium. At first, the song sounds like a mess, an anarchic frenzy of industrial-grade bass drums, hi-hats, snares, and toms suggesting two entirely unrelated tracks leaking into your headphones. Listen closely, though, and “U.D.U.” starts to make a wonderful kind of sense as the various beats—forward, backward, pitched up and down—pull at the limits of a 4/4 cadence to create a bizarrely funky breed of chaos that is all the more sublime for being slightly unfathomable. The fabulous “wb movement” is similarly bewildering, with shakers, hi-hats, and snares positioned around the bass-drum pulse in off-kilter patterns that seem designed to unsettle the listener’s rhythmic instincts.
“j become,” on the other hand, is sneakily mischievous. On first evidence, the track is a fairly standard replica of the early Trax records that were designed to put the wind up your nightgown via pummeling beats, relentless synth hooks, and menacing vocal lines, only for Milyakov to yank the bass drum backwards half a beat, so that the mix briefly resembles the kind of botched drop that gives amateur DJs waking nightmares. That he punctuates this effect with the sound of a record spinning back—precisely the move a nervous DJ would make to rescue the situation—suggests a producer who cares very little for the DJ-centric nature of techno.
The manipulation of vocal hooks, a hallmark of recent Trip releases, is also in evidence here. On “BBBASE” vocal samples tumble about the octaves like socks in a washing machine, spinning a psychedelic web of noise around the nonchalant central riff, while the gruff robotic vocal that runs through “pkds” and “tr-919” becomes so maddeningly repetitive you suspect annoying the listener might actually be the point.
These two songs illustrate badtrip’s principal weakness, namely an occasional tendency to ramble that seems at odds with the lunatic energy of “U.D.U” or “wb movement.” “Ferenz-18” worries at its central synth melody like a cat with a dying vole, the track prickling along like a distressed take on Isolée’s classic “Beau Mot Plage”; it could stand to lose a good two minutes, while “pkds” and “tr-919” are seriously overstretched.
badtrip doesn’t give any simple answers. DJs will be put off by the EP’s rhythmic roguery, while home listeners may be frustrated by sporadic needless repetition. At its best, though, badtrip’s musical imagination rides gloriously roughshod over the conventions of techno.
