PAVEL MILYAKOV Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Crimean label Krym Mryk returns with its sophomore release: a Various Artists collection putting the spotlight on several top musicians from Russia and Ukraine as well as a few newcomers to the scene. Highlights come fast and thick throughout; we're particularly loving the grinding cyclicality of Rim Menko's "Illusion", beatless yet hypnotic arpeggio workouts ("Amb Day Out" and "November Bad") by Pavel Milyakov (Buttechno), man of the hour Stanislav Tolkachev with slow-mo entrancer "While You Are Drawing A Butterfly" and Hoavi's "Aya Horizon", which closes the LP with its sublime ambience.

Review: Berlin-based Pavel Milyakov, who you might know better as Buttechno, arrives on AD 93 here with his adventurous new full length 'Project Mirrors'. It is crafted from a serious of intriguing loops that he made between 2016 and 2021. They find him bending metal, harness fireflies, pipetting starry droplets and offering ups bright, shiny surfaces and crystalline lines on the hyper real opener before exploring more dystopian drone textures, double time techno rhythms and heavenly chorals. It's an escapist album for dreaming to and which will leave you feeling lies you have travelled to another dimension.

Review: In recent times we've become accustomed to hearing Pavel Milyakov in full-on obtuse techno mode, delivering devilish dancefloor workouts that tend toward the unflinchingly intense. On La Maison De La Mort, the Russian producer changes take, delivering an album for Berceuse Heroique that's breathtaking in its scope and ambition. He mixes, mangles and manipulates sounds and styles at will, offering up a giddy and mind-altering journey that variously touches on ambient, drone, spoken word, music concrete, white noise, post-apocalyptic doom, dub techno, industrial, IDM, modern classical and much, much more. It could well be his greatest single work to date; it's certainly an absorbing and breathless adventure.

Review: After launching with a buttechno 12", Russia's leading exponent of leftfield techno fires up his RASSVET label under his own name with a trip into the strange middle ground between trance and coldwave. "Main Loop" is certainly obscure in its leaning, coming on like an 80s soundtrack refrain, but there's no mistaking the dazzling leads undergoing surgery in "Chording". This is deconstructed trance mangled for the post club generation, all the euphoria straining against aggressive digital processing to create a very unsettling listening experience indeed. Trance aficionados will be aghast, techno snobs will be up in arms, and the new wave of heads drawing on all genres great and small will be relishing in the post modern madness of it all.