Ben Butler & Mouse Pad is Joe Gay vs You/Germlin’s new project. Anyone exposed to the furious shake & pop of pixelated DIY dance fury from either act should expect excellence. Excellence as in a cloud of pink TV static spreading over psychedelic gradient skies outside the window of your commuter train, analogical lighting bolts blasting in a rainbow coloured Sabbath which burns into the circuitry of your brain like the soundtrack of an old coin-op beat-em-up designed by a crazed cabal of progressive wizards and bearded Sci-Fi
savants.

Yep, that kind of excellence, like Golden Axe’s red dragons invading the hallucinatory dreamscapes of a Philip K. Dick pulp which was never published because it was too weird, and too close to the bone. There is, in Ben Butler’s music, a bristling and expansive melodic madness inherited from the baroque experiments of 1970s studio megalomaniacs such as Vangelis, Alan Parsons, Triumvirat or even ELO, devoured, digested, sent back in time and thrown up over some bizarrely funky rhythmic backdrops that one would perhaps define as nerdxploitation, hadn’t this term been spiritually trademarked by the evil ghouls of the MTV.

This philosophical stance should perhaps make you think of Ben Butler & Mouse Pad as the shy hyper-intelligent cousin of a couple of popular French dance acts also raised on unhealthy doses of weirdo synth music, experimental disco and coffee black like sin, or the one true genius who will compose the jingle for Firefly, if this series ever comes back to the screens under Paper Rad’s direction. Either way, he’s onto a winner, and you will be too, once you step past the golden rings of the dimensional trans-sonic portal of his awesome music. - Juan, 20jazzfunkgreats.co.uk Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.