Having spent 2018 playing to thousands of people at major festivals from to Electric Forest (Michigan) to Shambhala (Canada) to Paradiso (Washington), EDM star Buku now caps off the year with a rare New Year’s Eve bash in his own hometown.

“I’ve been in a handful of other cities for New Year’s, and this is the first time I’ve spent New Year’s in Pittsburgh in a long time, and I’m super stoked,” says Robert Balotsky, who’s been working under the Buku banner for the past decade.

The EDM producer from Leetsdale will be at the Rex Theater, where as a student at Duquesne University he got a closeup look at such artists as Skrillex and 12th Planet.

It’s safe to say that not every EDM artist is running around with a degree in music technology. As a drummer, he was drawn to the beauty, energy and excitement of electronic music and, taking his name from a Krizz Kaliko song, that’s the path he began to take while at Duquesne from 2008 to 2012, performing at raves and venues like the Shadow Lounge.

His breakthrough came with “Janky,” a quirky track that combined tribal percussion and chanting with a wash of synthesizers that was showcased worldwide through a popular YouTube channel. Fellow EDM producer Diplo moved to declare that it was “where dubstep is going” in 2013. From there, Buku’s style has gotten richer and more sophisticated with pieces like the gorgeous banger “Front to Back,” the frenetic “Yeahboi” and the pulsing “Control” that point to his background in composition.

It’s one thing to whip up those things in his studio; it’s another thing to infuse it with some extra voltage on stage, which Buku does with his high energy shows.

So, what drew you to this kind of music?

I’ve been a musician pretty much my whole life. I started drumming when I was 8, and I went through all the music education in school and whatnot, and I graduated from Duquesne University with a degree in music technology. During my time there, I got turned on to some of the electronic music through the popular YouTube channels and just through friends. Having been a musician, I wanted to experiment with making the music on the computer ’cause that’s what I had been studying, what I had been doing in years previous. I started making stuff that wasn’t completely terrible and started meeting people on the local scene and in the dance music world. I was making music because I was a fan of it. I had no idea about the whole live world of it, so I realized I could learn how to DJ and showcase my music to all these people. Once I put those things together, I just kept the ball rolling and continued to work on the craft. I picked up a booking agent, a manager and continued to tour and now I’m doing it full time.

How did you go about developing your own style within the genre?

This goes for just about anybody who makes the music: You can kind of build your sound by developing your own techniques that aren’t necessarily by the book. There are ways to put together your sound and timbres as you kind of just learn your own process. If you were to crack open a book on how to create a synthesizer patch or something, you find your own little shortcuts and all those shortcuts add together to create your own characteristic of sound. You find your own little ways of breaking the rules, and the sum of all those parts become your sonic identity.

What did learn at Duquesne that you were able to apply to this directly?

You have classes and full formal training in music therapy, music history and whatnot. That’s the stuff that I use day to day, like the music theory training. There’s like a lot of foundational pieces that I learned through my schooling that I use day to day. It’s a misconception that if you go to school for music ... they’re going to teach you how to just outright make a banger for a club. But they’ll provide the foundation so you have the tools to create it. On the technology side of things, they taught me how to use the various plug-ins, the physics of sound, the functions of pieces of music technology so that you can run wherever your imagination takes you.

Would they have looked down on this at all, like people you went to school with who might be in jazz bands right now and not making any money?

[laughs] Yes, absolutely. Actually, to graduate we had to do an exit interview and you had to present yourself as a product, pretty much. I presented myself as Buku the project. There were a few heads of the departments of music, and it was split down the middle. I was told that it was very ill-advised by a few of them. But the technology guys loved it, because they saw what I was doing and that I started to get the chops to do it. The performance side of the people were not super stoked.

Where there certain artists that particularly inspired you?

Deadmaus was one of my original main inspirations, because he would have those big long musical breaks that really resonated with me as a college kid who was looking for the most musical stuff I could find. Almost coming from like a progressive instrumental style, that’s kind of my origins.

What was it that allowed you to break through to this level?

The definite moment was when the guys from the UKF YouTube channel reached out, ’cause they were some of the frontrunners in the dubstep world in showcasing all this new music. Their YouTube channel was the most popping thing at the time. I made a track called “Janky” that I had put out for a free release, and the guys reached out to me to do an official release, so having their platform reach out to me was definitely a game-changer. And from there, it really allowed me to basically stop working my restaurant jobs and pursue touring full time.

So, what are you actually doing on stage?

Pretty much finding creative ways to mix various records together and transition from one another. Using the various technological tools of the DJ equipment, just finding new and exciting ways to present this music that as artists we work on in the studio, finding ways to present it in fun and inventive ways to these crowds.

What’s it like being up there and looking out at them?

It’s pretty surreal, most of the time, because you go from working on music in the studio, where it’s just absolute solitude, just you in the room, trying to make music for a room of like 600 people. You spend all that time in the studio and then step out on to the stage, and you play that thing that you’ve been grinding away on by your lonesome, and you see the people react. It’s not always a positive reaction. You gotta go back and work on things, but once you finally get that positive reaction, it’s pretty surreal: something that you’ve created from nothing can make people have a good time.

Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com.

First Published: December 24, 2018, 10:20 p.m.