Winnipeg's Fletcher Pratt is one of those lucky bastards whose day job blurs into his afterhours obsessions. As an electronics technician for CBC Radio, he punches the clock in TV and radio maintenance before heading home to a mad scientist's lab of modular synths and other Frankensteined toys, transmitting a brain-scrambling tsunami of A/V what-the-fuckery."It's all kind of continuum," he says. "I was a musician and then I wanted to learn more about audio electronics and building pedals, so that's why I went to school. Getting this job was kind of flukey because there was lots of other stuff not related to audio or video in any way. It was nice to land something that totally related to my hobbies."Through his own Midori Records imprint, the egghead electro nut's prolific output provides a diary-style approach to his ongoing experiments. While Pratt's harsher noise/drone releases will likely only appeal to a select group of dungeon dwellers, he's also followed the path of likeminded provocateurs Pete Swanson and Expressway Yo-Yo Dieting, drifting into beat-driven trips of chopped 'n' screwed hip-hop and woozy dub. The latter is best showcased in his 2011 release Dub Sessions Vol.1, a bong water bliss-out of stuttered riddims and eerie saxophone edits.
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Following a stint playing in post-rock bands and exploring the outer reaches of techno, Pratt began delivering guerilla sound invasions on his hometown with the group project KraakK! His solo releases started in earnest with the 'Mind Gunk' cassette series of collage-style tape loops, an ongoing project centering on a cherished possession from the golden age of Wild Style."The Mind Gunk releases are all made on a JVC ghetto blaster that my parents passed down to me," Pratt laughs. "It's a really nice piece of equipment that my mom apparently traded a car for in the 80s. It has great microphones, transformers and tape heads, so it sounds really good. I discovered that playing with the pause button while recording and mixing that with line level sources to create crude collages could result in some interesting sounding stuff."Thanks to the New Media Arts fund of local organization Video Pool, Pratt is currently in the midst of his most ambitious project to date: building an analog video synthesizer…Read the rest of the article over at Noisey.