You would be forgiven for thinking a cat named Bruno Pronsato was some Argentinean chef or Italian porn star. But instead of baking pollo or supplying money shots, Pronsato cooks up some of the world's most inventive tech-house for local label Orac. His forthcoming album, Silver Cities (out in August), has sparked excited chatter among the underground's elite DJs. What's more, German electronica bible de:bug bestowed its highest rating on the opus and XLR8R magazine proclaimed Seattle laptop producer Pronsato the "Next Big Thing" in its August issue.

The following scene at Chop Suey the night of the recent Ghostly Records tour illustrates Pronsato's burgeoning status in underground-electronic-music circles. Before his set, rising Detroit tech-house star Matthew Dear was introduced to Pronsato (AKA Steven Ford) and the two artists proceeded to animatedly discuss their Texas backgrounds and compliment each other's music. Turns out DJ Magda of Richie Hawtin's clique hipped Dear to Pronsato's tracks, and it was love at first listen.

Dear isn't the only major electronic-music figure feeling Pronsato's leftfield tech-house productions. Craig Richards and Akufen have included "Read_Me" on their radio sets for the London club/label Fabric's renowned DJ-mix series (Akufen beamed that Read_Me left him "speechless"). Other luminaries like Hawtin, Ben Nevile, Mike Shannon, and Jay Haze have chimed in with praise and heavy rotation in their sets. Combine this with Köln powerhouse Kompakt distributing Silver Cities, and Pronsato seems poised to blow up--as much as someone making experimental tech-house can be expected to blow up.

Silver Cities stands Space Needle-high among the deluge of electronica releases for its superb balance between cerebral, eccentric sound design and lasciviously pumping grooviness. The disc's peculiar sonic palette derives from Ford's obsession with 12-tone composers Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, while its tricky, glitchy rhythms stem from Ford's love of bleeding-edge microhouse from the Perlon, Circus Company, and Telegraph labels. Ford's diverse song structures and savvy pacing (with help from Orac boss Randy Jones, who also soulfully croons on "All Night, Blah, Blah") make it the rare tech-house offering you'll want to listen to repeatedly, with 'phones recommended to catch all the fascinating subtleties.

"[Orac heads Jones and Konstantin Gabbro] were adamant about it not being the same style throughout," Ford stresses. "They didn't just want to put out 10 glitched-out techno tracks: They really wanted it to tell a kind of story. Randy said, 'I want the full-length to capture all of Bruno's moods.' And I think he did a fantastic job of that."

A year and a half ago, Ford was focusing on his Bobby Karate guise, under which he issued Hot Trips, Cold Returns (2003, Woodson Lateral). The album administered artful beatdowns to ivory-tower microsound composition. Now he's all about Bruno Pronsato, which previously had been a lark. "I think the Bobby Karate stuff was really about me finding out what I wanted to do with music in the electronic realm," he says. "I have played drums since I was about 15, so percussion is a big part of who I am as a musician. The BK stuff didn't reflect that. The Bruno stuff does a better job of representing that side. I can't say that I won't ever do another Bobby Karate track, but at the moment, it isn't something I'm actively pursuing."

After completing Silver Cities, Ford "felt drained. I thought after I finished [it], I wanted to do a straight dance 12-inch. So I've been switching gears and trying to get some tracks aimed exclusively at the dance floor. But I've hit a brick wall. I'll get something going and it may be a little too abstract, or a little too corny. I think I'm just trying to grasp the idea of a balance between both. So I think busting through any [creative] block is reinventing yourself, or switching things up a bit, and that's what I'm trying to do now."

A return to his metal roots may lead Ford out of this bind. A CD-R of "a computer interpretation of all the metal and noise I have been into throughout my life" is incubating with California's Phthalo Records, waiting for this aural alchemist to forge it into digital gold.

segal@thestranger.com