Montreal's Mutek festival is electronic music's annual summit meeting, a gathering of elite producers and visual artists who are avant-gardening below the radar. This year, 12,000 appreciators-including a sizable Seattle contingent-witnessed the yearly spectacle of rarefied sine-wave sculpting, precision beat manufacturing, and adventurous tonal painting that has scant chance of rippling mainstream ears yet may someday be viewed with the same reverence as the musique concrète composers of the '40s and '50s.

This year, Bruno Pronsato (Steven Ford) properly represented the Emerald City, whipping the 500-plus crowd at Musée Juste pour Rire into a hollerin', hip-shakin', cellphone-photographin' frenzy. Illustrious techno producers Mossa, Michel Baumann (Soulphiction), and Marc Leclair (Akufen), plus Wire journalist Phil Sherburne and Forced Exposure marketing director David Day all raved about Bruno's set. Hot Montreal DJ Maus was seen leaving the venue with Pronsato's Ape Masquerade 12-inch (on Akufen's Musique Risquée label). Pronsato also impressed Mutek Chile director Andres Ortega, who's considering booking him for his festival in December. Consensus revealed that Pronsato not only smashed a homerun in Montreal, he also served everyone hotdogs-with relish.

Pronsato's Mutek gig climaxed a career that's been steadily ascending since his 2003 debut EP, Read_Me. "The performance went off exactly as I had hoped it would," he says.

Indeed, Bruno's Mutek debut reached dizzying heights. Beginning with suspense-building bass stabs, Pronsato gradually brought in ill whip-crack beats and filigreed them with leopard-like growls, tongue clicks, warped metallic pings, liquidy slurps, and a distorted simulacrum of the intro to Sabbath's "Iron Man." With a playful rigor, Pronsato laced skewed funk tactics and the most psychedelic percussion sounds I've heard by a techno artist into the time-honored 4/4 matrix. Throughout his performance, he subverted expectations while keeping the floor moving with music of a predatory sexiness.

"The set that I did there was probably one of the first that I actually [thoroughly] rehearsed," Ford says. "I typically like to fly by the seat of my pants."

Musing on his phenomenal progress, Ford notes, "For the world of music that I am in, there is no greater honor in 2005 than being invited to play Mutek. So it did feel like there was a lot at stake here-mainly because there is this microcosm of people whom you never see suddenly at a festival celebrating weird electronic music. Being in front of a 'discerning' crowd was a little nerve-racking in that everyone had a notepad out and [was] judging you (not as severe as that sounds) based on [my reputation]."

With further releases this year on Orac, Telegraph, and Philpot, and important gigs booked in Germany, Holland, France, and Argentina, Pronsato solidifies his world-class status among techno producers. Not bad for an ex-speed-metal drummer... DAVE SEGAL