Bruno Pronsato

Bruno Pronsato is the alias of Steven Ford, an American DJ and producer who has been based in Berlin for roughly two decades.

His musical journey is a distinctive one: the sensitive, detail-rich electronic productions he makes as Bruno Pronsato give little hint that he used to play drums in a metal band. Encountering the kind of music Perlon was releasing in the early 2000s proved formative, and he was living in Seattle at the time, quickly devoting nearly every spare moment to the studio. The music eventually took him to Berlin, where he has lived ever since.

Before crossing the Atlantic, Pronsato released his debut album, "Silver Cities," on Orac Records in 2004, alongside EPs on Telegraph, Musique Risquée, Philpot and Hello? His breakthrough arrived in 2007 with "Why Can't We Be Like Us," a record that received a 5/5 from Resident Advisor and later appeared at number 82 in its Top 100 Albums of the Decade list. In 2009 he founded his own label, Thesongsays, partly as a vehicle for his most ambitious work at that point, the 38-minute epic "The Make Up The Break Up." The label, based in Germany, also released his third album, "Lovers Do," in 2011, on which his intricate textural maps of clicking beats and chiming chords continued to defy trends. Ford also records under the alias Archangel, a project in which live performance and rock-style song structures play a central role, and which can be heard as bringing him full circle to his drumming roots.

His long-running relationship with Foom Music, the London label of Benjamin Freeney, spans both his 2017 Bruno Pronsato album "US Drag" and the Archangel LP "The Bedroom Slant" from 2014. His 2018 Foom album "A Face Wasted On The Theatre" was a collaboration with Israeli bassist Yonatan Levi, credited as L.A. Teen, who plays on six of the eight tracks and is joined by guest saxophone from Peter Gordon.

His 2021 double LP "Do It At Your Funeral" was released on Perlon, Zip and Markus Nikolai's Frankfurt imprint, his first album for the label though he had previously appeared on it with the 2018 "The Girls Thing" EP. Around the same time, he teamed with Benjamin Jay of Benoit and Sergio as Triple Parked for the LP "Keith's Salon" on Paris's Logistic Records, fusing minimal and house production with the oddball rap of Kool Keith. The "Symmetry and The Cops" EP on Foom followed, recorded after his return to Berlin from a period in the United States working on the Keith project. His 2024 album "Rare Normal," released on Foom, draws on experimental, minimal, leftfield and microhouse textures, and sits alongside a 2024 EP, "This Morning Talks,".

Across his catalogue, the throughline is a cerebral yet physical, off-kilter approach to techno and house Club der Visionäre in Berlin has been a documented live setting, and his recorded work spans a range of European imprints without losing its distinctly uncompromising character.