Fletcher Pratt Is Building A Nightmare Machine

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. He’s now gearing up to drop Vol. 2, so here’s a taste:

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. The old school format fetishism of his cassette releases pops up here as well, with bizarre-o clips from the skuzziest of VHS tapes and insomniac TV broadcasts providing the source material for this nightmare machine. Here’s “Skeleton Lady”, a choice example of his lo-def hauntology:

“For my final project in school, I built a digital video synthesizer programming a micro-controller to create video images that responded to audio,” he says. “Now I’m trying to design modules that work with the LZX Visionary system, which is basically run by one guy from Texas and is the only company of its kind. It’s almost like customizing a hot rod car with a hobbyist’s mentality. You can easily get sucked into adding more and more without necessarily getting more creative, but I’ve been trying to do both by recording short videos while adding modules, balancing the art output with the electronic output.”

So what exactly is a video synthesizer? Pratt’s explanation makes it sounds insane, but will likely still leave you scratching your head:

“Basically, you take an audio modular synth that has basic components like oscillators, filters and generators that’s completely patchable,” he says. “Theoretically you can generate any sound, so it’s not like buying a pre-made synth that’s configured a certain way and has those limitations. For video, you have the same concept. You have oscillators and filters set up to generate video from scratch to create colorful psychedelic patterns or mix those with external sources, like a VHS tape for example. The really neat thing is that you can have it connect to your audio so that they completely synchronize.”

Here’s a little toe-tapper, catchily titled “////////||||||||||\\\\\\\\////////||||||||||\\\\\\\\”:

Living in the rural expanses of the Canadian prairies, it’d be easy to assume that a noisenik like Fletcher would feel a sense of isolation. However, the ‘Peg has also spawned the extended experimental families of sister labels Dub Ditch Picnic and Prairie Fire Tapes. More importantly, he’s come to terms with the niche nature of what he does, and how he may have to cross the pond to reach a larger set of open ears.

“I used to think that other cities would have way better noise scenes, but it seems like the nature of the music is such that no matter where you go it’s small,” Pratt concludes. “I was talking to a friend in Toronto about what the turnouts are like there, and he said it’s pretty much always the same 12 people. Maybe if you’re in Japan a good amount of people will come to the show [laughs]. But whether you’re in Winnipeg or a bigger city, you never get a lot of people out. It’s not like I’m playing club music.”

Follow Jesse at @wipeoutbeat

Previously - Babysitter