Klimek - Interview with the sound researcher
Being one of the more serious electronic artists, Sebastian Meissner aka Klimek spent all his energy over the years in exploring new dimensions of sound.
Sebastian Meissner has been making strange, beautiful music since the early- to mid-1990s, when he began collaboration with Ekkehard Ehlers on their Autopoieses project for the Frankfurt-based Mille Plateaux family of labels. He also worked on solo projects under the intriguingly mysterious names aUTOkoNTRasT, Bizz Circuits, Random Inc and Random Industries before scoring worldwide attention for his lush dreamscapes produced as Klimek. In 2002, Kompakt released his “Milk & Honey” 12-inch, which was expanded two years later into a full-length Klimek CD containing 10 tracks. More of his dense, melodic instrumentals have been featured on Kompakt’s Pop Ambient comps, beginning in 2003 with “Milk & Honey” and “Sun(Rise).” The next year, “Standing on the Beach (Gun in My Hand mix)” was the lead track on Pop Ambient 2004; and for Pop Ambient 2005, Meissner contributed “Let the Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death.” Both wonderfully rich tracks with some of the most cheeky titles ever. The following year, his remix of “Milk” was selected for the series, then it was “Ruined in a Day (Buenos Aires)” on Pop Ambient 2007 and “The Ice Storm” for the most recent comp, released in November. For Kompakt, Meissner has also produced a 12-inch, “Listen, the Snow is Falling,” in 2005 and the full-length CD, Music to Fall Asleep, in 2006.
Late in 2007, New York-based Anticipate Recordings released Klimek’s newest full-length effort, Dedications, which continues Meissner’s sonic dissection of those tiny spaces that exist between light and dark, somewhere and nowhere. Made up of tracks he produced over a three-and-a-half year period, Dedications possesses a grayer, more industrial tone without sacrificing any of the slow-motion beauty of his earlier recordings. Some critic called it “a collection of perfectly realized drifting tones, humming drones and rustling static ... arranged with a painter’s touch and awash in milky reverb.” That sums it up perfectly.
I met Sebastian when he performed at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival (or Movement, if you will) in 2006. He was part of a Kompakt showcase that included Markus Guentner and Mikkel Metal. All three live performances remain among my favorite memories of that festival. A week later, Klimek was my guest at a weekly residency called that my DJ collective, Paris ‘68, held at a Detroit cafe. What did Klimek play that night? Bottoms-up dubstep, classic dirty funk and soul, hip hop and jazz classics: an amazingly diverse selection of tunes that he rolled out as his Ambient Pimp alter ego. People who were there watched and listened with eyes and ears (and minds, I trust) wide open. We’ve kept in touch since then. This interview was done on email over the last month, with edits and re-edits sent back and forth and back again across the Atlantic.
Hello, Sebastian. We met in Detroit in 2006 when you performed at the Movement Festival. Do you have some memories of that event or any lasting impressions of Detroit?
Oh, definitely! I have lot of formative memories of Detroit. I visited the city for the first time in 1995.
It was just one year after Robert Hood’s “Minimal Nation,” which was for me one of the deepest music experiences to date. The Motown/soul heritage was in the background of my perception, but still it was and is the Motor City.
During that trip, a friend and me landed in Detroit’s suburbs, while missing an exit to downtown. Well, OK, I had already experienced the streets of poor and devastated U.S. suburbia in New York and Washington D.C. before. But being confronted with the only American city to my knowledge where downtown was as much devastated as suburbia in other cities, a city where downtown was the “ghetto” was a highly influential experience for me.
After some time of cruising we found our way downtown and there it was: this big Caribbean music festival (don’t remember the name), where people were gently grooving and having a late afternoon barbecue (that was the same area where DEMF is happening now). I don’t think that I expected anything that the city would look or be like, but this trip to Detroit definitely encouraged me later on to focus on U.S. urban/culture studies.
My last visit to Detroit was a big pleasure. My friend Amir Husak was living at that time in the city and I stayed more then one week at his place having lot of fun together, having him showing me all the cool and secret places of the city – like sneaking into the old train station.
Going to a Perlon party at the Masonic Temple and other abandoned building and warehouse parties, sightseeing the residences of former soul legends, eating shawarma and chlorinated Diet Coke on ice in Little Lebanon (in the suburb of Dearborn), having bad Polish food in a 3rd generation after immigration restaurant, a trip across the river to Windsor, Canada …
