Klimek - Interview with the sound researcher
You are very welcome to check out my pictures from my Pixel Travel series on HYPERLINK “http://www.autokontrast.de” http://www.autokontrast.de, which I took during that visit. Definitely it was one of my coolest trips to the U.S.
I remember you identifying yourself to me as the Ambient Pimp! Where did that name come from and are you still doing Ghetto Ambient tracks?
Well, actually the Ambient Pimp thing started during that trip to Detroit. It was kind of a joke. Cruising with Amir through the city, listening to rock and hip-hop and performing later that day a Klimek set at DEMF. I mean: I never took that “ambient” thing for real myself. Ambient Pimp is maybe the Marilyn Manson or Jello Biafra of the down (or no)tempo electronica! A character big enough to leave space for letting two different worlds clash into each other. Once I was invited to a festival called “Ambient Picnic,” on a Sunday afternoon, in a park – I wanted to record the sound of barking dogs for this event – but had to cancel the gig because of schedule conflicts. Having such dilemmas some people maybe would advise to start doing noise (music) straight away (and I am still waiting for the right moment when I will be ready to record a noise album), but I find it more communicative to reflect on music genres from the inside and not from the outside. Like all those artists who have developed and devoted their life’s work to one specific aesthetic. Today I am using the Ambient Pimp alias when I am DJing deep house and techno.
The name “Ghetto Ambient” has a similar background. I never really knew what this thing “Pop Ambient” means. For me it was little bit like this “grunge” term, symbolizing so many different things to so many different people, but in fact being just a fashion word, which was easy to sell to a growing target audience. What is “ambient” anyway? It’s a terminology same as “rock,” describing a huge genre that means so much and yet blurs everything at the same time. Of course, I still love “Chill Out” by KLF. Ambient seems to symbolize dreamy worlds between relaxation and science fiction. Myself, I am interested in art, by that I mean discussing the world around me. “Ghetto Ambient” is about places at the edge of our “globalized world.” These are non-places - but not like the French anthropologist Marc Augé used it: places such as airports and malls. But instead forgotten or ignored places in our fat society like Gaza, East Jerusalem, Algeria, or simply like the part of the neighborhood just around the corner where you live. I have composed a lot of Ghetto Ambient tracks, which shift between post-dubstep and darkly-drone atmospheres, but wasn’t able to find an appropriate label to release those tracks.
Give us a brief background of your life and travels. You were born in Częstochowa, Poland, right? I know you’ve lived in Vienna and now live in Berlin. Where else have you lived?
Are you joking? I am supposed to give you a background of my life? I am 38. This is too much for this format. I am born to a half Polish and half Polish-German (Upper Silesian) family. I spent the first 12 years of my life in socialistic Poland. In 1981, my parents took the train to West Germany. So I left my childhood, quite abruptly, behind me and landed in the middle of my adolescence in the (still) happy capitalism of 1980s Germany.
Szombierki - a former working-class neighbourhood of the Upper Silesian town of Bytom - is the place where I spent my whole childhood. From the end of the 19th century it was one of Europe’s most busy industrial areas - coalmines and huge steel works. Decay of industrial buildings was a natural part of the landscape; those buildings that couldn’t be maintained anymore were abandoned, leaving behind exciting playgrounds for kids like me. There were so many things to explore, digging holes and finding those unidentified objects. In my early 20s, when I started to get busy with photography, one of my favourite places turned out to be the port in the east end of Frankfurt (my former hometown). Friends were asking me why am I taking pictures of all those ugly places. This was maybe the first time that I realized that other people might find those places ugly. It is how I started explaining to myself my fascination for cities like Detroit. Especially the old central train station, where I could luckily and illegally climb inside during my last trip to the city.
Beside that – and especially after many other travels to North and South America - I lost a personal bound for places, lost the idea of home defined by geography. I also lived in Vienna for 2 years and in New York (or better say New Jersey) for one year.
