Klimek - Interview with the sound researcher
Tell us a little bit about your work as Random Inc. and Autopoiesies for Mille Plateaux in the late 1990s. What was it like working with Ekkehard Ehlers?
First of all there are not that many connections between my work as Random Inc and Autopoieses. I started to fool around with my first PC in 1994: recording distortions, clicks, the hiss of records and other regular/abnormal sound events. But the biggest fun of all was sampling my records and cutting them to pieces. Ekkehard Ehlers started to call me at that time the “DJ Premier” of the microsound, a distinction, which (immodestly speaking) I have kept somehow until now. Autopoieses started for the two of us by sitting on leather couches late at night listening to John Coltrane, Marvin Gaye, Iannis Xenakis and chain gang blues records and drinking bottles of whiskey and beer. We were friends at this time, and without this friendship, I guess I wouldn’t make my little hard-drive world public so soon. So working between the two of us depended on close and positive human relation.
So what happened?
At that time two coincidences occurred, which changed the paths of our music careers: one was when he was drunk, Ekki smashed the bathroom door at a party at (founder of Mille Plateaux/Force Inc.) Achim Szepanski’s apartment; the other was that our first record La Vie A Noir was discovered by William Forsythe dancer Stephen Galloway (who at that time shared the same apartment as Markus Weissbeck, who had designed the artwork of our albums). He introduced our rework of Roberta Flack’s “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men” to Mr. Forsythe, which made him use it for his ballet peace “Endless House” (actually a one minute track, which was looped – to what I have heard - to more then half an hour). I didn’t even get a ticket for any of those “Endless House” shows (and of course didn’t even see a penny, although this specific composition used there was indisputably done just by myself – as sampled from Ekkehard Ehler’s Roberta Flack record) because EE was too busy manoeuvring himself toward spotlights. On “Music For William Forsythe” Ekkehard has attempted to rework my version and I am using sometimes my own extended version as the opening track for my concerts.
I have put my alias Random Inc on hold. It symbolized for me too much what is past for me: my time at Mille Plateaux, and my so-called “Jerusalem project,” which then transformed into Intifada Offspring and the release Bizz Circuits play Intifada Offspring.
You began recording Klimek tracks for Kompakt in 2002. When did you meet Wolfgang Voigt? Were you a fan of his Profan/Studio 1 tracks?
Of course! Besides Detroit there was Wolfgang! Studio 1, Profan, Love Inc and all that great shit. I knew Wolfgang’s work from the Force Inc/Mille Plateaux days very well, and his Mike Ink alias was one of my favourite techno acts at the beginning of the 1990s.
The Klimek - Kompakt connection started with a simple and anonymous demo, which made Wolfgang call me some days after its arrival and offering to me to release those two tracks as the “Milk & Honey” 12-inch. Those were the two first tracks, which were marking a new production level for me.
And Voigt’s denser, more atmospheric work in the later 1990s ...
Wolfgang’s Gas project was surely very influential for what some years later turned out as a new wave of bedroom produced ambient music. The Gas project is rooted in a time when this so-called “ambient music” was very close to techno, it was an integral part of this culture, and it wasn’t just a pure functional music genre, allowing ravers to come down after exhausting dance escapades. Out of Gas came a lot of producers who developed very distinguished styles of slowed down/beatless music.
