(DE/Anticipate, Mille Plateaux)
 
Klimek is one of the many aliases of German sound and media artist Sebastian Meissner (b. 1969), who has explored various terrains under several guises throughout his career, including Open Source, Bizz Circuits, aUTOkoNTRasT and others. Meissner has recorded for numerous, highly regarded labels – Mille Plateaux, Kompakt, Sub Rosa, and many others – and exhibited his work in several formats and venues.
 
Meissner is known for his collaborations with Ekkehard Ehlers as Autopoiesis, with Israeli artists Ran Slavin and Eran Sachs as Random Inc. and in the Intifada Offspring project and with Lia as Tiny Little Elements.
 
Under his Klimek moniker, Meissner produces delicate drone scapes, which are carefully constructed from acoustic source materials such as guitar and sons trouvé (found sounds). His dreamy, evocative slow motion compositions show a striking sense of beauty and bittersweet melancholia, while boasting dark, haunting and ghostly undertones. Clear points of reference would be purveyors of mesmerising, floating but tense music such as Bohren und der Club of Gore, Tim Hecker, Earth with their the recent album or Angelo Badalamenti’s groundbreaking atmospheric scores for the film works of David Lynch. As an artist who consciously left behind the still so common division of either visual artistist or musician, Klimek’s performances are a combination of acoustic and visual material (video projections). He focuses on intermediate states and interstices that result from transformation processes, altering definitions, changing architectures and other small shifts and cracks that appear in or can be induced into otherwise tendentiously rigid structures.
 
Meissner’s first Klimek release, the Milk & Honey 12" appeared on Kompakt in 2002, and was followed two years later by a long-player of the same name. In 2006, the critically acclaimed Music To Fall Asleep was released. Meissner’s next Klimek missive, Dedications was released in late 2007 on the New York label Anticipate, run by Ezekiel Honig. With Dedications, Meissner presented his most personal album to date, bringing together a variety of people, themes and influences that permeate his extensive work in different mediums, and under different pseudonyms.
 
Originally from Poland, Sebastian Meissner’s works have, over the years, been widely presented at festivals and by institutions such as Transmediale (D), Podewil (D), Portikus (D), Schirn Kunsthalle (D), Festival for Jewish Culture (PL), Goethe Institute Buenos Aires (AR), Goethe Institute Ramallah (PAL), Goethe Institute Almaty (KZ), Sonar (ES), Mutek (CA), OK Centrum (A), Hazira Performance Center Jerusalem (IL), Kulturhuset Stockholm (S) and Forsythe Ballet (D).
 
Meissner studied Education, Sociology, Psychology and American Cultural Studies at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main (D). In the past years he realized workshops, seminars and lectures for Barents Spektakel, Kirkenes (NO), Goethe Institute Ramallah (PAL), DJ-School Of Contemporary Music, Tel Aviv (IL), Internationale Sommerakademie, Mousonturm Frankfurt (D) and International School of New Media, Luebeck (D).
 
> Klimek on Autokontrast
> Klimek on Ghetto Ambient
> Klimek on Random Industries
> Klimek on Myspace
 
Appearances:
> CTM.08 > COSMOS