Klimek

Frankfurt-based concept artist Sebastian Meissner has come a long way since his late ’90s stint with Ekkehard Ehlers in glitch collage duo Autopoiesies. Since then, he’s kept busy with a stream of releases under the handful of monikers he uses to explore different tangents of his musical interests. Whereas Random Industries houses Meissner’s politics and Bizz Circuits his post-digital theory, Klimek has become the place to find his guitar explorations. Music to Fall Asleep is the second Klimek in as many years, and it picks up where Milk and Honey left off, lulling the listening toward restless slumber. Ostensibly a record of minimal guitar meanderings, Klimek fuses the granular ambience Radio Amor-era Tim Hecker with the narcotic drawl of Stars of the Lid and the slight blues’n’country underpinnings of Loren Mezzacane Connors. Much of the guitar work here is passed through a mess of wires, effects and laptops, though the final result is ultimately clean, and a refined distillation of the six strings’ capacity for tripping the lonely lights fantastic outside any trappings of form. Klimek may fit within Kompakt’s rubric of pop ambience, though Music to Fall Asleep is more spaghetti western for the laptop generation.