Electronic Press Kit

Short Story

Composer/percussionist Klimchak builds elaborate structures of interlocking melody & rhythm, then obliterates those structures with bursts of noise, random drones, and slabs of spontaneous improvised sound. Expect to see some combination of home built instruments, computerized sound design and a mess of drums, flutes and maybe a theremin.

Long Story

Klimchak is a man of few names and many talents. In 2009, he was awarded the Loridans Arts Award, a $15,000 cash prize often called “Atlanta’s MacArthur Genius Award.” His sonic artwork has been heard in solo concerts, performance art pieces and scores for theater, dance and film.

Combining a sense of whimsy with the playing skills of a master multi-instrumentalist, his concerts are filled with surprises and crazy home-made instruments played using even crazier techniques. Waterworks is played by striking small pieces of metal while dipping them into an amplified bowl of water. Speaking NonSynths melds theremin, Tuvan throat singing, didgeridoo and percussion into a bubbling groove in 7/4 time.

Klimchak’s last performance art project was performed at The Goat Farm Arts Center in Atlanta. CookNotes is a performance art cooking show, funded in part by grants from Idea Capital and the Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs. He built instruments out of kitchen equipment & wrote music for them. Klimchak performed that music live, WHILE cooking food on the instruments. At the end of the concert, there was a complete meal made for the audience to eat.

In the last year, live performances include playing theremin, Moog Minitaur and a set of tuned circular saw-blades for Shakespeare’s As You Like It for Theater Emory, Theremin Bike in the Little Five Points Arts Alive Festival, and a modified kitchen sink with electronics for the Art In Odd Places Festival in Orlando. He’s currently composing music for an opera, The Followers, to be performed at 7 Stages Theater in 2018.

The three-piece [SloGo] suite that Klimchak performed started as a drone soundscape with music that moved like orchestrated weather and ended up in an odyssey of rhythm… Spanning metal, wood, string, wind and even non-lyrical voice, it was an incredible array of sounds, all engaged in intriguing interplay across both electronic and acoustic media… It was a study in texture, movement and the kind of lightning-capturing improvisation that sometimes saw him playing things until they fell to the floor or flew out of his hands.

Bau Le-Huu Orlando Weekly

Klimchak is one of the most interesting percussionist/musicians/composers I know. When you see him live you are constantly asking yourself, or the person next to you, ‘What is that?’ in reference to some instrument that you have never seen or heard before. Found objects, an electronic xylophone thing, sheet metal, kick drums and kazoos are just a fraction of the percussive and non-percussive instruments I’ve seen this guy play, and usually all at the same time.

redoubtblog.com

Klimchak is a composer, musician, and performer extraordinaire who combines original and traditional instruments, electronic effects, percussion and a range of musical genres “from Medieval to Hip-Hop” to create music and sound landscapes in the areas of dance, theater, puppetry art and live performance.

Loridans Award Committee

Once again he demonstrated his virtuosity as a performer: both feet busy with drum pedal controllers, four mallets in his hands and a wind controller at his mouth. He started with a slinky, jazzy tune with a funky rhythmic undercurrent, adding a little theremin to the mix in the middle.

Mark Gresham, ArtsATL

His music forms in a pool of lovely or jarring or weird timbres — at play with the color of sound.

Pierre Ruhe, ArtsAtl

Atlanta composer Klimchak provides fiendishly fun musical accompaniment and sound effects from a variety of bizarre instruments, even a theremin for spectral noises.

Curt Holman, Creative Loafing

Klimchak’s woozy score enhances the text; it’s a drum kit of horror and psychological suspense, punctuated by what sounded like an Aboriginal didgeridoo.

Wendell Brock, Atlanta Journal Constitution

If you like live electronics performances, very early experimental electronic music, and creative uses for found sound, you will like Klimchak. Though some of his music is a bit eerie, it’s rife with interesting textures and instrumentation.

Electronic Musician Magazine

The handmade sound devices from Atlanta’s theremin master, Klimchak, were spot-on. His endearing Stooge Rack, a work composed of cowbells, whistles, woodblocks, and balloons, was affectionately reminiscent of the ‘confounded contraption’ bemoaned by Belle’s father in Beauty and the Beast. Klimchak’s original instruments were each so adventurous…

Jessica Blankenship, Burnaway Magazine