Kleptix’s Troy Peterson on jumpsuits and circuit bending

The man behind an eccentric Madison electronic project joins us for a talk at WORT-FM.

Kleptix is the electronic music and bizarro live-performance project that sprung out of Madisonian Troy Peterson’s basement experiments with all manner of instruments and audiovisual gear. “Most of my life was all about destroying things, and a few years ago, I kind of switched over to fixing things,” Peterson says.

In his live sets, Peterson dons a white jumpsuit and flails about happily as he creates beat-oriented but strongly noise-influenced tunes. Sometimes he projects movies onto himself. Once, during a Make Music Madison performance at a North Side park, a little girl ran up and joined in on the performance, and Peterson rolled with it, letting his surprise collaborator take the mic and talk to the crowd about her dog. Peterson joined us at WORT-FM studios this week to talk about how Kleptix came together and why 10 broken keyboards are better than one. Kleptix’s next show is September 11 at Good Style Shop, opening for Mary Ocher.

Thanks to Dylan Brogan at WORT for producing this segment. A shorter version aired earlier this week on WORT’s In Our Backyard news show.