Kepler content production lead Zach Schimpf is the first agency creative we’ve profiled for Off the Clock whose Bandcamp and Spotify accounts come up before LinkedIn in a Google search.
From his home studio, now in Milwaukee and usually with a dog at his side, Schimpf makes albums of electronic and ambient music, as well as taking on projects for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. It was his passion for music—specifically the process of producing it—that led him to the advertising world.
Schimpf first picked up a guitar at age 11, which lit a spark that definitely wasn’t there when he’d taken piano lessons earlier in life. “I didn’t like the classical music that I was told to play,” said Schimpf, admitting that he still can’t read sheet music. “I appreciate classical music now, but at the time I hated it.”
With the acoustic guitar, a hand-me-down from his brother, Schimpf enjoyed the freedom of playing whatever he wanted—Metallica, at the time. Then, a Christmas gift of a digital audio recorder took his interest to the next level. “I was just obsessed with it,” he recalled, spending hours figuring out how to mix sounds and emulate different genres of music.
Of course, playing music is only one part of being an indie musician. When Schimpf was in bands during school, he had to become a promoter, learning video, photography, and social media management. He spent as much time recording other bands and working as an audio engineer for his hometown St. Louis’ Lo-Fi Cherokee festival as he did making his own music.
He majored in mass communications at Southern Illinois University because the department had a multimedia studio, which led him to a somewhat ironic marketing internship with the St. Louis Symphony, then the San Francisco Symphony.
When the pandemic started and orchestras began releasing concerts online, Schimpf pivoted to video editing, which eventually took him to technology education platform Creativebug, then a multidisciplinary role at Kepler as the global marketing agency was starting up its Kepler Creative arm.
Along the way, he kept posting his music to platforms including Soundcloud, where he got a DM from Adult Swim in 2012 asking to use one of his songs for, in Schimpf’s words, “a psychedelic, weird anthology show” called Off the Air. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy,’” he recalled.
