Florian T M Zeisig: Art Is Life
The Berlin-based experimental musician on sampling Enya, producing for Kelela and his new space-inspired album Planet Inc
When MTV had Chillout Zone, German public TV had Space Night.
Broadcasting since 1994, the long-running nightly show provided the backdrop for countless after-club comedown sessions. It would even be played in chill-out rooms at techno raves.
Conceived to replace the test patterns that ran after the regular TV program ended, the idea behind the cult show was simple – setting images from NASA space shuttle cameras to atmospheric ambient music.
Florian T M Zeisig had almost forgotten about Space Night when he stayed in a Bavarian hotel with a Canadian woman he was dating. Returning to their room one night, they turned on the TV, and there it was, still running as if nothing had ever changed. She had never seen the show before, but her instant positive reaction made him realize its cultural significance.
Inspired by that night, Florian started watching Space Night re-runs on mute while producing tracks. The resulting album Planet Inc – a mix of experimental ambient and dub techno – represents just one of the many faces of Florian T M Zeisig.
Growing up in the Bavarian countryside, young Florian was interested in skateboarding and hip-hop. At 16, he started playing in indie bands, trying various instruments and roles along the way: Drums, bass, guitar, even taking on vocal duties. His favourite band were the Deftones.
After school he moved to Berlin and worked in a record store. With lots of time at his hands and records everywhere around him, he just listened to music constantly. “That was my first university”, he smirks.
Though he’d become interested in electronic and experimental music, nightlife wasn’t his natural habitat. “I was not a club kid, but I worked at a club, in the cloakroom”, he says. “I was more like, ‘I’m going to Berghain to see Dean Blunt live’, you know?”
Moving to London in the mid-2010s, he enrolled in academic sound studies under the writer and artist David Toop, who authored the best book of all time on ambient music: Ocean of Sound. It was Toop who coined the apt phrase about ambient not being an actual genre, but a way of listening.
Still in the UK capital, Florian randomly bought a cassette of Enya’s hugely successful 1988 album Watermark (yes, the one with “Orinoco Flow”). For an assignment in his sound studies, he had to work on a conceptual piece. Knowing he wanted to do something with that tape, one day he unscrewed and opened it and threw it on the floor, only to cut the seminal new age record into 426 short strips of tape, and recombine those four-second loops in hours of painstaking work.
The resulting piece You Look So Serious turned Enya’s modern Celtic songs into a gorgeously warped piece of Basinski-esque hauntology. Emphasizing its academic origin, the press info rightly boasts:
“The work touches on subjects of mainstream music and popular culture, juxtaposing it and aiming to introduce a discourse on institutional elitism, privilege in the general context of sound/performance art. In the process evaluating its boundaries while staying as close as possible to the original medium.”
Back in Berlin to finish his master in sound studies at the University of the Arts, Florian teamed up with fellow electronic music producer and Bavarian ex-pat Yo van Lenz. As OCA, they released their first collaborative album Preset Music on tape label Constellation Tatsu in 2018.
Their abstract, sparse sounds must have caught the attention of Kelela, who felt inspired to sing over the album opener “HeavenCent” and include the resulting vocal version in her Aquaphoria mix, released in 2019.
When she started working on her upcoming album, she reached out to the duo, looking for OCA’s calm and tranquil sounds to counterbalance the heavier, more beat-focussed production from collaborators LSDXOXO, Bambii and Asmara of Nguzunguzu.
Kelela came to Berlin for a two-day studio session at one point, and now the two German names are all over the producer credits for her critically acclaimed 2023 album Raven, released on the influential Warp label and seen by many as one of last year’s avant-pop highlights.
After finishing his masters, Florian continued his studies with Carsten Nicolai, the composer and musician also known as Alva Noto, at Dresden’s art school. Florian says he was – and still is – “a fan” of Nicolai’s heady music.
Making conceptual art music one day, and then co-producing for a popular avant-garde singer like Kelela the next – for Florian, it’s all part of the same approach. “I try not to make these distinctions. It’s not like I have a day job and passion projects. All of my music is just a direct expression of my life.”
In the last few years, he has been building his profile, publishing music on various labels, and as part of multiple groups and duos. Even with his solo projects, his eclectic style ranges from calm beatless ambient (Music For Parents, 2021) to harsh noise attacks (What We See, 2023).
Florian says he’s sitting on a huge backlog of music that still needs to come out, including a project on the influential US ambient label West Mineral Ltd., and an album with composer and multi-instrumentalist Mari Maurice, alias more eaze.
He wouldn’t be opposed to getting more requests to produce ‘bigger’ records in the aftermath of Raven. At the same time, he seems absolutely fine to keep on working in his ‘experimental’ niche as well.
“I have been trying to stop judging everything”, he says at one point. “I realized it just gets me into a bad mood.”
Now non-judgment is a key principle of Buddhism and mindfulness, but Florian doesn’t follow one specific doctrine – just like in music, where he doesn’t want to be tied down to a genre and its limitations, he is a spiritual seeker as well.
“I’m generally curious and try to keep an open mind and heart”, he confirms. “I learn so much from various spiritual traditions, and I’m trying to find my truth – whether that’s in the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, or Eckhart Tolle, or David Hawkins, or even more unknown people, like some ex-addict that talks about their experience on YouTube. I am looking for what resonates with me, what seems helpful to me.”
Florian T M Zeisig’s new album Planet Inc is out now.
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Media Diet
Listening: Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin, Ghosted (2022)
Since seeing this trio live at Berlin’s Gedächtniskirche a few months ago, I’ve frequently returned to this album. It’s hard to describe – it’s not exactly jazz, not exactly ambient, and not exactly rock either. I believe there’s a lot of improvisation going on over hypnotic, minimalist grooves, not totally unlike The Necks’ recent work. I was happy to learn that a sequel, Ghosted II, is slated for late April.
Reading: Tricia Romano, The Freaks Came Out To Write (2024)
A non-fiction book about the history of The Village Voice, New York’s original counterculture gazette. Romano conducted hundreds of interviews to paint a gripping oral history of a non-conformist newspaper with a huge legacy and lasting influence on culture journalism, from the mid-1950s until today.
Watching: Jon Nguyen, David Lynch: The Art Life (2016)
Long-form documentary with an unusual approach on the iconic filmmaker’s early life (up until work on his first full-length movie Eraserhead started). We hear Lynch’s narrating voice and see him in interaction with his youngest daughter, while scenes from his own childhood and youth are illustrated by strange, animated sequences.
One more thing
For Everything Jazz, I wrote a story about French composer Alain Goraguer’s cult classic soundtrack La Planète Sauvage that recently turned 50. His fusion of American jazz funk with French pop sensibilities inspired many of my favourite hip-hop producers, including Madlib, J Dilla, Flying Lotus, and DJ Shadow.
© 2024 Stephan Kunze
So excited to see their name pop up on your substack! I love Florians new album.
Studying musicology and sound studies myself, I would have loved to hear more about his criticism of the sound art world/discourse. Elitism is something to be wary of in any 'headsy' or '-core' environment imho.
I remembering devouring Ocean of Sound when it came out many many years ago...