Audiopile Review: White hot producer Florian T M Zeisig revisits his 2018 cassette release for Cassauna, You Look So Serious, with this expanded 2xLP set, issued here in a scant edition of 230. Zeisig has been on an incredible streak as of late, most notably contributing to Kelela’s explosive Raven LP last year, while also operating as one half of NUG, dropping in on the AOTY contender from Naemi and issuing albums for labels like Métron, Constellation Tatsu and, earlier this year, Stroom. You Look So Serious, which marks his debut release under his own name, is made up of loops from an Enya cassette, physically extracted and degraded into new forms, a motif reminiscent of Romance’s Celine Dion sampling/distorting LP Once Upon A Time, which would come four years after this. But most of you will likely hear a more direct nod towards William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops or his unsung Variations For Piano & Tape, these warbling loops have that distinct crumbling towards ecstasy feel that have become a genre unto itself. Zeisig is able to isolate moments from the original cassette, taken in four-second samples, and extract pure melancholic bliss out of them. Enya’s soaring vocals are clipped and smeared into angelic oblivion, or a simplistic piano line is rendered into warbling, heartbreaking infinitude. It’s worth mentioning that Zeisig also operates under the Angel R moniker, working with the vocalist/artist Alliyah Enyo on a very similar project where he loops and smears her vocals into crackled heavenward ascents. That album appears on this week’s email as well. What timing! Admittedly, we came to this one a bit late, this reissue almost a year old at this point. It actually seemed sold out at the source, but Enmossed was kind enough to get us a small handful when we ordered some of their other new releases (read further on in our email for those).

‘You Look So Serious’ engages with Enya’s ‘Watermark’ Album from 1988. Based on a copy of her album on cassette tape, Florian T M Zeisig reconstructs and remixes her album of 39:42 minutes. ‘You Look So Serious’ is the result of a painstaking process, cutting ‘Watermark’ into 426, four second long cassette tape loops. Loops were chosen, arranged and mixed together to re-compose the material in order to translate and reinterpret Enya’s hyper-produced and widespread success.