Audiopile Review: Florian TM Zeisig dons yet another guise, returning to Somewhere Press as Spool, chasing his crackled dream-pop collaboration with vocalist Alliyah Enyo that dropped during his busy 2024, coming alongside his murky ambient NUG project on West Mineral and a full length of inverted trip-hop for Stroom. Needless to say, the guy stays busy. But, for us, among all these shapeshifting projects, his loop-based, hypnagogic-ambient work is where Zeisig strikes home for us. Continuing the threads previously pulled under his Angel R project and his dissociative Enya-sampling You Look So Serious LP, Spool’s seven tracks unfurl smeared loops, gaseous synths, haunted piano, and a light dusting of field recordings. Tugging at heart strings with his delicate, purposeful touch, these airy bits are patiently deployed into a tender ambience that, as we’ve referenced in the past, is redolent of William Basinski’s time-slowing loop degradations. But Zeisig’s got his own ghosts to purge, and with Spool he’s cemented his own status as a master of finessing the past into new forms. Edition of 300. Big recommendation.

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Spool is a multi-disciplinary, collaborative project by musician and producer Florian TM Zeisig and artist and perfumer Angel Paradise. The project came about when both artists were living in Hinang, a small farming village in the Bavarian Alps. The work embodies a period of isolation, reflection and personal awakening.

Florian TM Zeisig has a distinctive ability to weave compositions that feel weightless yet deeply evocative. His music carries a profound tenderness—a soulful presence that lingers in even the most crystalline soundscapes. On Spool, he weaves loops from obscured material into a hazy tapestry of romantic atmospheres. These pieces hold the frequencies of both past and future—present and remembered. Fragments of pop relics, flickering piano, and the echoes of an in-between world dissolve into aether, their resonance stirring a bittersweet euphoria—a rose-tinted melancholy.

Spool was born out of a time of intense transformation for both Zeisig and Angel Paradise; their epic surroundings were a vessel through which to see life at a different scale. That goes some way to explaining how emotionally resonant this music is, even for Zeisig. His studio at the time looked onto endless mountain forests, wisps of cloud gliding majestically across their silhouettes. It’s heard in the ethereal vocal drones that evoke mountain spirits, the samples crunched into abstraction that rustle, like creatures in the forest overgrowth, and the reverberating chords that linger on like natural echoes over mountain tops. Zeisig resurfaces the redolent core of bygone fragments, honing into long-gone echoes, their spirits returning for one final breath before fading into the mist.