Florian T M Zeisig is one of contemporary ambient music’s preeminent shapeshifters. The Berlin-based producer first made waves in late 2020 with You Look So Serious, a compilation of Enya edits that distilled the singer’s voice down to a distant emanation. Since then, he’s set his talents to throbbing neurodrone, skunky spiritual jazz, West Mineral tropical unease, and a fantastic album about working at a nightclub that sounded like a party heard through the wall. His latest endeavor is a rotating collective with a name so florid it makes Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 seem like a perfectly modest moniker, and the theme this time is rock music, stripped of orthodoxy.
Zeisig assembled The Thinking of the World Began Pounding in Our Ears the Moment We Hit Shore from three years of sessions with various collaborators, notably more eaze’s Mari Maurice Rubio, sound sculptor Cal Fish, and saxophonist Don Lyons. This would imply Zeisig stepping into a Carlos Niño-esque role of benevolent bandleader and subsequent jam-assembler, but it’s mostly just the same few musicians playing musical chairs, and the style is consistent throughout: slow, expansive, swooning indie rock falling along a continuum running from slowcore and shoegaze through the dreamier end of emo.
It feels crucial that Zeisig insists this is a “project, rather than a band.” The spontaneity and interplay traditionally valued in rock does not figure into Zeisig’s musical style or choice of collaborators. Instead, Zeisig treats the project like a beat tape, preferring static mats of sound and dynamically unyielding drifts over crescendoes and catharsis. Unlike session-jam projects like Josh Homme’s Desert Sessions or Beck’s Record Club that encourage spontaneous ideas and not thinking too hard, The Thinking of the World feels like a patchwork pieced together out of files, made by people who weren’t necessarily in the same room at the same time. As the drums dissipate and the album enters its ambient final stretch, the song titles begin to betray the process of their making: “Voice Memo,” “Take 4,” “World Loop.”
This uncanny quality is most apparent in the treatment of Rubio’s vocals. Her use of Auto-Tune and pitch-shifting won’t surprise anyone who’s heard either her solo records or her many collaborations with fellow Texas ambient composer claire rousay, but the context in which her voice is used might come as a shock. The sound on opener “Say What You Want To” seems to boom from far away, and yet Rubio’s voice is shoved up so close to the front of the mix it’s like a sheet of paper pinned to a wall of fog. In her ambient solo work or her hyperpop-leaning collabs with rousay, this extreme processing feels at home. Over the sound of a rock band, it’s much stranger.
The first three tracks proceed like this, with Rubio doing jazz runs through a gauntlet of chipmunk effects while the music hovers in midair as if sourced from a Galaxie 500 record stuck in a locked groove. When she launches into a violin solo on “Moon,” you realize how little difference there is between how she treats that instrument and how she treats her own vocals. T-Pain said he wanted to use Auto-Tune to make his voice sound like a saxophone, and Rubio’s performance on The Thinking of the World is something like the final evolution of that vision. Imagine rock music as jazz as Drain Gang-style emo rap. It’s an acquired taste—one more easily acquired after long nights on the internet, most likely.
The album achieves liftoff with its penultimate track, “World Loop,” which is also the song that feels most divorced from the rest of the album. Rather than living in the flatscreen world of ennui and file-sharing, “World Loop” is a slice of ambient Americana that conjures the open skies of the American West, though its crowded mix has more in common with the pollution-choked dustscapes of James Ferraro’s Last American Hero than the cinematic grandeur of SUSS or North Americans. I’m inclined to say “World Loop” is the best track on The Thinking of the World, yet I distrust my instincts in saying so because it’s the track that feels more improvisatory, dynamic, alive, real: all the rockist adjectives the Thinkers are trying to throw out the window with this music.
