About Me

I am telling my story

Here’s a short version:

I am a music and culture writer based in Berlin, Germany. I write books and publish a twice-weekly newsletter/blog. Occasionally I contribute to magazines like Tricycle: The Buddhist Review (US), Everything Jazz (UK) and Diffus (GER).

I have a particular interest in ambient and experimental music, vaporwave, speculative fiction and off-grid culture. I’m a lay student of Zen Buddhism and I practice Deep Listening.

I’ve published my first non-fiction book with Arkana/Penguin Random House in 2021 and am currently writing my second book for Velocity Press, UK.

Here’s the longer version:

I grew up in a small, sleepy beach town in Northern Germany.

I was initiated to pop music in the mid-1980s, with the sounds of synth pop, italo disco, Hi-NRG, early (acid) house and hip-hop on the radio and television – sounds made with drum machines, synthesizers and samplers. My first favorite band was Depeche Mode.

As a kid, I got into Role-Playing Games (Middle-earth), spec fic (fantasy, horror, science fiction), video games and skateboarding. Skate videos and their eclectic soundtracks would become a huge influence on my music taste, just as classic video game soundtracks are deeply embedded into my musical memory.

During my adolescence in the first half of the 1990s, I listened to a lot of dark, guitar-based music – grunge, goth rock, neofolk, metal and industrial. Some of my favorite bands included Nirvana, The Cure, The Doors, Joy Division, Sisters of Mercy, Metallica, Slayer, Ministry, Dead Can Dance and Current 93. As you can imagine, my wardrobe consisted mainly of black garments.

For some strange reason, I’ve also always loved rap music. In the mid-1990s, I got even more intensely into hip-hop, mostly the bohemian ‘indie rap’ strain. Through bands like The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers and Massive Attack, I’d discover trip-hop, downtempo, atmospheric drum’n’bass, ambient techno, house and so-called IDM. Digging through sample sources of 80s/90s hip-hop and electronic music, I got into music from the 60s/70s, like jazz, funk, afrobeat, bossa nova and dub reggae.

At the time, I was reading every music magazine I could get my hands on. I didn’t grow up in a major city, so I rarely experienced the music I liked in a club or a live setting. My friends and I would hang out at local bars and then move to someone’s parents’ house late at night to listen to records, play video games and watch TV.

While acquiring two useless law degrees in my 20s, I began writing for music magazines. Of course I was terrible at first, but I knew a lot about many different styles of music, and people seemed to enjoy my presumptuous ramblings.

I finished my studies and got a day job in a media and entertainment law firm. I knew it wasn’t really for me. I was still writing reviews for newspapers and interviewing artists for magazines – those were the days when you were still regularly flying out to the U.S. for a 20-minute interview with an aspiring R&B singer in some five-star hotel lobby. I spent a lot of time on planes and trains.

I received the offer to become editor-in-chief of Juice, at the time the most influential German hip-hop magazine, which I’d been contributing to for a while. I seized the opportunity to drop out of the aspiring lawyer career path and maintained this stressful but fulfilling job for almost six years.

At the time, I was really into underground rap and all sorts of instrumental beats. We’re talking about the mid- to late 2000s: The L.A. beat scene was in full effect, and the triumvirate of Madlib, J Dilla and MF DOOM reigned supreme. I also got heavily into dubstep, dub techno and more experimental electronic music.

In the early to mid-2010s, I discovered both ambient and vaporwave, two strains of music that are dominating my daily listening until today. I was in my early 30s at the time, had moved to Berlin, and I’d left my first job. I’d burned out on rap, as Rick Rubin would say. My marriage was also disintegrating, and I suffered from severe mental and physical health issues.

In this time of crisis, I turned towards meditation and started reading spiritual books. A mindfulness course led to my first seven-day Vipassana retreat, which led me to starting to explore Daoism and Zen Buddhism.

I got into minimalism – the life philosophy, not the art movement –, and actually got rid of most of my physical belongings. At one point I owned less than 100 things, listed in a neat spreadsheet. It was all about leaving baggage behind, I guess. I stopped drinking and smoking as well, took up hiking and meditating instead.

After leaving my job at the magazine, I’d go back to writing freelance, but I’d also explore various roles within the music industry, consulting brands and labels, managing artists, running an independent record label, producing my own weekly community radio show and teaching music journalism at the university.

I joined Spotify as a full-time music editor in 2016. I curated playlists across multiple genres – hip-hop, indie rock, jazz, classical, meditation music. During the pandemic, I stepped up to lead their global editorial team. But the longer I played the game, the more I felt a misalignment between my own values and those of the tech/music industry. The pandemic did its fair share for me to realize I didn’t want to keep going down this route.

I’d decided to delete all my social media accounts in October 2018, thanks to Jaron Lanier and Cal Newport, whose books I’d previously devoured. To keep in touch with friends and followers, I launched an old school mailing list. Still spending most of my days digging for new and old music, I sent out irregular newsletters with record recommendations and brief essays on my new, ‘alternative’ lifestyle.

In the early COVID-19 days, I wrote a non-fiction book about my spiritual journey, Zen Style, which was published in December 2021 by Arkana, a division of Penguin Random House. It might be the best thing I’ve done so far, and one of the few things I’m actually quite proud of.

During the pandemic, I got married for a second time. My wife and I bought a piece of land with an old farmhouse in the rural Northeast of Germany, where we’ve been spending much time ever since, living off the grid. Our family grew through the addition of a young yellow Lab, Quinn. Our aim was to live a more reclusive and calm lifestyle, more in tune with nature and the seasons.

Quinn, summer of ‘25

Since leaving my last full-time job, I’ve returned to writing and consultancy work. I’ve been consulting in content and editorial strategy for labels and brands; among other projects, I worked as a commissioning editor for Everything Jazz, an online record store operated by Universal Music’s Global Classics & Jazz division in London, for three years. Aside from that, I was writing for newspapers and magazines, teaching at universities and publishing this newsletter/blog.

I moved it from Mailchimp to Substack, switched the language to English and adapted a more regular publishing schedule in 2023. Since then, it has grown from a beautiful hobby to an actual part of my job as a freelance writer. In April 2025, it became a Substack best-selling publication. At the end of the year, I made the decision to focus solely on Substack and writing books.

Right now, publishing a newsletter feels like a viable way of getting my writing and recommendations out to people who are still interested in connecting deeply with music and culture, unfazed by mainstream trends and the popularity contests of streaming numbers and social media vanity metrics.

People who listen to albums instead of playlists, who read books instead of bingeing podcasts at double speed, who prefer slow arthouse films to short video reels.

People like you, I assume.

Thanks for reading!