About Me

This is my story so far

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

I was raised on 1980s pop culture: American hip-hop and British sampling pop, Stephen King and Douglas Adams novels, John Hughes and Steven Spielberg films. As a kid, I got into Role-Playing Games (Middle-earth), speculative fiction (fantasy, horror, sci-fi), 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 engraved into my musical memory.

During my adolescence, I was a skate rat with goth leanings. 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, Joy Division, Sisters of Mercy, Metallica, Slayer, Ministry, Dead Can Dance and Current 93.

But I’ve also always loved rap music since I first saw Run-D.M.C. and the Beastie Boys on TV as an eight-year old. 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 more electronic sounds – trip-hop, downtempo, atmospheric drum’n’bass, ambient techno/house and so-called IDM.

Even back then, my musical universe was constantly expanding. At the time, I was reading every music magazine I could get my hands on. 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.

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 house late at night to listen to records, play video games and watch TV.

While acquiring two useless law degrees in my early to mid-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.

In the early 2000s, the Internet became my second home. I started blogging in 2003. For a while, I ran an MP3 blog sharing rare and forgotten hip-hop tracks that I ripped from my record collection. Through the blog network, I got to know a whole bunch of other music enthusiasts who became friends and blogging partners.

I finished my studies and got a day job in a media and entertainment law firm. 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.

In 2007, I became the 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 weirdly fulfilling job for almost six years.

At the time, I was really into underground rap and all sorts of instrumental beats. 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 for a few years. In the early 2010s, I discovered both ambient and vaporwave, two strains of music that are dominating my daily listening until today.

I was in my mid-30s at the time, had finally moved to Berlin, and I’d left my first job. I’d burned out on rap, as Rick Rubin would say, my marriage was 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 gone 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.

In 2016, I joined Spotify as a full-time music editor. For the first few years, I was curating playlists across multiple genres – hip-hop, indie rock, jazz, classical, meditation music. During the pandemic, I stepped up to lead the 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 deleted all my social media accounts in October 2018, thanks to Jaron Lanier and Cal Newport, two critics of Big Tech 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 ‘alternative’ lifestyle.

In the early COVID-19 days, I wrote a non-fiction book about my spiritual journey of the previous decade, 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.

In the pandemic, I got married for a second time. My wife and I soon 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, and with a smaller ecological footprint.

Quinn, summer of ‘25

Since leaving my last full-time job, I’ve returned to writing and consultancy work. I’ve been working in content and editorial strategy for labels and brands; one of my main projects was Everything Jazz, an online record store operated by Universal Music’s Global Classics & Jazz division in London. Aside from that, I was writing for newspapers and magazines, teaching at universities and constantly 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.

Here I am still mainly writing about ambient and experimental music, and I’ve developed a special focus on vaporwave, an art movement and internet subculture I’d discovered back in 2013, when I’d left my first job at the hip-hop magazine.

Occasionally I might write about other things like books, films, art, media and philosophy. I’m currently working on my second book for the UK publisher Velocity Press in our off-grid country hideaway in Northeast Germany.

If you ever feel like you want to get in touch, just drop me a line:
stephankunze [at] posteo [dot] de

Thanks for reading!