About Me

My name is Stephan Kunze. I’m a freelance journalist and book author.

Together with my wife and our dog, I live in Berlin and in a quiet village in Northeast Germany, near the Baltic sea and the Polish border.

I enjoy being out in nature, hiking and cycling, roaming the woods.

I also deeply enjoy sitting in front of a computer and being on the internet.

For most of my career, I’ve worked as a music editor, curator and programmer. I’ve also been an artist manager, an independent label co-founder, a community radio host and an university lecturer.

Music

I enjoy ambient music as well as the instrumental, ambient-leaning sides of other genres – like jazz, techno, house, drum’n’bass, rock and hip-hop.

I’m also really into free jazz, improvised and experimental music, and I passionately love vaporwave in all of its various shapes and forms.

Films

I’m big on indie and arthouse cinema. My favorite directors include Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer, David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-Wai, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Mia Hansen-Løve, Martin Rejtman and Laura Citarella.

I’m also partial to science-fiction and cyberpunk films, TV mystery and crime investigation series and 1980s/1990s romcoms and teen dramas.

Books

My formative reading revolved around 20th century novelists like Franz Kafka, Max Frisch, Thomas Mann, J.D. Salinger, Aldous Huxley and Thomas Pynchon. I’ve also been into speculative fiction since my early youth – science fiction, cyberpunk, fantasy and magical realism, horror and gothic novels.

In the last few years, I’ve become an avid reader of contemporary authors Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy and Sheila Heti. I’ve also been reading many non-fiction books on spiritual traditions, with a special focus on Daoism and Zen Buddhism.

Beliefs

I’m not into organized religion, but I believe there’s a converging truth at the core of most religious teachings. I find it in Buddhist psychology and Daoist philosophy, as well as in the writings of Christian mystics, Sufi poets and Hindu ascets.

The name of this newsletter, zensounds, reflects my interest and practice as a lay student of Zen Buddhism. I’ve attended multiple silent retreats, as well as courses in mindfulness meditation and Deep Listening™, a spiritual and creative practice developed by the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros.

My story

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 – sounds made with drum machines, synthesizers and samplers. My first favorite band was Depeche Mode.

I started skateboarding as a kid. 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, industrial, metal and neofolk. But I also felt drawn to the fringes quite early and started seeking out the weirdest music, from free jazz to grindcore to atonal composition.

As I slowly grew out of puberty, I got more intensely into hip-hop, mostly the bohemian ‘indie rap’ strain of the mid- to late 1990s from the U.S. and all sorts of breakbeats from the UK – through bands like The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers and Massive Attack, I’d discover trip-hop, drum’n’bass and so-called IDM.

I enjoyed the eclectic sounds coming from UK labels Mo Wax and Ninja Tune, as well as Vienna’s downbeat scene around Kruder & Dorfmeister. Digging through sample sources of hip-hop and electronic music, I got into older styles of music like jazz, funk, afrobeat, bossa nova and dub reggae. At the time, I was reading every music magazine I could get my hands on.

As I wasn’t living in a major city, I rarely experienced the music I liked in a club or a live setting. Me and my friends, we’d 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. I was quite good at it from the beginning. Well, of course I was terrible, but I knew a lot about many different styles of music, and people seemed to enjoy my ramblings.

I finished my studies and got myself a day job in a media and entertainment law firm. I already knew it wasn’t really for me. On the side, 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.

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. Seizing the opportunity to drop out of the aspiring lawyer career path, I moved to Munich and did this job for almost six years.

I was really into underground rap and all sorts of instrumental beats at the time. We’re talking about the second half of the 2000s here. The L.A. beat scene was in full effect; I also got heavily into dubstep and dub techno, and then moved into more experimental electronic music. In the early to mid-2010s, I discovered both ambient and vaporwave, two strains of music that are still dominating my daily listening.

I was in my early 30s at the time, living in 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 go back to writing freelance, but I’d also explore various freelance roles within the music industry, consulting brands and labels, managing artists, running an independent record label, producing my own weekly community radio show and lecturing about music journalism at the university.

When music streaming came around, I got involved in playlist curation. 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 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 essays on my alternative lifestyle – hence the title, zensounds.

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 the ruins of an old farmhouse in the rural Northeast of Germany, where we’ve been spending much time ever since, working remotely and fixing up the space. 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 working in content and editorial strategy for labels and brands, writing for newspapers and magazines, teaching at universities and publishing this newsletter, which quite unexpectedly turned into one of my most important projects.

I moved the newsletter to Substack, switched the language to English and adapted a more regular schedule in 2023. Since then, it has grown from a beautiful hobby to an actual part of my job as a freelance writer.

Right now, publishing a newsletter feels 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!