About Me

My name is Stephan Kunze. I’m a writer focused on music and culture.

I’ve worked as an editor, curator, programmer, music manager and consultant.

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 as much as possible.

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

Apart from my small chosen family, I have a handful of close friends who don’t have much to do with each other. I don’t enjoy being in a room with many people, and I can get quite awkward socially, so I prefer to meet them one on one.

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.

I’m a lay student of Zen Buddhism. I’ve attended multiple silent retreats in Zen and in the Vipassana tradition of mindfulness meditation, and I’ve completed courses in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Deep Listening™, a Buddhism-inspired spiritual and creative practice developed by the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros.

I listen to more instrumental than vocal music. I love ambient and experimental electronic music (vaporwave, dub techno, balearic etc.), free and spiritual jazz, post-rock, drone, noise, dub and indie/alternative hip-hop. I enjoy some 20th century art music as well as some free improvisation, post-minimalist composition, industrial, neofolk, dreampop, shoegaze and trip-hop.

Here are 100 Albums That Rocked My World – not an attempt at a ‘best of’, but a highly subjective list of inspiring, trail-blazing records.

I’ve always enjoyed indie and arthouse cinema. Some of my favorite directors include Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer, David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-Wai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Mia Hansen-Løve.

I’m also partial to 1980s/1990s science-fiction, classic TV mystery and crime investigation series, romcoms, indie mumblecore and the new Argentine film (Martin Rejtman, Mariano Llinás, Laura Citarella).

My formative reading experiences revolved around classic 20th century novelists like Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Fjodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann and J.D. Salinger. Two writers of fiction that inspired me deeply when I discovered them as an adult were Thomas Pynchon and Roberto Bolaño.

For a longer phase in my life, I was only reading non-fiction books on philosophy and spirituality, as well as music history books and artist biographies. In the last few years, I’ve become an avid reader of literary fiction by contemporary authors such as Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, Sheila Heti, Ayşegül Savaş or Maggie Nelson. I read around 50 books per year. I'm not on social media and I don’t own a TV.

I grew up in a small 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 house, Latin freestyle, electrofunk and hip-hop – all these heavily artificial sounds made with drum machines, synthesizers and samplers.

I started skateboarding in 1987. Skate videos and their eclectic soundtracks became a huge influence on my music taste moving forward.

In my youth, I listened to a lot of dark, mostly guitar-based music – grunge, goth rock, neofolk, industrial and groove metal – but then as I slowly grew out of puberty, I got back even more intensely into hip-hop, mostly the bohemian ‘indie rap’ strain.

In the mid-1990s, I also discovered eclectic electronic music from the UK – trip-hop, drum’n’bass, downtempo and so-called IDM. I’d listen to these sounds all night while playing videogames with my friends.

Hip-hop and electronic music were still mostly sample-based in those days, and I’d start digging for older records. My musical universe constantly expanded through my finds, from jazz and funk to disco and dub to afrobeat and bossa nova.

While acquiring two useless law degrees in my 20s, I began freelance writing for music magazines. Now this was fun. I was quite good at it from the beginning. I mean, of course I was terrible, but I knew a lot about 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 knew it wasn’t really for me. I was just waiting for the right moment to drop out of the aspiring lawyer career path.

I got the opportunity to become editor-in-chief of Juice, the biggest local hip-hop magazine, which I’d been contributing to for a while. I moved to Munich and did this job for almost six years.

I was into underground rap and all sorts of progressive instrumental beats, from Madlib to Flying Lotus, and from J Dilla to Burial. I got heavily into dubstep, and then moved into what was then called ‘post-dubstep’, eventually venturing off into more experimental areas of electronic music, like ‘deconstructed club’, ambient and vaporwave.

Fast forward a few years. I was living in Berlin, and I’d left my first job. I’d burned out on rap, as Rick Rubin would say, my first marriage was disintegrating and I suffered from severe mental and physical health issues. In this crisis period, I turned towards meditation. I started reading spiritual books. A mindfulness course led to my first seven-day Vipassana retreat, which led me to exploring the practices of Zen Buddhism and Deep Listening.

I got into Stoicism and minimalism as a life philosophy, and I 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, took up hiking and meditating instead.

After leaving my position at the magazine, I’d go back to writing freelance, but I’d also start exploring different roles within the music industry, consulting brands and labels, managing artists, running an independent record label and producing my own weekly community radio show.

In the mid-2010s, I got involved in streaming playlist curation. After a few years as a full-time music editor at Spotify, I stepped up to lead their global editorial team. But the longer I played the tech industry game, the more I felt a misalignment between my personal development and the company goals. The pandemic did its fair share for me to realize I didn’t want to keep going down this route.

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.

At the tail end of the pandemic, my wife and I bought the ruins of an old farmhouse on a piece of land 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 named 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 I left my last full-time job, I’ve returned to freelance writing and consultancy work. I’ve been working in content and editorial strategy for labels and brands, writing for newspapers and magazines, teaching culture journalism at universities, and publishing this newsletter, which quite unexpectedly has turned into one of my most important projects.

The roots of zensounds lead back to the day in October 2018 when I decided to delete all my social media accounts. 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 music recommendations and essays on my alternative lifestyle – hence the title, Zen Sounds.

It became zensounds (lowercase, like much of the music I present here) after I moved to Substack, switched to English and adapted a weekly schedule in December 2022. Since then, this 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!

If you still want to know more about me and my taste in music, continue here:

• The Music That Made Me – My life from 5 to 45 in 9 albums

• 100 Albums That Rocked My World (1960-2020) – A highly subjective, genre-agnostic list of inspiring, trail-blazing records