About Me

My name is Stephan Kunze. I’m a freelance culture 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.

I’ve been writing this newsletter since 2018, moved to Substack in 2021, switched to English in 2022 and increased my publishing cadence to twice-weekly in 2024.

My taste

Music

These days, I enjoy ambient music as well as the instrumental, ambient-leaning sides of other genres – like ambient jazz, dub techno, balearic house, atmospheric drum’n’bass, post-rock and trip-hop. I’m really into free jazz and improvised music, and I love vaporwave in all of its various shapes and forms.

Films

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.

But I’m also partial to science-fiction, cyberpunk and high school films from the 1980s and 1990s, classic TV mystery and crime investigation series, indie mumblecore and the new Argentine film – my favorite directors in that style are Martin Rejtman, Mariano Llinás and Laura Citarella.

Books

My formative reading revolved around 20th century novelists like Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon and Haruki Murakami. I’ve also been into speculative fiction since my earliest youth, from J.R.R. Tolkien to Ursula K. Le Guin, and from Stanislaw Lem to Philip K. Dick. In the last few years, I’ve become an avid reader of contemporary authors Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy and Sheila Heti.

My 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

How I got into music

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 house, Latin freestyle, electrofunk and hip-hop – all these heavily artificial sounds made with drum machines, synthesizers and samplers that I really loved as a kid. My first favorite band was Depeche Mode.

I started skateboarding when I was ten years old. 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 and neofolk. I loved bands like Nirvana, Sonic Youth, The Cure, Joy Division, Sisters Of Mercy, Ministry and Current 93.

But I also felt drawn to the fringes quite early and started seeking out the weirdest music I could find. Soon I was stumbling from John Zorn’s Naked City to Einstürzende Neubauten to Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.

As I slowly grew out of puberty, I got back even 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, big beat 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.

As I was living in the countryside, I rarely experienced the music I liked in a club setting. I would join my friends who were regularly going out to commercial discos, but I would rarely enjoy the music, so I’d look forward to hanging out at my friends’ places or my own house late at night, listening to records, playing video games and watching TV.

How I got started as a writer

While acquiring two useless law degrees in my 20s, I began writing for music magazines. I was quite good at it from the beginning. I mean, of course I was terrible, but I knew a lot about different styles of music, and people seemed to enjoy my presumptuous 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 day when you were still regularly flying out to the States just for a 20-minute interview with an aspiring R&B singer in some five-star hotel lobby.

I received the offer to become editor-in-chief of Juice, the biggest local 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.

Musically, I was into underground rap and all sorts of progressive instrumental beats at the time. We’re talking about the second half of the 2000s here. As a long-time fan of UK underground music, I got heavily into grime and dubstep, and then moved into more experimental areas of electronic music, like ‘post-dubstep’, ambient and vaporwave, which I discovered during its first wave in the early 2010s.

How I embarked on my spiritual path

Fast forward a few years. I was in my early 30s, 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 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 Taoism 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 and producing my own weekly community radio show.

When streaming became a thing, I got involved in playlist curation. I joined Spotify as a full-time music editor in 2016. During the pandemic, I stepped up to lead their global editorial team. But the longer I played the tech/music 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, Quinn. Our aim was to live a more reclusive and calm lifestyle, more in tune with nature and the seasons.

Quinn, summer of ‘25

Why I started this newsletter

Since I left 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 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, 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 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!