Hi, I'm Stephan.

And this is my story.

I’ve been a music and culture journalist for 25 years.

I’ve also worked as an entertainment lawyer and artist manager, I ran an independent record label and curated playlists, I developed content brands and hosted community radio shows.

These days, I am working as a writer, editor, consultant and lecturer. And I am publishing this newsletter, which has grown more than I’d ever imagined.

I’m based in Berlin, but in the last few years, I’ve also been spending much time with my family in an old, off-grid farmhouse in a small village in the rural Northeast, the most sparsely populated part of Germany – quite close to the Polish border and the Baltic sea.

Below you will find a short version of my biography, romantically contorted through the rearview mirror of human memory.

I grew up here.

The 1980s

I spent my childhood and adolescence in a small beach town in Northern Germany.

It was a beautiful place to grow up – bustling with excitement in the summer, sleepy and cozy in the winter.

Reading became my first passion. An early favorite was Tolkien, and by the time I went to high school, I’d be devouring Hesse, Kafka and Dostoevsky novels.

Of course I’d go through a heavy Beats phase, and a Pynchon phase. That one’s actually ongoing. I still read around 50 books per year – contemporary literary fiction, classics, non-fiction.

After my family got their first VCR player, I sat on the living room floor by myself on weekend mornings, deeply immersed in movies like War Games or Blade Runner. A few years later, I’d discover the works of Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch, who introduced me to the wonders of indie and arthouse cinema.

But by far my biggest love would become music. It was playing around our house all the time – not Top 40 radio, but older records from the 1960s and 1970s: The Beatles and the Stones, Brian Wilson and Bob Marley, Roxy Music and Pink Floyd. My parents owned a sizeable vinyl collection – aside from their shared favorites, my father was into progressive rock, while my mother preferred blues and folk.

I was initiated to contemporary pop music by one of my cousins, who’s a couple years older than me and used to record new music off the radio. Sometimes she’d babysit me and bring her hand-labeled mixtapes, which she named Disco and gave each a sequential number, like Disco #81. I’d borrow and copy these tapes, and they became a formative influence on my taste.

Her favorite music was some of the edgier stuff of the mid-1980s: synth pop, italo disco, early house and hip-hop. She was a huge Depeche Mode fan. One of her tapes contained Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel’s “The Message”. I fell in love with that song, but the recording cut off in the middle of the second verse.

With my pocket money, I soon started buying my own records. From the Fat Boys to Run-D.M.C., from the Beastie Boys to LL Cool J, I was interested in music that sounded new and fresh – and different from the rock and folk music I knew from home. Rap ticked all the boxes.

I started skateboarding around the same time – this must have been in 1987, when Powell-Peralta’s The Search for Animal Chin came out.

The 1990s

When I turned 14, Nevermind was released, and nothing would ever be the same again.

As a teen, I was into harsh, dark, mostly guitar-based music – grunge and goth rock, industrial and groove metal. I still have one photo from that time where I have thick, shoulder-long black hair. I’m wearing a Ministry shirt and a silver bat on a leather cord around my neck. I still liked rap though – groups like Cypress Hill, Public Enemy and Wu-Tang Clan belonged to my listening diet as well.

I half-heartedly tried to learn the guitar, then switched to electric bass. I never got good at it, because I rarely practiced. In my teens I joined an nameless cover band that would just rehearse a couple of times. Our repertoire was limited to a few songs by The Cure, Joy Division and Bauhaus. We wore a lot of black, combed back our hair, and if we were feeling adventurous, we’d wear eyeliner.

The bass guitar soon collected dust in a corner of my room. I got back into skateboarding and more intensely into hip-hop, mostly the bohemian ‘indie rap’ strain, but I also discovered electronic music from the UK – trip-hop, drum’n’bass and so-called IDM. There was no place to experience any of that in a club setting, so I’d listen to records all night while playing video games.

In the port town of Kiel, Germany, nightlife was limited to a bunch of commercial discotheques, a student bar that played indie rock, and a community center which would have a free jazz band playing on one floor, while a goth party would go down on the other one. Needless to say, I hung out there a lot.

Those were the mid-1990s, and my main role models were still the Beastie Boys, who had pivoted from frat-boy party starters to purveyors of retro cool. I switched my own black Doc Marten’s boots for black Adidas Campus sneakers and wanted to be MCA so badly.

Towards the end of the decade, I I moved out of my parents’ house and in with a friend who was a jazz pianist. I’d started digging for older records. These explorations happened because of my deepening love for hip-hop and electronic music, genres that were still sample-based in those days. My musical universe constantly expanded through my finds – from jazz and soul to funk and dub to afrobeat and bossa nova.

The 2000s

Me and my friends started going to uni in different cities. We’d regularly visit each other. We’d pool the money for gas, drive a few hundred miles on a Friday, go out the whole weekend, and sleep on the dirty floors of shared student flats in Berlin, Cologne, Amsterdam or Paris.

I moved to Hamburg around the turn of the millennium. I spent too much time in the bars of my new neighborhood. I moved to Zurich for a few months one winter, depressed and without a clear goal in life. While acquiring two pretty much useless law degrees, I began writing for music magazines and moved in with my then-girlfriend whom I met during an internship at one of those magazines.

When I’d finished my studies, I got a job in a media and entertainment law firm. It wasn’t for me. After a year, I dropped out of the aspiring lawyer career path to become the editor-in-chief of Juice, the biggest local hip-hop magazine, which I’d been contributing to for a while. I would do this job for almost six years – one of the formative experiences of my professional life.

I caught the tail end of an era where record companies would still routinely pay for music journalists’ transatlantic flights out of promotional budgets. I reported almost exclusively on hip-hop for some years, working for various other German magazines and newspapers aside from the magazine I edited.

From the outside, my life might have looked successful. I slept in five-star hotels from West Hollywood to Miami Beach. I also drank and smoked way too much. I didn’t eat healthy and didn’t sleep well. I was late diagnosed with being on the spectrum, so looking back, I probably spent a lot of time masking in those days.

The 2010s

Fast forward a few years. I’d left my first job because of burnout, my first marriage was disintegrating and I suffered from severe mental and physical health issues.

In this crisis period, I turned towards meditation and minimalism. I started reading books by teachers like Jon Kabat-Zinn, Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chödrön and Alan Watts, and attending spiritual retreats. An eight-week course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and my first seven-day Vipassana retreat led me to eventually exploring the practices of Zen Buddhism and Deep Listening.

I got into ambient music and spiritual jazz. I stopped drinking and smoking. I took up hiking, running and meditating. I got into therapy. And then I fell in love again and got married for a second time.

During the pandemic, I wrote and published a non-fiction book about my spiritual journey so far, Zen Style, which was published by Arkana, a division of Penguin Random House. I’m actually quite proud of that work. So far, it’s only available in German.

Throughout all this time, I’d explore different roles within the music industry, consulting brands and labels, managing artists, running an independent record label and producing my own weekly radio show for the award-winning German station ByteFM.

In the mid-2010s, I got involved in streaming playlist curation, which I’d do full-time for several years at Spotify, and ended up leading a global team of editors and programmers at the company.

For some years, I was leading the lifestyle of a manager at a tech company. I was based in Berlin but traveling a lot, often working from offices in Amsterdam, London, Stockholm and New York City. But the longer I played the game, the more I felt a certain misalignment between my personal, spiritual development and the company goals. The pandemic did its fair share for me to realize I couldn’t go on this way.

The 2020s, so far

During lockdown, I realized that I wanted to get out of the city, at least partly, and live a more reclusive lifestyle, more in tune with nature and the seasons.

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. We also got a dog – a yellow Lab named Quinn.

Records, movies and books are still my main way of engaging with the outside world. I’m also regularly spending some days or even weeks in the city just to meet friends and business associates, and go to concerts and exhibitions.

Since I left my last full-time job, I’ve returned to working as a freelance writer and consultant. I’m currently a commissioning editor for Everything Jazz, a global online record store with its headquarters in London. I’m occasionally teaching culture journalism to university students, and I’m publishing this newsletter.

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. I used it to send out irregular music recommendations and life updates – 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, which happened in December 2022. The music I’m focusing on is ambient, electronic, indie rap, post-rock, neoclassical and instrumental jazz – and many other things which would somehow fall under the wide umbrella term of ‘experimental music’.

Publishing my own newsletter seemed like a viable way of getting my writing 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.

If you still want to know more about me and my taste in music, here are some more personal essays:

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

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

Thanks for reading!