My First AMA (Ask Me Anything)

Here are the answers to your questions from yesterday's Substack chat

I’ve completely neglected the subscriber chat so far, but I wanted to try an experiment: Yesterday I asked you to post any questions you might have for me, whether music-related or not.

Usually I am the one asking questions, so I was really curious about what you’d come up with. And of course a bit excited too. But I was really taken aback by the diversity and depth of your questions. I’ve compiled and answered them below.

My sincere thanks to all of you! This was fun, we should do it again someday.

photo: Claudia Kunze

Gordon San: Whats your motivation to share music and recommendations?

My genuine love for the music. I also want to be an active part of the music community, not just a consumer. I find it sad that coverage of non-mainstream music has been absent from most bigger media in recent years, and most of the indie music mags are dead.

milola: Do you buy every record you review?

Well, I receive a lot of music from artists, labels and agencies in advance. But I also constantly dig beyond the promo email inbox. Some of the most interesting music doesn’t have a publicist behind it. That means I buy the music.

I buy most of the records that I really like. Even if I’d received a digital version upfront, I order the CD or tape when it’s out. For the first two years of this newsletter, all money I earned from paid subscriptions would directly go to Bandcamp.

Carsten: I’m around the same age as you and feel like we share a very similar musical upbringing. Back in the ‘90s and 2000s, I was deeply immersed in chasing new music and following the latest trends. Ironically, now – despite the virtually unlimited access to new music through streaming platforms – I find myself gravitating more and more toward timeless music. Very few new releases manage to stay in my personal rotation long-term. Since around 2022, maybe 10 to 15 albums per year have made the cut. To me, this feels somewhat counterintuitive, given how much more music is available today. Do you experience something similar as you get older? And how do you make sense of this shift – from chasing novelty to seeking depth or continuity in music?

Yeah, I feel you in general and I definitely experienced something similar.

I don’t even listen to most new and hyped records right away. If they’re really good, they will still be good in a few weeks or months. Back in the days, as a younger music writer, that would have been unthinkable. I always wanted to be on top of things – now I see my role more on the bottom of things, in the words of Donald Knuth.

The older I get, the less excited I get about trends. But when it hits me, it really hits me, like when Amapiano appeared. That still happens with new music, but similar to your experience, I find just a bunch of new albums each year that stick – a few more than you, maybe 25? 30, tops?

The amount of released music has clearly grown massively, but maybe the amount of great music with staying power hasn’t so much. These days, there is a lot of decent music – the stuff that gets a 7.0 rating on Pitchfork. I write about that too, because sometimes decent is just fine. Not every album needs to be a timeless classic. There are many records in my collection that I played for some days or weeks, and then I moved on. That doesn’t make those records bad – I really enjoyed them, I just won’t return to them very often. Our time is limited, after all.

Ivo: What are the most important qualities in a good interviewer?

In terms of actual qualities I’d say curiosity and empathy, and in skills I’d say active listening. I am speaking about this topic regularly in my university lectures on music journalism, so here are some more tangible things I find important when interviewing artists.

• Ask open questions (that can’t be answered with ‘yes’ or ‘no’). Make your questions specific, but also give the artist room to go on tangents. The tangents can be more interesting than the actual answer to your question.

• Don’t start out with a deep or unpleasant question. Make some friendly smalltalk and then ask something surprising or unexpected – try to get them interested in the conversation and leave their ‘promo mindstate’.

• Don’t ask stuff that you can find out by a Google search. It’s boring. They’ve answered that stuff millions of times. Just google it.

• Be prepared – do research, read, listen. It makes the interviewee feel safe and understood. Have questions written down as a fall-back option, but don’t stick to the script. Ask follow-up questions whenever it feels like there could be something more interesting hidden beneath an answer.

• Listen actively. Allow for pauses. Don’t try to fill every moment of silence. Sometimes you just need to wait for something to appear.

• Don’t make the interview about yourself. Don’t constantly validate the interviewee’s opinions – challenge them if necessary. This is not a conversation between friends, it’s an interview. Keep the reader in mind. What would they want to ask when reading this answer?

Michael Fordham: When you were at Spotify, how did you handle listening to the flood of music coming your way?

Before I moved into a managerial role leading a global team that worked on editorial policies and frameworks, I was curating a substantial number of playlists across various genres. So I was literally listening to hundreds of new tracks every week. I was never ‘done’ with work – there was always more new music to listen to.

We did have a tool that helped us in organizing our professional listening through filters and buckets. I’d set the filter in Spotify For Artists to show me the pitches for new releases in a certain genre or market for the upcoming weeks, depending on what playlist I was working on, and then I’d go through them one by one, listening to bits and pieces – rarely full songs – to decide whether I’d see any potential for my playlists. I’d always listen to them in batches – say, German hip-hop on Tuesday afternoon, lo-fi beats on Wednesday morning, and jazz all Thursday.

In those days, I was listening to songs for many hours per day – the rest was taken up by meetings. But whenever I pitied myself, I asked myself how 16-year old me would have thought about getting paid a decent salary for sitting at my computer with headphones on all day and going through unreleased music. There are definitely worse jobs.

Dom Aversano

: I’m curious about how you think Zoom calls are affecting music journalism? On the one hand, there is the advantage of shrinking geography and scheduling time more efficiently; on the other hand, without the physical connection and opportunity to hang out more casually, interviews might be too cerebral and calculated. Since I’ve not done this, I’d be curious to know about your thoughts and experience.

I’m trying to do in-person whenever possible, but I live in the German countryside for a significant part of the year, and if I’d restrict myself to face-to-face conversations, I’d probably run just a handful of interviews per year. I think Zoom does a good job in most cases though, if you have stable Wi-Fi and are in a quiet place without much distraction.

Let’s face it, even if you’re meeting in person, you usually won’t get to hang out with the artist for a longer time, unless you’re writing a cover story for a big magazine. So you’ll have your 45-minute chat in some café or hotel or a conference room at the label office, and that’s not so much better than meeting them over Zoom, to be honest.

I still prefer face-to-face if feasible. Some artists do too, and I always find that refreshing when artists push for an in-person interview even though you offer the option of a Zoom call. (Shoutouts to Okkyung Lee!)

Daniel Enache: What do you think about this Suno Studio new DAW? Will it replace producers work?

Is that some AI thing? Well, I don’t know what it does, but no, I don’t think so.

What interests me about art is something deeply human – character, personality, emotions and experience that come across in an artist’s work. I don’t want to listen to ‘type beats’ or generic remixes, generated by some kid with an AI tool. I don’t care about that at all.

As for the future of the ‘producer’, I think we’d need to define that role first. I am thinking of an actual music producer in the old school sense – someone like Manfred Eicher, Brian Eno or Rick Rubin. These people have a creative vision and a skill to bring out the best in the musicians’ performance, using whatever methods they find applicable to realize their vision, a lot of them more on a psychological level – their work more like being a coach for the artist(s) in the studio. I believe most artists would prefer a human to take on that role, and there’s little that a Suno DAW can change about that.

To come back to your question, yes I think in some areas of mainstream pop and functional music the AI thing might have an actual impact. It might even take some jobs away, for sure. It’s probably already happening. Do I think that’s necessarily a bad thing? Well, there’s little artistic value in most of that stuff for me anyways. I don’t know, I’m not particularly passionate about this topic.

Bas Grasmayer

: What is a habit, big or small, that anyone working in music should cultivate? Why?

This might sound obvious, but I’d say training your listening ability.

First of all, there’s a huge difference between hearing and listening – hearing just describes the physical effect of sound waves reaching your ear canal. Listening means actively turning towards the sound, giving it your full attention, and feeling it with your whole body, not just your ear. I think that ability is increasingly being lost in our fragmented media world of frequent multitasking and second screens. For the music industry, this is particularly tragic. Only by listening deeply, you will be able to cut through the noise and the BS to find relevance. That goes for music, and for all of our media consumption.

I make time for at least an hour of dedicated, deep listening per day. This is time where I just sit with music, without doing much else. I don’t let anything interrupt me. I turn off all distractions. I will listen to full albums – new ones, unreleased ones, recommendations and (re-)discoveries.

It’s similar with reading, watching films, viewing art, walking in nature, or even conversations with people. I value all of these activities highly, and I try to be as attentive as possible when I engage in them. It’s vital to my work and my output. Shelling out that time also means that I decide to do less in total – but I find that’s a fair trade-off.

Reamontt: Has streaming made music more like a commodity for consumption than a piece of art to be savoured in the physical form?

The short answer is yes. I believe that the move to digital music and to streaming has devalued music and turned it into a mere ‘commodity for consumption’ – similar to certain types of mainstream radio before, but on a more massive scale.

That being said, I don’t think we should get too romantic about physical media either. The vinyl album was invented in the mid-1950s – by the major record labels. Those companies didn’t necessarily want to ‘savour pieces of art in the physical form’. They wanted to make money. To do that effectively, they turned recordings of performances into a mass consumption good.

There are immensely positive aspects to digital music. As a professional music writer, I couldn’t imagine life without it. I still remember the days when record labels would send envelopes with CD-Rs to your office via bike courier. Also, as someone who lives in more than one place and travels quite a bit for work reasons, I appreciate the opportunity to access my library from different locations.

Still, in the past few years, I’ve been returning to physical formats for various reasons, one being that many are just beautiful artefacts, and the act of putting on a CD or a tape – I’m not a vinyl person myself – is just much more deliberate than pressing play on a stream.

In my archive (paid subs only), you will find some more of my articles about my changed perception of streaming and my shift back to physical media:

• Listening More Slowly

• I’ve Given Up On Music Streaming

• Life Without Streaming: An Update

willowlaun’s john h: I’d love to hear your thoughts on the future of streaming and physical media as big corporations and the subscription models are getting a bit of a well-deserved backlash, especially within the genres you enjoy and promote so well. As an ambient artist myself I am seeing lots of interest in cassettes but don’t know how sustainable that will be over the long haul. Would love your thoughts on where things might be headed or where you’d like them to go.

The backlash is real. It’s happening. Not on a mainstream level yet, but the tide seems to be changing substantially, for the first time in the last 15 years.

See, mainstream entertainment is moving into a bleak direction where basically all ‘content’ is just short bursts of dopamine in a feed. On these platforms, music now competes with video podcasts, random film snippets, self-help motivational content, influencer livestreams, Mr Beast type game shows, growth hackers and AI slop. This is just dystopian to me. What I believe and hope is that more people will come to their senses and turn their backs on these platforms.

In that subcultural niche of ambient and experimental music that you and I feel at home in, the reality is also that many have day jobs, and many others are hustling, barely breaking even by playing live shows, selling physical objects (tapes, vinyl, CDs, merchandise and other things lke HTRK’s custom earrings or claire rousay’s ‘emo ambient’ hats), doing commissioned work, applying for grants and residencies and having Patreon, Substack and Bandcamp type subscription models.

This might sustain a certain level of artists on a very basic and humble level. You need a certain critical mass for that – the often quoted 1,000 true fans, possibly. To find and retain these people, you need to put in a lot of work. You also need to keep your overhead as low as possible, which in turn limits your growth opportunities.

Let’s be realistic – nobody’s going to get rich here. But maybe we can at least rebuild an independent, alternative ecosystem like it has existed since the 1970s, until social media and streaming came along and forced HTRK and claire rousay to compete for attention with Drake and Taylor Swift. That never made any sense to me.

One underexplored aspect is how artist cooperatives can become a part of an alternative music ecosystem. I’m thinking grassroots AACM type models for the digital era – basically subscription bundles with exclusive access to all work of a bunch of related artists, including music (new and catalogue), tickets, merch, writings, videos, livestreams and other forms of communication that now happens on social media. I’m not into parasocial fandom and celebrity worship cults, but it might be worth exploring digital ‘fan clubs’ where like-minded artists and listeners come together at eye level.

Justin Patrick Moore: Personally I am a universalist when it comes to religion and spirituality. I don’t believe there is any one right path, only the right path for an individual in the particular context of their lives. That said, how did you come to Buddhism, as opposed to a path from western culture, whether that be the religions we see on the surface in the west, or our more hidden and esoteric traditions (such as hermeticism, kabbalah, neopaganism and the like)? Thanks and blessings to you if you will have them.

Thanks for your blessings, Justin! Right back at you.

First of all, I do agree that Aldous Huxley was really on to something in The Perennial Philosophy, though it’s not a very fashionable idea these days.

For most of my life, I’ve defined myself as an atheist though. I was brought up in a non-religious, progressive environment, but I still went to Protestant church on Sundays to get confirmation, and that had a profound effect on me. I also had a phase in my youth when I was occupying myself with the ‘occult’ (Crowley/Thelema, Mysticism, Paganism/Druidry etc.) – influenced by certain gothic, industrial and ‘neofolk’ artists, of course.

Then in my early 30s, I went through a serious life crisis – I burned out in my first job, my first marriage was disintegrating, and I got into some health trouble because of some bad lifestyle habits. At that point, I was looking for guidance.

I was reading a lot about Indian, Chinese and Stoic philosophy, and then I attended a course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which led me to exploring Buddhist meditation. During a Vipassana retreat I discovered Zen, which I felt immediately drawn to and I’ve been studying and practicing for the past decade. I wrote a book about my experiences and insights, Zen Style (2021), but it wasn’t translated to English yet.

Taking up that meditation practice was one of the best things that has happened to me in my life. I am just much happier, more relaxed and less anxious now than I was ever before. I am convicted that everyone needs to find their own path, and fully agree with you that there is not one single ‘perfect’ way.

Wes Morgenthaler: How does music relate to and enrich your spiritual beliefs and practice?

It was through music that I initially found a vague spiritual direction pointing towards the East – Adam “MCA” Yauch of the Beastie Boys rapping about Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock talking about their particular strain of Buddhist practice, Alice Coltrane singing Hindu chants in her ashram, John Cage writing about Zen Buddhism, Rick Rubin and David Lynch promoting transcendental meditation, and the music manager Christian Clancy quoting from Jon Kabat-Zinn and Eckhart Tolle books. These were all little hints leading me on my path.

In my Zen practice, music hasn’t exactly played a huge role: With a few exceptions, I usually don’t listen to music when meditating. But as soon as I had embarked on my spiritual journey, I found myself interested in other music than before. In a way, I was looking for calm, quiet music to support my lifestyle, music that ‘created a space to think’, to quote Brian Eno. I was moving away from my focus on rhythm, melody and storytelling, shifting more towards an emphasis on texture, mood and ambience.

I remain deeply interested in the intersection of spirituality and art, exploring how certain artists’ work is informed by their spiritual journey, and how spiritual and artistic communities employ music in their rituals. These things feel very intertwined for me now, so I’d definitely say music and spirituality are quite connected for me.

Simon J. Iredale: As someone who has also gone on a spiritual path, what are your thoughts on how it should be brought into teaching at an early life?

That is such a hard question. While I sometimes wish I would have begun my spiritual path much earlier – I just started it in my early 30s –, I tend to believe in the Buddhist mantra that the teacher will appear when the student is ready. You know, the information is out there, especially in this day and age. It’s just a matter of finding it in the right moment and being mentally ready to engage with it.

I think it’s important to have people around you to safely guide you and light the way – so that when you’re ready, you already know where to go. Giving young people the opportunity to find out about different paths and encouraging them to explore their own way is definitely something I support, but it should happen voluntarily and without any force or pressure.

Oliver von Felbert: Do you distinguish between good zazen and bad zazen?

Is that a kōan? Are you testing me, Oliver? Just kidding.

I mean, I’m not an enlightened being, so I’d say yes, of course I do. Sometimes I sit zazen, and the storm in my head can’t be tamed, and the monkey mind wins over my ambition to focus on my breath. It doesn’t happen as frequently as earlier in my practice, but it still happens, and then I’d think to myself, ‘I was really bad at zazen today’, or ‘Gosh, that was a bad zazen session.’

On other days, I might fall into a state of blissful being after 30 seconds, remain completely mindful for the rest of the session and feel totally at rest and ease when I’m done with it – a ‘good’ zazen session.

What most of my teachers would tell me though is that there is no good or bad practice, there is just practice. Every zazen session will help us on ‘the way’ ultimately, whether we experience it as pleasant or unpleasant, as successful or ineffective in that very moment, should not be important at all, right? Then again, if every session was like that first one, I doubt the practice would have a positive effect on my life.

But what do I know, I’m just a lay student like you!

Justin Patrick Moore

: Since you are reading Paul Kingsnorth, what are your thoughts on such things as the collapse / decline of western civilization?

I definitely have some doomer and prepper tendencies. I was really into that whole peak oil and dark ecology movement that grew out of radical environmentalism. I was reading a lot of Kingsnorth, Jared Diamond, James Howard Kunstler, Dmitry Orlov and John Michael Greer at the time.

Ultimately I didn’t like where their collapsologist thoughts were taking some of these people on an ideological level – Kunstler for example turned into a full-on Trumpist, and while I share some of Kingsnorth’s views on ‘The Machine’ and find in him a kindred spirit in many ways, I am at odds with the increasingly conservative parts of his neo-luddite worldview, especially some of his ideas about family, gender and identity. To be clear, I am 100% pro trans rights, and in this newsletter, I’m trying to amplify LGBTQ* voices wherever I can.

I still think that Western civilization might have seen the best of it. There are two simple reasons – one is that the West is being eaten alive by what Kingsnorth calls ‘The Machine’, and the other one is climate change, which everyone seems to have forgotten about. Personally, I don’t see a way out of these threats, and they’re deeply connected as well. I chose not to have children, not just for that reason, but that is one of the best reasons.

I believe we’re heading towards what John Michael Greer called ‘the long descent’, a period of degrowth and destabilization through wars, weather catastrophes and migration movements, alternating with some calmer periods that create an illusion of momentary stability. This might last for a couple of decades, maybe even 100 or 150 years. Whether it will ultimately lead to the downfall of this civilization or not, we’d be well-advised to prepare for the mid-term consequences.

This sounds all very bleak, doesn’t it? People don’t enjoy talking about this. I think there’s no need to fall into apathy and depression though. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to do anything about it – of course not. I try to limit my ecological footprint where I can. I try to break free from ‘The Machine’. But the effect of our well-meaning individual actions might be limited, so we should start developing resilience and other valuable skills for the potentially difficult time ahead.

m12345: Has your passion for music stayed relatively consistent all of your adult life? Have there been extended periods where you have not listened to music at all, or have had no interest in the latest releases etc.?

It has stayed quite consistent, I must say, but there were a couple of instances when I didn’t listen to music for a few weeks or months. In my case, that’s usually a sign of a serious depressive episode. I have struggled with those throughout my adult life, but my meditation practice has helped me on that level as well.

So I never burned out on music in general, but on certain genres, especially when I’d made negative experiences immersing myself in a scene. For example, for the first decade of my career, I reported almost exclusively on hip-hop, and later I even managed a few rappers and ran a small indie rap label. At one point, I was done with the local rap scene, and I still don’t listen to any German rap at all. It wasn’t because of a singular event, more because of the cumulative stress working in that environment.

Max: Best Lloyd Banks album / mixtape?

Rotten Apple clearly remains his best album. In terms of mixtapes, I remember liking Cold Corner 2 and V6: The Gift, when he found his lane as an apologist of classic, gritty NYC street rap. I rated Banks as a rapper back in the days, but haven’t really followed his output in a long time. I have a close friend who’s a die-hard fan and will occasionally slip me a YT link though.

SJP: Can you recommend some Chinese electronic or experimental albums?

I’m not an expert, but I rate 33EMBYW. Her albums Golem and Arthropods are brilliant (and totally nuts, but in a good way, like Venetian Snares/Aphex Twin type nuts). I loved some of Hyph11e’s stuff, an experimental take on jungle and gqom straight out of Shanghai’s underground, and more recently, DaYe’s Road To Spring was one I listened to quite a lot – it’s a bit more on the ambient end but very distinctively Chinese in its mood and instrumentation.

If you want to go deeper here,

Jake

is your guy. He’s lived in China for years. I’ve discovered loads of amazing music through his Concrete Avalanche newsletter. As a starting point, I’d like to point you to his amazing playlist of Chinese ambient. My personal faves from that are Wang Fan’s Five Primary Elements and this unspeakable album, but there’s so much more to discover!

⌒．: What is your favourite colour?

Depends on context. I wear mostly black and earthtones. I like matte, washed/worn-out colours more than bright ones, at least for clothing. Like every true Boards of Canada fan, I love orange.

Petros Nikolaou: When that’s possible, do you tend to go to sleep at night while listening to music or is it something you avoid?

When I was younger, I couldn’t sleep without background noise. I’d have either music or the TV running. For a long time I even wore headphones in bed. But in the past decade, I’ve learned to enjoy sleeping in silence. I also suffer from sleep apnea, which is a condition that makes my sleep less restful in general. In recent times I’ve rediscovered the allure of falling asleep to quiet ambient or drone music on very low volume.

Sunny: Looking back at your childhood, what was your favorite fairy tale or folk story?

I grew up here in Germany, so the Brothers Grimm’s Fairy Tales were prevalent – we’d call them Märchen. I would devour Astrid Lindgren’s books like Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter and Pippi Longstocking. I’d move on to Greek and Nordic myths, and then Tolkien came into my life… but to answer your question, I think the one folk story I really gravitated to as a child, even though it scared me, was Rumplestiltskin.

Olaf Westfeld: Is there a daily ritual you follow (spiritual, eg)? What are 10 more ECM favourites? Will there be more dog content?

It changes with the seasons. I’ve described what my regular days in the summer months look like in a previous post. My current morning ritual is that I get up around 7, make coffee, and then the whole family – the wife, the doggie, me – goes into the garden to sit in the sun while waking up. I love that ritual and I will miss it in the winter, when we’re back in the city.

10 More ECM Favourites

1. Meredith Monk – Dolmen Music (1981)

2. Nils Petter Molvaer – Khmer (1997)

3. Bennie Maupin – The Jewel In The Lotus (1974)

4. Codona – Codona (1979)

5. Arvo Pärt – Alina (1999)

6. Eberhard Weber – Yellow Fields (1976)

7. Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin – Awase (2018)

8. John Abercrombie – Timeless (1975)

9. Tigran Hamasyan – Atmosphères (2016)

10. Wadada Leo Smith / Vijay Iyer – Defiant Life (2025)