No photos on the dancefloor.

Let others be free, without having to worry about how they might show up in other people’s pictures or videos. And let yourself be free; in the present moment, fully participating in what might make a night special, rather than being so busy trying to collect souvenirs that the night passes you by.

Lutz Leichsenring, co-founder of nightlife consultancy VibeLab and former spokesperson of Berlin’s Clubcommission, estimates that around 90% of the city’s venues enforce this no-photo rule. Break it, and you’ll get a warning. Some stricter venues even remove you immediately.

With this, another cultural dimension emerged: dancefloors are for dancing, and it’s generally not appreciated when you go stand still on the dancefloor to look at your phone for longer than a brief moment. A bit like looking at your phone in the cinema.

Berlin is a rare exception, and in many places, taking photos and videos during events has remained the norm, with a 2019 UK study finding that 70% of people find it annoying.

But something is shifting…

It’s no longer a Berlin thing. It’s going global.

London’s FOLD club has had the policy since it opened in 2018, with Fabric following in 2021. In Ibiza, Pikes introduced a blanket camera ban in August 2024, seven nights a week.

In New York, the shift has been especially visible: Nowadays has enforced a no-phones rule since 2015, and in 2025 alone, Signal, Refuge, and Green Room all opened with the policy built in from day one. For younger clubbers who have never known a dancefloor without phones, phone-free nights have become something to actively seek out. “It’s healthy, especially for my age group,” said one 25-year-old at her first phone-free party, in a NYT piece on the trend in late 2025.

I’m a millennial. I remember what life was like before smartphones. Before being always on. And I’ve been experimenting to reconnect with that feeling. My phone-free month. My no-news March. Ditching streaming.

But when I talk with younger people, who haven’t experienced the world that way, I often get a sense that it can seem unimaginable to them. Just as I once found it hard to imagine life without a TV.

What gives me hope is that there is now a generation that doesn’t remember what it was like before. They are pioneering digital fasts. In nightclubs, but also outside them, in cafes, nature walks, and even on retreats. Organisations like The Offline Club are a great example of that trend.

It’s great that millennials are saying, “Hold up, maybe we’ve gone a bit too far with all this”, but nostalgia isn’t what will get us out of this mess. A younger generation that has no recollection of what once was, but instead envisions how things might be, taking the status quo as a starting point. That’s inspiring.

No phones on the ____floor.

Let’s fill in the gaps together.

༺𓆩 Don’t miss 𓆪༻‏

I built a free browser extension that turns your distractions into forests and cleaner oceans. I’m not joking!

Imagine the impact we can have together.

ᕱᕱ For your ears ᕱᕱ

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, dub maestro Adrian Sherwood gave his own spin to Nightmares On Wax’s In A Space Outta Sound album. An incredibly smooth record.

For whatever reason, they never really stuck with me as a motivational tool.

Not for lack of aspiration or ambition.

It’s just that I don’t find goals interesting in my personal life.

Instead of setting goals, I’ve always picked directions to move into. It would leave more to the imagination.

I saw it like this:

• Goal-orientation: narrow-focus, must tick off the boxes and avoid distractions.

• Direction-orientation: broader focus, so if opportunities emerge and they move me in the same direction, I can make use of them.

Maybe it’s semantics, or just mental models for the same thing. I’m not an expert.

But at the start of the year, I decided to do something different.

I set goals. Extremely specific goals.

Personal OKRs

I’ve been working with OKR goal-setting frameworks for close to a decade in startups, usually with cross-functional teams.1

You first define an Objective (O): a broad directional goal you want to achieve.

Then you set Key Results (KRs): results you can break down into numbers to track whether you’re reaching your objective.

For example, if you’re a calm & fluffy cloud, your objective might be that you want to float up in the sky. To achieve that, you want to reduce your liquid water content by 30%. That’s a key result.

At regular intervals, you check in on your key results to gauge how you’re moving towards your objective. If the needle isn’t moving, this confronts you with the need to change your approach. What can I be doing better? What needs reprioritisation?

It means you have regular moments when you make deliberate choices about what you will do and won’t do, rather than trying to do it all.

If you want to dive in deeper, Google re:Work offers an excellent resource.

While I was used to running these with teams and even on an individual level as a professional inside an organisation, I had never set truly personal OKRs.

At the start of January this year, that changed.

The Megaprompt

Earlier this year, I reconnected with James McAulay over our shared passions for music, creativity, transformation, and new technology. He's been running his own personal OKR framework for years, using it to lead his company and to train for Ironmans and marathons. Recently, he turned it into a megaprompt.

I set up a new project in my preferred AI assistant and tried out the prompt.

It immediately ran me through a goal-setting exercise, but, more importantly, it forced me to figure out SYSTEMS to work towards those goals.

Specifically, I wanted to see if I could improve my execution consistency. I’ve always worked in bursts of output, often preceded and followed by periods of lower output and more reflection, introspection, and often procrastination. Could I balance this better?

The year had started with a mission.

I wanted to take bigger career risks. To invest in new directions and fields where I don’t yet have a reputation or network. That meant reducing costs, excess & distractions and building as much stability & growth into my daily life as possible. I set four objectives for the quarter. I’ll share two.

My first objective was to have a clear understanding, by the end of the quarter, of what that was going to look like. For now, that means bigger freelance projects that challenge me, mixed with a part-time job that allows me to share my passion for Berlin’s history with visitors, because after 20 years, I’m bored of being on my laptop or in offices all day.

My second objective was the system that needed to be developed to get me there:

Objective 2 — Build a focus system that survives bad days (keystone)

• KR1: Implement a daily checkout → check-in loop

  • Checkout: clear browser, decide tomorrow’s top 1–3 (≥4 days/week)

  • Check-in: open laptop, journal, review priorities and start first Pomodoro before checking news, socials, email, etc.

• KR2: Use a fixed focus method (Pomodoro) for ≥2 cycles/day, tracked.

• KR3: No system switching for 90 days (one journal + one task board).

Pomodoro is a method in which you set a 25-minute timer for focused work, then take a 5-minute break. This forces you to break down your to-do list into manageable chunks of work.

I don’t always prefer that approach, but it is a good way to get me started in the day. It also prevents getting overwhelmed by things that are new to me.

One of the interviews I published recently ran quite long and touched on many things I felt were better left out of scope. One day, a to-do list item said: “transcribe and finish first draft”. Overwhelming. I put it off until the next day.

The next day, I changed the goal to: run 3 Pomodoros on this interview. For something that is relatively new to me (transcribing & editing interviews for this newsletter), that made the day much more predictable and manageable. I would also learn how far I can actually get with 75 minutes of focused work.

I ultimately spent about 10 Pomodoro cycles on it that day.

At the end of the quarter, I scored about 80% across my four objectives.

Good for a first run.

• I finally launched Calm & Fluffy’s interview series (more on the way)

• Built two apps and launched one

• Lined up new freelance clients

But the more interesting wins were the side effects. It took some work, but I’ve properly transitioned away from music streaming and now rely on an owned collection. Something I'd been trying to establish for years finally stuck: daily meditation. And when I noticed poor sleep quality, really unusual for me, I addressed it with surprising ease by breaking a habit: no more coffee after noon.

If you want to try it yourself, James’ personal OKR megaprompt is worth running at the start of your next quarter. But you don’t need to use AI, the framework works on its own (read the AI-free explainer here).

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ᕱᕱ For your ears ᕱᕱ

It’s been over a month since I last shared music with you. Here are some of the albums I’ve been listening to.

As soon as I heard the ambient jazz album Seeing Is Forgetting by Elori Saxl & Henry Solomon, I knew exactly when and how I wanted to listen to it again: on a warm, late evening, while cycling through the city. A week later, after a group meditation, I had the chance. It was wonderful. (discovered via the warmly recommended newsletter)

Another album I’ve enjoyed is this compilation of four decades recordings by the Kenyan artist Joseph Kamuru, spanning from high-life to afro funk and much more.

I’ve also been entranced by Max Eilbacher’s structural composition 7 Runs, an experimental work that asks the questions: Is descending a ladder to nowhere the same as sitting? Are 7 pulses equally partitioned through time, no longer a discrete measure of time?

Lastly, and most recently, I’ve been listening to this work composed by Gregorio Allegri in the 1630s, intended to be sung in the Sistine Chapel during Holy Week liturgy. The story goes that the piece was so secretive that no written copies of it existed outside of the Vatican and a few trusted places. One day, a fourteen-year old Mozart heard the piece and ended up transcribing it from memory.

Rather than being appalled and punishing Mozart for it, Pope Clement XIV summoned Mozart back to Rome and awarded him a distinction: a knighthood. Awarded for musical piracy, to a teenager, by the institution he’d technically wronged.

Miserere Mei, Deus, a beautiful piece of choral music, in this recording performed by the Choir of New College, Oxford, under Edward Higginbottom.

This one is a little different. I'm so glad you're here for it.

Today, I'm launching a browser extension that turns your distractions into trees planted and plastic removed from the ocean.

Together, our moments of distraction can contribute to a better planet.

It’s free and it’s called Mindful Block.

Keep reading to find out:

• What Mindful Block is and how it works;

• The personal story about why I built it;

• How you can help it have impact.

Mindful Block turns distracted browsing into something good. Blocked sites redirect to Ecosia and OceanHero, search engines that plant trees and clean the ocean.

Most site blockers just say no. Mindful Block says: go here instead.

Every time you try to visit a site you’re trying to avoid, you get redirected to a search on Ecosia or OceanHero. Those searches plant trees and remove plastic from the ocean. Your distraction becomes a small act of good.

Works on Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers like Brave, Edge, Opera, and Vivaldi.

Get the extension

How it works

• Add the sites that distract you to your block list

• When you visit one, Mindful Block redirects you to a mindful search on Ecosia or OceanHero

• The search query is drawn from your own list of Search ideas — things you actually want to explore

• You can customise both lists at any time

Features

• Calm Guard — the main on/off toggle for redirects, pauseable with one click

• Right-click the extension icon to pause or resume without opening the popup

• Ecosia and OceanHero both enabled by default — use one or both

• Optional image search mode

Get the free browser extension

Disclaimer

This extension has no affiliation with Ecosia or OceanHero. It simply redirects to their public search pages.

Feedback, support, and questions

Send me an email at mindfulblock@calmfluffy.cloud

<3

How my one-month no-news challenge led to this

This winter, I’ve been feeling inspired by a radio program on Dutch public radio called Vroege Vogels (Early Birds). The 3-hour radio program is broadcast early every Sunday morning and has reporters explore nature in The Netherlands, mixing field reports and listener call-ins with columns, classical music, and lots of nature sounds.

After a few weeks of going for walks in my local park, listening to the radio program in one ear and birdsong in the other, the warmer weather made me decide to deepen my commitment.

So, over the past month, I’ve gotten up early on Saturday morning and cycled to Berlin’s Grunewald forest, finding a bench with a table where I like to meditate, read, draw, listen to birds, take in a new or familiar ambient music release, and maybe journal.

It’s wonderful. The first time out there this season, I saw migrating crane birds, ravens, butterflies, and trees older than my great-grandparents.

On February 28, I decided to cycle through to where the forest meets the water. On a hill overlooking the lake, a centuries-old oak stands with a bench facing it.

I sat down to admire the tree and all the life it sustains: moss, insects, birds, and other plants.

After a moment, I reached for my phone and checked the news.

Bombs. War. Geopolitical conflict. It was the first day of attacks on Iran.

My heart broke. Anxiety arose. My focus shattered.

Two thoughts appeared almost simultaneously:

1. Why did I need to bring that into this moment? Was that really the best moment to fill my mind with ‘the news’?

2. How had I, a compulsive news checker, actually managed to make it to the early afternoon without being aware of the latest crisis?

I put my phone away and made a decision right there on that bench, with the gnarled oak as my witness: this month, I will not read the news.

I have taken breaks in the past. My thinking was always this:

I can only live each moment once. I need mental presence to make the most of it. Being in a state of distraction will not help. If something truly important happens, the news will reach me.

The privilege I have is that I do not need to fill my mind with the details of a war. In fact, having a clear mind would aid my ability to effectively oppose wars and have a positive impact on the planet and the beings that inhabit it.

I’ve been reading the news daily for 20+ years, with a short gap here and there. It started with newspapers, then websites on my computer, and eventually mostly on my phone. On some days, I check more than ten times.

So I kicked off the experiment.

One month, no news. Or rather, not mindlessly visiting news websites.1

That evening, I met a friend to go see some jazz. Later, on our way home, she remarked on Khamenei’s death. I hadn’t heard yet. The important news had found its way to me. A few minutes later, we cycled past a big crowd of people waving Iranian flags, celebrating.

The next day, I blocked my favourite news websites on my phone. And as I was figuring out how to do the same on my laptop, a thought struck me:

If I believe managing my focus can benefit the world, can I make it even more beneficial?

I started brainstorming how to direct distractions towards better options and, in the end, landed on Ecosia and OceanHero, which dedicate their profits to improving the planet. In recent years, OceanHero has typically prevented around 1 to 1.5 million ocean-bound plastic bottles from reaching the seas every month. And Ecosia finances the planting of 1-3 million trees each month, as well as funding other climate impact projects.

To fund these initiatives, search engines serve ads within search results. So when the extension blocks a distraction, it redirects to a search result page for maximum impact. Which led me to another challenge: what would be good, meaningful search results?

So I made a list of 100 search ideas centred on curiosity, well-being, and the world around you. Some examples from the extension’s search ideas list:

• simple breathing techniques for stress

• how to reduce food waste at home

• tiny habits for personal growth

• how to plant native species garden

• science of deep breathing

Here’s how it works:

And it has worked well for me over the past weeks, so I’m excited to see and hear how it works on a larger scale.

Imagine the impact we can have together.

Making the most of it

If you use ad-blockers like Ghostery or uBlock, please consider disabling them on Ecosia and OceanHero. This way, your searches contribute more directly to these organisations’ goals.

You can create accounts on Ecosia and OceanHero to track your personal impact. Since using the extension over the past weeks, my estimated impact is:

• 2 trees planted

• 760 Wh of energy generated

• 1 hour of tree planting efforts

• 11 recovered plastic bottles

You can customise the extension to best fit your intentions. Remove searches that are not helpful to you. Block sites that distract you (note: news sites are not in the default block list). Add new searches that inspire you.

Get the extension

Imagine the impact we can have together

Here’s how you can help.

You can spread the word by sharing the extension with your friends.

Link them to either:

• The Mindful Block landing page: https://mindfulblock.calmfluffy.cloud/

• Mindful Block in the Chrome Web Store (link)

You can also share this post if you think they’re interested in the backstory.

Leaving a 5-star review helps the extension stand out in the Chrome Web Store. If it’s not worth 5 stars in your view, I’d love to hear why. Drop me a message or leave a comment.

More is coming. To celebrate the 100-install milestone, I want to run a small brainstorm to generate more inspiring search ideas for new users. If you're not already following this newsletter, now is a good time.

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Stay Calm & Fluffy.

Lots of love,

Bas

James is the founder of BetterTech, a publication on the impact of tech and a digital responsibility consulting firm. In this interview, we talk about:

• The “all your base are belong to us” mindset behind big AI

• Why so many people knowingly share sensitive data with chatbots

• When using AI is like swatting a fly with a bazooka

• How not to turn chatbots into doctors, therapists, or friends

• What an “AI pescatarian” way of using technology looks like

When people say “AI is unethical” in that very black‑and‑white way, what are they usually referring to? And what might they be getting wrong?

“AI is unethical” is a huge claim. I’ve been working on this while creating my Responsible AI training, where I try to break that statement down into concrete risks, such as:

• lack of transparency,

• inaccuracy and hallucination,

• bias,

• social and environmental impacts,

• and security risks.

Most of these problems cluster around what I call “big AI”, companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and the big US tech platforms like Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. They behave as if our data belongs to them.

It’s like that old meme, “all your base are belong to us.” It’s literally that mindset applied to data.

The core ethical problem is this belief that they’re entitled to take:

• all of humanity’s music, video, and written content,

• plus everything we type into their systems,

and use it to train future models, usually by default, even on paid plans. You can opt out, but you have to go and find that setting, and most people never do.

They justify it by leaning on the grey area between fair use and reproduction: “We’re just learning from the data, not copying it.” The end result will only be quotes, and that’s fair use. But research has shown that at least one Claude model can reproduce the first Harry Potter book almost word‑for‑word. That’s not quoting anymore; that’s effectively reproducing the text, which directly contravenes US copyright law.

You see the same mindset in specific behaviour. For example, when OpenAI were building GPT‑4, their president Greg Brockman reportedly told the team to go onto YouTube, grab over a million hours of video, transcribe it with their Whisper system, and use that to train the next model.

People inside apparently said, “Doesn’t YouTube’s terms of service forbid that? Won’t Google sue us?” And the response was basically, “Do it anyway.”

Google didn’t sue, because they were doing something very similar themselves at the time to train Gemini. So you get this “two wrongs make a right” situation: everyone knows they’re in a grey zone, but no one wants to throw the first stone because they’re all doing versions of the same thing.

Anthropic is another example. Once they’d hoovered up most of the internet, the usual sources like web pages, YouTube, Reddit, they turned to books as a relatively untapped source of high‑quality data. The approach was what’s been called “destructive scanning”: you literally take physical books, tear out each page to scan it, and ingest it as training data. The books are destroyed in the process.

They’ve since settled a court case related to pirated copies of books and agreed to pay around $1.5 billion to hundreds of thousands of authors. The authors were thrilled; Anthropic can easily see it as a very affordable price for access to that many books. If both sides consider this a win, nothing will change.

So when people say “AI is unethical,” they’re often pointing to exactly this kind of thing: giant companies taking whatever data they can get away with, stretching or ignoring terms of service and copyright, and assuming that as long as they move fast enough, the legal and ethical questions will lag behind.

What worries me just as much is our behaviour as users. A Cisco survey found that nearly 30% of AI users have already given health or banking data to an LLM. People know there are privacy and security risks, but they still feed in highly sensitive information. That contradiction, seeing the problem and still participating in it, is a big part of why this all feels so ethically messy.

At least some part of that 30% will be people who are actually aware of ethics, security, and privacy problems, and still do it because the tools are so useful. How do you look at those trade‑offs?

I’m less interested in saying “you should” or “you shouldn’t,” and more in understanding what’s actually happening.

This technology is very new. People are still figuring out what it is and how to relate to it. But it has a lot in common with previous tech shifts: Amazon, Uber, and so on. These tools are incredibly handy. If something saves you time or effort, like writing, research, or admin work, many people will accept some level of risk, even if they know it’s not ideal.

I don’t think that’s irrational. It’s just not always informed.

What’s the most common misunderstanding you see?

One worrying example is how people are using these tools for health and mental health. Some people paste their medical reports into ChatGPT: “The doctor said this. What does it mean? What should I do?” That’s extremely sensitive data, and then they treat the answer as if it were a doctor’s advice.

The core misunderstanding is that many people think an LLM works like a search engine: it goes off, finds the right answer in a database, and brings it back. That’s not what’s happening. It’s generating text word by word based on probabilities.

Because that’s invisible, people assume it’s telling the truth. In reality, it often hallucinates – and will give you different answers if you ask the same question again.

So one of the simplest ethical pieces of advice I can give is: do not treat these systems as doctors or therapists or oracles. They are predictive text engines with no understanding of harm, duty of care, or context.

How much responsibility do you think sits with the individual user?

This is where regulation is interesting. If you look at the EU AI Act – which is often described as the most advanced AI law in the world – individual users are given essentially no responsibility.

The law focuses on:

• providers,

• deployers,

• importers,

and a few other categories. It’s about companies and organisations, not people at home on their phones. Even employees are only partially covered, and more through their employer’s obligations than their own.

So under that framework, someone using ChatGPT at home has no formal responsibility. You could argue about whether that’s right or wrong, but legally, that’s where we are.

For companies, this has big implications. If your staff, as users, have no legal responsibility, then you need internal rules and governance. The Samsung case is a good example: In 2023, a Samsung employee uploaded confidential code to ChatGPT. Management were furious, and temporarily banned usage of the chatbot, including threats of potential employment termination for contraventions. When they allowed it again, it was with very strict conditions, underlining the fact that those rules should have been there in the first place.

So in a corporate context, if the law doesn’t put responsibility on users, companies have to.

So what should everyday users feel responsible for? Is this like the environmental footprint question – how much is really on the individual?

It’s very similar.

When I talk about this, I try not to guilt people, because it’s not their fault that large language models are so impactful. These tools were dropped into people’s laps, often for free.

The bigger issue is structural: data centres, hardware, software – the three pillars of green IT – and the way generative AI uses GPUs instead of CPUs. GPUs are far more energy‑intensive, and they were originally designed for video games, not AI. So we’ve essentially hacked gaming hardware into a global AI infrastructure.

Because of this, generative AI is much more impactful than any IT product we’ve used before.

So I encourage people to ask a few simple questions:

• Do I really need AI for this? The number one use of LLMs right now is replacing a web search. Instead of looking something up, people ask the model. Do you really need a giant model to find a pancake recipe?

• Is there a simpler alternative? Can you use a normal search, a dictionary, your own knowledge?

I sometimes use the image of using a bazooka to swat a fly. If you use a huge model for something trivial, the impact-to-benefit ratio is way off. And most people have no idea that’s what they’re doing.

On top of that, the big AI companies are not transparent about their impacts. They might say “one prompt uses this much water,” but they don’t give enough information to properly assess the full footprint. It’s a classic pattern: the more you hide, the more people suspect you’ve got something to hide.

Technically, it’s also very inefficient. Some estimates suggest big labs are only using about 20–30% of each GPU’s compute capacity. The rest is wasted. There’s a white paper arguing that if we could push that to around 60% and keep GPUs in service for three years instead of one, we’d only need about half the GPUs we’re currently building data centres around.

So for individuals, I’d say:

• Don’t feel personally responsible for fixing all this.

• But do be thoughtful about when you use AI, what for, and which tools you choose.

• And remember that smaller, more focused models often exist and are far less impactful than the giant ones… and they’re often open source, so free!

We’ve covered a lot of the dark side. What’s there to be optimistic about? What, if anything, excites you about this technology?

I am optimistic, but not about the current “bigger is always better” race.

Cory Doctorow wrote a piece where he said he’s looking forward to the AI bubble bursting. I agree. When the hype calms down, we’ll be left with the things that are genuinely useful:

• smaller, more specialised models,

• tools that can run locally on your phone or laptop,

• systems that don’t always need the cloud,

• and AI that is right‑sized to the problem.

A lot of the most useful AI for the planet isn’t generative at all, it’s predictive: forecasting storms, optimising energy grids, reducing waste in data centres. One example I love is a project that puts small, solar‑powered sensor boxes in rainforest trees. A tiny algorithm listens for the sound of chainsaws and alerts the authorities to illegal logging. That’s AI used well.

So I’m not anti‑AI. I’m against huge, opaque, resource‑hungry systems being used for everything. I’m very much in favour of smaller, pragmatic systems that solve real problems, ideally running on renewable energy.

Last question: what do you make of people who try to “opt out” of AI? Is that a meaningful stance?

I get asked if I’m an “AI vegan”, someone who refuses to use it at all. I usually say I’m more of an AI pescatarian.

I try to:

• use my own brain first;

• only use AI when it genuinely helps;

• and when I do, choose smaller, more efficient models wherever possible.

There are already tools out there that try to be “green ChatGPTs”: leaner, more transparent, built with impact in mind.

Completely opting out is getting harder, because AI is being baked into everything. You see “Use AI” buttons everywhere. But you can still:

• resist using it by default,

• avoid feeding it sensitive or other people’s data,

• choose smaller tools over giant ones,

• and never treat it as a doctor, therapist, or source of truth.

For me, that’s what using AI more ethically looks like at an individual level.

• James Martin on LinkedIn

• James’ BetterTech Blog

• James’ Responsible AI & Frugal AI training courses

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The era of recorded music had made listening to music a rather static experience. A recording is the same every time you listen to it. That is a relatively new quality of music. Maybe, looking back from the future, a historical anomaly. I tried to get labels on board to make music less static (they weren’t having any of it), and started giving talks about this topic. I wrote an article (translated into Russian) to promote one of these talks, titled Why Music is about to Change Radically.

As a result, I was introduced to Oleg Stavitsky, and when we met, we discovered we shared similar visions for the future of music. Oleg would go on to co-found and become CEO of Endel, an app that creates adaptive soundscapes to aid your well-being. But that day, he showed me a children’s app he had built with his team. It combined playful discovery, drawing, and music. It blew me away.

I really admire the work the Endel team has done. Few other companies have been able to reenvision our relationship with music and sound through technology quite like they have. So I reconnected with Oleg, now a fellow Berliner, to catch up.

Throughout the interview, I learned about:

• Why Oleg can’t listen to his own product

• The physicist whose obscure book changed the direction of Endel

• How people use Endel in unanticipated, sometimes baffling, ways

• The Russian concept of “hedgehog mittens”

• Why the team launched a label, called Sources, to release music with artists

And to kick it off, a thought starter by producer and ambient music pioneer Brian Eno, in 1996 (emphasis added):

“Until 100 years ago, every musical event was unique: music was ephemeral and unrepeatable and even classical scoring couldn’t guarantee precise duplication. Then came the gramophone record, which captured particular performances and made it possible to hear them identically over and over again. […] I think it’s possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: “You mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?””

Published in collaboration with MUSIC x — a newsletter about innovation and music’s future, which I founded 10 years ago. Now led by Maarten Walraven.

When was the last time you heard something that genuinely surprised you, a sound or a piece of music?

Not too long ago. I expose myself to a lot of music, often music I may not necessarily like. I just listen to a lot of weird stuff.

I think that’s part of the discipline for me: to stay very open to all kinds of things. That’s really what made me who I am, and I continue almost deliberately exposing myself to things I know I might not like, but I’m curious about.

The most interesting things come when you connect dots between things, when you see connections that others don’t. That requires exposing yourself to a lot of material, often weird, not very interesting, or just flat‑out bad. But it’s something I do intentionally.

Has your relationship to listening and hearing changed since you started your Endel journey?

Definitely, yes. First of all, I can’t listen to Endel myself. The reason is that I pay too much attention to it. Because I’m the creator, I listen to the soundscape, and I’m searching for mistakes or bugs or anything that feels off.

I pay a lot of attention to what I’m hearing everywhere. It’s both good and bad. I’m a very attentive listener, but at the same time I know a lot of musicians who can’t listen to music anymore because it just falls apart for them. They don’t hear “music,” they hear the moving parts: the individual components, the mix, the bass line. I’m not quite at that level, but especially with ambient music I probably pay too much attention to the details.

Which is kind of weird, because Endel is not designed for conscious listening. It’s actually the opposite.

Another side effect of working on Endel is that everything is a soundscape now. You sit in a café and overhear people talking, cups clinking, everything. It all sounds like a soundscape to me. It’s a bit of a psychedelic feeling to have. Not always a good soundscape, but still, everything sounds like one.

How has Endel, and the vision for Endel, changed over time? And how have you changed over the years?

The core idea from the very beginning was: can we create a soundscape that is scientifically engineered to put you in a certain cognitive state? The three main cognitive states we defined early on were concentration, sleep, and relaxation.

As we started digging into the neuroscience of how sound affects your psyche and your emotional and physical state, we quickly realised it would have to be adaptive and personalised. That’s where the technology aspect of Endel comes from, it comes from neuroscience.

We didn’t start with, “Let’s build a generative ambient machine.” We started from observing a behaviour: people were using sound as a wellness tool, as a function.

I noticed that back in 2016 in my own behaviour. I realised I was playing specific music or records just to get into a certain cognitive state, not because I particularly liked them, but because they did something to me. I noticed other people doing the same thing. Suddenly there were all these “music for this, music for that” playlists and videos and mixes popping up.

But a lot of it was just someone throwing together a mix and saying, “You should sleep to this,” without any science behind it. So we started digging into the science. That’s when we realised it would have to be personalised and adaptive, and that we’d have to build this technology.

We’ve stayed true to that. It’s not designed for conscious listening. We don’t even call it music. We call it functional sound, or functional audio. It’s designed to put you in a certain cognitive state, and we’ve been diligently putting out content designed for that.

The way it’s expanded is that we realised it’s not enough to present people with a catalog of soundscapes and say, “Here are all the soundscapes; go figure out how to weave them into your life.” Especially for people who are not familiar with the concept, they don’t know what to do with it.

So now we’ve started designing features around the soundscapes to help people build routines, to introduce sound into their lives in a more guided way. That’s what’s changed.

How did the neuroscience find its way to you? How did you actually approach that research?

Back in 2016–2017, when we started thinking about this, there wasn’t a lot of research around sound and sleep. And what we did find was pretty shallow: “Mozart relaxes you, AC/DC energises you,” that kind of thing. We were like, “Okay, but how?”

There are a few fundamental books, like This Is Your Brain on Music, that talk about this, but beyond that, hardly anyone was studying what happens in your brain on a second‑by‑second basis as you listen to certain sounds, and how specific scales and frequencies affect your psycho‑emotional and physical state.

We just read everything we could find. We found this book online called The Physics and Anatomy of Music by a Russian physicist. It was a very small print run. He was living somewhere in Europe at the time, but his wife was still at their house on the outskirts of Moscow, and she had some copies. I went there, bought all the remaining books, maybe ten, and brought them back to Berlin. We read the book and started talking to him.

He was actually the one who told us, “You can’t just create a recording. It needs to be adaptive.” That’s when we thought, “Oh, this is interesting. So we’re going to have to build this generative sound technology.”

The first time we met, many years ago, you showed me BUBL. The way I remember it, it was like a digital toy with interactive elements, where sound was a really important aspect. How is that connected to Endel?

There was a clear path. I remember when my first child was born and the first iPad came out. I was in LA at the time. I bought the iPad, unpacked it, opened the App Store. There were very few apps there, and one of the featured apps was Brian Eno’s Bloom.

I bought and downloaded it and was completely blown away by how elegant, simple, and mesmerising it was. Then I went back to Europe, gave the iPad to my daughter, and just watched her play.

It was fascinating. You just tap on the screen; there are no instructions, no defined gameplay. Whatever you do creates a soundscape that slowly fades away and makes space for something new. You can fiddle with settings to change the logic behind it. It’s essentially a generative soundscape that you create.

I thought, “This is cool.” My daughter is just tapping away, and I’m listening to Brian Eno. It looks great, something I’d love my child to interact with. Then I started looking at apps designed specifically for children and babies. There were very few that were really well‑designed, the kind of thing you’d want to show your kids.

That’s how the idea for BUBL was born. Our pitch was: interactive digital art for kids. These apps would be designed to teach children the correlation between colour, form, and sound.

One of the more successful apps was BUBL Draw, where you could literally draw with sound. You’d pick a colour, pick a theme, and depending on which form you drew, you’d create this Steve Reich‑like minimalist soundscape.

We had to build a lot of generative sound technology just to make that work. And when my co‑founders and I were designing BUBL (it’s the same group of co‑founders as Endel), we always said sound was going to be a very important aspect. In every app we released, sound was part of the gameplay. Your actions would generate a melody or a soundscape, and the sound would react in real time.

Dmitry Evgrafov, who is now the Chief Music Officer at Endel, was also the Chief Music Officer at BUBL. He did all the sound design and music production for those apps. So moving from BUBL to Endel was a very natural transition.

When you hear stories about how people use Endel in their lives, does any of it change how you think about your own work or habits?

Less personally, and more about human behaviour. Two things stand out.

First, people listen to Endel in all kinds of crazy situations. I’ve heard from multiple people that they gave birth while listening to Endel. We don’t have a soundscape specifically for that, but people say, “I played Endel for eight hours straight while giving birth.” That’s wild.

Second, the way people use Endel can be very different from how we designed it. Some people say, “I work a lot while listening to the Sleep or Relax soundscapes,” and I think, “What are you doing? It’s not designed for that!” But that’s what works for them.

Even though science says, for example, that to concentrate better you need a steady beat, and I firmly believe that, and the science supports it, many people just play white noise while they work, or they use our sleep soundscapes for that. It’s wild to me, but it’s real.

So you have this creator ego that says, “No, this is how you’re supposed to use it,” and then real life happens and people use it in all these interesting ways, often against what you envisioned. That’s life.

Is there something unexpected you’ve learned about yourself through this work?

Not so much about myself, but about letting go. You realise that once you put a product out into the world, you’re not in control anymore. You can’t force people to use it in the way you envisioned or think is “best.”

People are going to use it in weird and, from your perspective, incorrect ways, and you just have to be comfortable with that. Whatever you do, people will still do what they do.

What’s a common piece of advice or trope around wellness, productivity, or stress management where you disagree or have a different take?

There are a lot of conflicting views in wellness. One school says: listen to yourself, be attentive and gentle, follow your natural ebb and flow of energy. The other says: no, you need a rigid system and discipline, strong routines you stick to no matter what.

I’m definitely more in the first camp, even though I do believe routines help, and certain “ceremonies” around you can be useful.

In Russian there’s this expression that literally translates to “mittens made of hedgehog”. The idea is that you have to “hold” yourself very tightly, almost painfully, to keep yourself in check. There’s a lot of that mentality in wellness and fitness, and I don’t really believe in it.

At the same time, I do believe in sometimes pushing yourself, setting boundaries. You can’t be too “slimy,” for lack of a better word.

I also don’t think the two things are mutually exclusive: discipline and gentleness. I think you need to learn your own system and rhythm, and from there, things can click into place with more ease instead of force. But some people have very different personalities and might benefit more from a kind of ‘military’ approach.

Well, also, it’s the society we live in. Especially here in Germany, life follows a very rigid structure. The flow of life is extremely structured.

You don’t have kids, but I do, and that imposes even more structure because of the school holiday system. At the beginning of each year they publish the school holidays for each region, and every parent in Germany opens their laptop and books flights for the entire year.

You almost can’t afford to be spontaneous, especially with children and family. The most expensive thing in Germany is continuity. If you want to counter that rigidity, the only real alternative is to have a huge amount of money.

You recently launched Sources, an ambient label. Kind of a sister project to Endel perhaps. How did that come about, and what’s the vision?

It was a really interesting path to Sources.

Every day, hundreds of millions of people open DSPs like Spotify or Apple Music and search for “music for meditation,” “music for concentration,” “music for sleep.” The most consumed playlists on any DSP are functional playlists.

We thought, “We have to be there somehow. People need to learn about us.”

[Editor’s note: Throughout this section, you’ll see references to ‘DSPs’. This stands for Digital Service Provider, and is a common term in the music industry. In this interview, mentions of DSPs refer to music streaming services.]

That got us into this rabbit hole of what “wellness music” on streaming platforms actually is. We realised that many of the editorial playlists — those controlled by the DSPs — are filled with music created by ghost artists and ghost producers. It’s not necessarily AI-generated, despite that narrative. It’s made by people, but it follows a very specific formula that DSPs believe sleep music or concentration music is supposed to sound like.

We tried to get into that game. But being who we are, we said: we actually know from a neuroscientific perspective how sleep music is supposed to sound. So we’d hand them a sleep release from Endel, and it was almost completely incompatible with those editorial playlists, both creatively and sonically. The work we did with artists like James Blake and 6LACK was also too different stylistically. It just wouldn’t fit.

So we started looking for ways to build our own playlists, or at least show the DSPs there’s a different approach. That’s why we started publishing Endel’s music on streaming platforms. Then the broader narrative shifted: everyone became aware of the ghost artist problem, and there was a big pushback. There’s a big push for authenticity and for something real, that is created by real humans.

We also heard directly from wellness editors at DSPs that they’d prefer to playlist functional music made by real artists, not anonymous brands or ghostwriters. And because we have good relationships in the music industry, some editors asked if we could curate interesting artists and commission wellness music from them.

That’s how Sources was born. We said, “Let’s go and find amazing voices in the ambient space and co-create wellness music with them.” Music designed to live on those playlists, but still with the intentionality and authenticity of music created by real people.

And we would remove ourselves from the equation. We are not gonna hide the fact that we’re doing this, but we’re not gonna put Endel on each and every release. Actually, we would highlight the artist; we would make it about the artist, not about us.

We’ve released a few EPs already, and more music is coming out every month.

Have you ever received noteworthy advice about listening or is there advice about listening that you find yourself giving others?

It’s obviously not a secret that I’m a big fan of Brian Eno and all of his ideas about music that should be listened to at a barely audible level. Music that tends the environment, music that has its own life almost. I just find it fascinating and I’ve read all of Brian Eno’s books. I’ve been to his lectures, I’ve watched him speak about this.

I just find this idea extremely interesting. A composer creating a kind of framework and throwing components in, and then taking a kind of hands-off approach. And the listener being almost a co-creator of this piece. That has influenced everything that I’m doing from BUBL to, definitely, Endel.

In BUBL it was more of an active participation. Like, the children would draw, or pick up certain objects and they would contribute to the soundscape. In Endel, it’s more of a passive participation, just by listening to it and by providing your biometric data, you influence the output.

The idea is that music is a living, breathing organism that follows you everywhere. It’s almost like this external bodily function. I just find it extremely fascinating, and I’m endlessly inspired by that.

• Endel homepage

• Sources homepage

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But music can have a more medical purpose, too.

Last year, I saw Kate Berkita speak about music therapy for people living with Parkinson’s disease on a panel at the Music Frontiers conference in Berlin. Her deeply personal connection to the disease prompted her to draw on her backgrounds in music production and product management to co-found Parkinsonic, an app that delivers music therapy for Parkinson’s patients at home.

Throughout the interview, I learned about:

• Why acceptance is one of the hardest parts of living with Parkinson’s

• How music increases dopamine, and why that matters for Parkinson’s patients

• The difference between music therapy and music as entertainment

• How biomarkers like tremor and voice can be translated into personalised music therapy

• What’s missing from the current Parkinson’s care pathway, especially at home

Published in collaboration with MUSIC x — a newsletter about innovation and music’s future, which I founded 10 years ago. Now stewarded by Maarten Walraven.

What was the moment you felt: “I need to do something about Parkinson’s”?

The story behind Parkinsonic started more than six years ago, when my mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. At that time, I didn’t know anything about Parkinson’s disease at all.

What we first noticed was tremor and shaking in her hands. It turned out she was already in the second stage of the disease. We somehow missed the first stage and the first symptoms, and she herself also didn’t understand what was happening.

About four and a half years ago, I moved to Germany, and for a long time, I only saw her via WhatsApp video calls. I saw how fast the disease was progressing. I could see her hands shaking more, her facial expression changing. I thought, whoa, this is something really hard to see, even on video, because I saw how the hands were shaking, how her face changed.

But I didn’t see her environment, and I didn’t see how she’s actually living, because people with Parkinson’s disease, in later stages, start to have very slow movement. She had problems with standing up, dressing, and many other things related to that.

Clinics and doctors cannot see those symptoms and can only get a snapshot of the current state when patients visit. But what’s going on at home, they cannot see. So I started thinking I should do something.

I started reading research papers and PhD theses, and watching talks and presentations. That’s when I discovered a project called MedRhythms. They use a device worn on the feet that generates musical rhythm from the way a person walks. People with Parkinson’s often lose their internal sense of rhythm, and hearing an external rhythm can help them move more easily.

That project inspired me. I thought: I have my technical background, I have my music background. I studied at a music school in Berlin and work as a music producer and artist there. So I started thinking: wow, AI‑generated music can really help to produce something personalised for people with Parkinson’s.

And that’s how Parkinsonic was born.

What are some of the early signs of Parkinson’s that people often miss?

From what I’ve learned through research, one of the very early signs can be depression. People feel low, withdraw from social contact and communicate less with others.

Another early symptom I didn’t know about before is loss of smell. People gradually lose their sense of smell, but it’s not always obvious or connected to Parkinson’s in their minds.

At the same time, Parkinson’s manifests very differently from person to person, and we lack knowledge about the different stages of the disease.

From being close to your mother’s experience, what do you think people most misunderstand about living with Parkinson’s day to day?

In my case, I realised that my mother didn’t accept the disease for a very long time, until I started to speak with her very openly: “Mom, you’ve changed. Look, something is happening. You should accept that, and you should trust the doctors, and at least use the proper medication.”

Many people with Parkinson’s are not ready to accept they have it. And this is very hard to see, to be honest.

I don’t know how it is for other people, but I also had customer interviews with people who have Parkinson’s disease for building Parkinsonic’s first solution. Somehow, all of them were very positive, and they’re trying to do a lot of things that can help: exercising, speaking with other people, visiting groups, doing something personal like Instagram videos, blogs, and sharing stories. It’s very good.

But not everyone is like that. Usually, people start to close themselves off and not show anything. They stay alone. With this disease, it’s very hard.

It sounds like you’re building Parkinsonic very much with those people in mind: people who are at home, often alone with the disease. Can you walk me through the journey of building the app?

My first idea was to create a small chatbot where people could record a short video and say how they are feeling, and receive an audio file with music that can help reduce symptoms, or music that is exactly how they want to feel. That was the first idea.

After bringing medical advisors and neuro‑experts onto the team, we added five different tasks that measure changes in tremor, voice and facial expression. We then translate these parameters into AI music therapy.

So today Parkinsonic is a web app. People register, complete a short “check‑in”, do the five tasks, and then have music as therapy.

What kind of tasks are those?

They’re video tasks. For example, a basic neuromotor check‑in, where the person is asked to smile, say certain words, and do simple facial and hand movements.

For tremor, they do standard exercises they’d also do when visiting a neurologist.

We use the tasks to estimate the person’s current stage. If they do daily check‑ins or even just weekly, we can see the progression. All of this is then shown in a kind of dashboard.

How do music and rhythm come into the picture?

Music can increase dopamine. For example, when you hear your favourite tracks, you get goosebumps and feel some energy. That means the dopamine in your brain is increasing.

Usually, people with Parkinson’s have less dopamine. This is exactly how the disease is often described: less dopamine, less energy, less motivation.

My idea was to take the biomarkers we measure, like tremor, voice and facial expression, and translate them into musical parameters: tempo, rhythm, frequency, and atmosphere. On top of that, we ask the user about their preferences and goals.

After the check‑in and five tasks, people can choose their favourite instrument, genre and the goal of the music therapy. For example: sleeping, calming down, walking and being more active, or focusing on work. It depends on the goal, and we create a special sound for it.

Earlier, you mentioned rhythm, almost like a metronome for movement. Can you explain that part?

In physiotherapy and occupational therapy, a metronome is often used for certain tasks. For example, putting on a jacket or doing other daily routine tasks. With rhythm, patients move faster and more easily.

There’s also a lot of evidence that rhythmic stimulation can help people to move.1 We use those parameters for various goals.

People can be very specific about their music taste. How do you handle someone who, say, really hates electronic music?

Music therapy is not ‘normal music as entertainment’. Music therapy has a specific goal, and music therapists who work in clinics create music in the moment, on the spot. When they see the person, they understand what they need and create some sound.

It’s not always going to be ‘full’ in the usual musical sense, because it’s a prescription of therapy, like a pill. It’s not always pleasant, but it’s necessary to listen and connect with the brain.

But we are trying to understand what people like and give them the opportunity to choose the genre and the instruments.

If you could redesign part of the Parkinson’s care pathway as it exists today, what would you change?

In my case, my mother lives in Russia, and not every city has a Parkinsonologist. This is a relatively new profession in the field. Usually when people have Parkinson’s disease, they go to a neurologist, but there are also Parkinsonologists who focus only on Parkinson’s disease.

I think it requires a bit more education in general, both about the disease and about the therapy options. Right now, the most effective approach is, of course, drug therapy, and usually, doctors don’t really believe in non-pharmaceutical approaches.

I would love for there to be more opportunities for people with Parkinson’s disease that can help them, and for doctors to prescribe these therapies. Because right now, standard care is physiotherapy, occupational therapy, maybe music therapy, only in clinics where people have music classes, but not at home.

At home, they have almost nothing, and they don’t have any motivation to do something. That’s why we are creating Parkinsonic, where people can use it at home.2 They have a check-in with professional standards that measures Parkinson’s disease metrics, then they see results, and have something at least at home. This is the idea.

• Early signs of Parkinson’s

• Parkinsonic’s web app

• Kate Berkita on LinkedIn

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Parkinson’s affects people differently. If you’re considering new therapies, discuss them with a healthcare professional. You can learn more about Parkinson’s symptoms and treatment options from the Parkinson’s Foundation or Parkinson’s UK.

I learned nothing.

Meditating every morning does exactly what it says on the box.

It has had pretty immediate benefits with regard to:

• Routine

• Resilience

• Spaciousness

How meditation has helped my routine

I’m an overthinker. I like challenges. ‘Thrive in complexity,’ as they say over on LinkedIn.

But this can also get overwhelming.

If I get too overwhelmed, I can procrastinate.

I’ve done this since childhood, so I know how to navigate it well without letting it affect the quality of my work or my commitment to other people. But it does impact the quality of my life.

In the mornings, I would often mull over what the day would bring. I’d try to figure stuff out. Make a mental to-do list. Down to small things, like whether I’d add honey to my breakfast that morning. Sometimes, this would trigger procrastination. I’d start checking my email, news, newsletters, etc., while still in bed, and would have to keep my phone out of reach from my bed for this reason.

This often would lead to a greater sense of being overwhelmed, because by the time I’d get up, I’d feel like I was ‘behind’. Whether I actually was or not doesn’t matter; it was more a feeling of knowing when I intended to ‘start being productive’ and when I actually did.

Morning meditation means that before anything else, I get up, sit down, and take a few minutes.

I’m blown away by how a simple practice like this has upended a deep-rooted set of habits.

My alarm goes. I might snooze it for 10 minutes, if the day allows for it, but then I get up and sit down to observe my thoughts. To breathe. To find focus. To bring myself into the present moment and sense whatever is there: in my body, my mind, my room, my greater surroundings.

If I can’t be bothered, I set a timer for just 3 minutes.

Often when the timer finishes, I stay still a little longer.

Then I’ll get ready, and when I get to my desk, I usually spend a moment journaling. Jotting down whatever’s happening in my head.

Journaling often gives me peace that I don’t have to “hold on” to certain things I’d like to remember or revisit. This has benefits before and afterwards.

After journaling, those thoughts have a place. But journaling also means that if any thoughts come up prior, for example, during meditation, I can observe those thoughts without grasping on to them. I know my mind well enough to know that those thoughts will reappear as soon as I sit down to journal later.

But morning meditation has also made me more diligent with how I finish my day.

I usually set a priority for the next day. I clean up my tabs. Structure my to-do list. This way, I know it’s all waiting for me. I don’t have to think about it. My mind is less likely to dwell on it during meditation. And prior to it. My mind is calm(er).

Resilience: “I can always sit down and look at a tree”

This calm at the start of the day is beginning to feel like a friend.

However the day goes, I know that my friend is always there.

I first got into meditation in my early 20s. One day, I had a few hours to kill between university and my side job. I wandered around the city. Then I looked up and realized that, despite having walked those streets often, I had barely seen what’s around me. My attention was pulled into the present moment and I was filled with wonder.

For a while, I practiced bringing myself back to that state. I vividly remember the tree in my parents’ garden. How beautiful it was when I was present enough to witness it.

Since then, for almost two decades, I have felt strengthened by knowing that worst comes to worst, I can always sit down and look at something as common as a tree and experience wonder. It’s a truth that can’t be taken away and is always there to return to.

And to be clear: it’s not about the tree. It is not even about using your eyes.

I was never consistent with my practice. In some tough periods, it could take me months, maybe even years, to see a tree the way I did that day in my early 20s.

But that was more an emergency button.

Now this calm that I meet when I get up in the morning is somewhat accessible throughout the day. All I need to do is take a moment for it.

Spaciousness

I like to think about my morning meditation as sitting in stillness. Meditating feels like a verb. Something active. Something you can do right or wrong. And while meditation is far from passive, for now, I approach the practice as sitting in stillness. It’s less prescriptive, but still captures the practice.

Sitting in stillness has many layers. I sit down. I check on my breath. I check on my body. I check on my surroundings. I check on my thoughts. Are they still? Wherever I find non-stillness, like noise or discomfort, I place my focus there. In order to feel the discomfort, to hear the noise.

It may sound counterintuitive to people who haven’t practised meditation, but the greater the awareness I can bring to something, the stiller it often becomes.

Thoughts dissipate. Quite quickly. If you observe them, you shift focus away from participating in those thoughts toward a concentrated stillness.

At least that’s how I would describe my experience.

The result is that my thoughts throughout the day are surrounded by more space. I can observe them. Decide what to do with them. Respond to them or leave them be.

Just to be clear and to temper expectations: it’s just a small beginning.

Let’s compare it to someone struggling to do a push-up. They start practising against the wall, then on their knees, and finally do a single push-up. Soon, they might be able to do two of them. Two push-ups don’t make you the strongest person in your town, but going from being able to do one to two push-ups means you’ve doubled what you can do. You will feel this in your body.

And you can achieve it by doing just 1 small thing every day.

Being able to hold a tiny bit more space for your thoughts might just amplify the depth of calm you experience.

How to start

I started this article by saying I learned nothing.

I knew all of this.

I knew what would happen when I started meditating regularly. I knew to find a regular moment for it. I knew I don’t have to do it for 60 minutes straight away. I knew it’s okay if I can’t “clear my mind”. I knew that the people around me who meditate regularly seemed somewhat more joyful, more peaceful, more resilient.

But somehow it didn’t turn into practice.

So I can’t tell you how to start.

You probably already know how. Just do it once. And then do it again.

To me, having this small moment brings so many benefits on its own, regardless of whether I can find stillness or not.

Even if it were a one-second practice, it would benefit me.

Wake up, get up, sit down, get up, start the day.

That practice alone creates space around the thoughts that would often trap me in decision-making mode before even getting out of bed.

So even if I have days where I sit down and my mind is stormy, I will still experience a benefit, even if I wasn’t able to sit in stillness.

This is the big difference from the other times I started this practice. And why it’s a no-brainer to keep it going. No matter how I feel. No matter how brief the session.

All I have to do is show up.

If you’re new to meditation, there are many great meditation apps you can try. I also recommend reading Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s guide to mindfulness and getting the free Plum Village app, which features guided meditations by Thich Nhat Hanh and his monastic community.

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ᕱᕱ For your ears ᕱᕱ

Jacob van Eyck was a blind Dutch composer in my hometown of 17th-century Utrecht, who worked as a carillonneur and bell tuner. His ear was so refined that he advised bell founders on acoustics. In the evenings, he’d play recorder for passersby in the Janskerkhof, the park outside the Janskerk, improvising on popular melodies. Those improvisations were collected in Der Fluyten Lust-hof. "Engels Liedt" is one of them, performed here by Gerard Stempfel.

Some plans fell through, leading to an unexpected search for the right next role.1

I’ve been lucky throughout my career, always landing roles through my network rather than through traditional job applications. As such, my familiarity with job postings has mostly come from writing them and scouring competitors’ openings for insights into their next moves.

What strikes me now, as I sometimes scan dozens of postings per day, is that most positions require AI literacy and hands-on experience beyond asking ChatGPT for a banana bread recipe.

While I’m lucky to have a background in building search and recommendation products that leverage machine learning, I imagine many employers’ expectations don’t align with the average person’s experience level (though obviously any organisation aims to hire people who can be described as more than ‘average’).

I hear a lot from people (and companies) who feel worried they’ll get left behind.

The standard advice is: automate something in your life. But for people who’ve never done that, knowing what to automate, let alone how to, can feel overwhelming.

Here’s what you can do today.

Stop typing the same stuff over and over

How often do you type your email address, your phone number, your IBAN, or links to personal websites or socials? Or maybe there are other things you type out regularly.

Let’s automate these.

If you’re on Mac, go to your System Settings, select Keyboard, and then go to Text Replacements. Now set up small shortcuts to save yourself time typing. I prefer putting stuff in brackets, but you could also add a prefix like !

Bonus: if you’re signed into the same Apple ID on your iOS device, these shortcuts will also work there.

If you’re on Windows, it requires a bit more effort using AutoHotKey or Beeftext. You can ask an AI assistant for help.

Other things to put in there:

• Calendar scheduling tools: if you use Cal.com or Calendly, you can create shortcuts for links to let people book meeting slots for certain lengths of time, e.g. (cal30) and (cal45) for 30 and 45-minute slots.

• (lib) for “link in bio” and other stuff you might need for managing socials.

• (bio) for a short 1-2 line biography.

• Particular docs you link to frequently, e.g. employee onboarding docs, codes of conduct, Figma files, or Github repos.

• If you’re a freelancer, things like what you do, what you’re currently working on, what your rates are (whatido) (current) (rates).

• Formatting symbols like ✓ → ← •

• Emoji combos you like for complimenting friends’ mixtapes 🔥🧯🚒👩‍🚒

And boom, that’s your first automation done.

These shortcuts are actually a simple form of automation. They follow a basic IF/THEN pattern that powers much more complex systems.

If… then…

Automation means that whenever a certain condition is met, an action is triggered. This is commonly phrased as IF/THEN.

With these simple text replacement automations, you’ve created the following:

IF (tel) is typed
THEN post my phone number instead

You can take this a lot further. Many of the tools we use have APIs that allow them to communicate with each other. For example, a productivity suite like Notion can communicate with Slack, so you may set up an automation that says IF a new ticket is created on this project board, THEN update the team in a specific Slack channel.

If two apps can’t directly speak to each other, you can use tools like IFTTT or Zapier to connect the dots. For instance, IF someone books a meeting through Cal.com, THEN create a prep task in your to-do app.

Sometimes, there are even custom tools built for specific APIs, like Smarter Playlists for Spotify, which I used years ago to build myself a global music radar.

It would run once a week, put tracks from various New Music Friday playlists together, filter out bigger names by tossing everything out that’s also in the global playlist, removing anything low energy (not a fan of ballads), then apply some playlist ordering logic, after which it would update my existing playlist.

Phrased in IF/THEN, in very simplified form, you could think about it like:

• IF the weekly run command is triggered

• THEN grab all tracks from selected playlists

• IF any of the tracks are present in the global playlist

• THEN remove them from the batch

• IF any of the tracks have a lower than x energy score

• THEN remove them from the batch

So whether it’s stuff you do for fun, for work, or for administration, I’m sure you can find small automations to make your life easier or more fun, like blinking your smart lights whenever you complete a to-do list item.

Once you get used to automating the basics, you can start figuring out how to make these systems smarter by integrating AI with tools like n8n.

Let me know about what automations you have running that make your life better.

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ᕱᕱ For your ears ᕱᕱ

I discovered Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s Gift Songs through zensounds, which named it the Ambient Album of the Year 2025. Rightly so.

Never have I found an album that so immediately and strongly invokes a combined sense of wonder, calm, and meditativeness in me.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to it since first hearing it in December. Rather than trying to describe it, here are some words I wrote after listening to it in a wintry Berlin park.

A small moment of effort for constant peace of mind.

What is Proton

If you’re not familiar, Proton is a privacy-first email provider, offering end-to-end encryption for your mail. That means the content of your mail stays private between you and the sender or receiver. Just like snail mail.

On top of that, they offer a suite of security tools and privacy-friendly alternatives to popular services, such as a Calendar app, VPN, an online Drive with a spreadsheet and document editor, an authenticator app, and a password manager.

They’re owned by a non-profit foundation, which ensures the services stay aligned with their users’ interests. And they’re based in Switzerland because of the country’s strong privacy laws (and threatened to leave when it considered amending those laws).

In short, they’re a defiant node in a web of enshittification, even providing grants to organisations that defend people’s freedoms.

Degoogling

I guess you could call me a Google power user.

I signed up for Gmail in 2004, when it was still invite-only. I use Google Calendar, Drive, Maps, Photos, Translate, Authenticator, Chrome, and YouTube.

Google might know me better than any of my friends or family.

Google has historically scanned email content directly to target ads as an explicit part of its business model. They claim they no longer do this for advertising.

But my email is still scanned and processed at scale: for spam filtering, search indexing, “smart features”, metadata extraction, and behavioural modelling across Google’s ecosystem. That means my most private communications are continuously parsed and transformed into derivative data I do not control.

Google knows I went to a gym I had never been to before on Tuesday, before returning to that neighbourhood the next day to visit a shop. From my calendar app and my email, Google knows I had an appointment for an eye test at that shop.

It has this data for every day of my life. For decades.

In Google Drive and Photos, Google’s data extraction and profiling systems have access to even more private information.

I’ve long felt uncomfortable with this, but the convenience of Google’s product suite made me reluctant to switch.

If only I had known how easy deGoogling would be.

Why now

Three reasons for finally pulling the trigger: personal momentum, geopolitics, and AI.

AI & ‘vibe hacking’

You may have heard of ‘vibe coding‘, which means programming using text prompts in AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Lovable.

AI allows people with limited technical skills to accomplish outcomes in hours that would have taken months or years. And even for technically skilled people, it allows them to automate things and achieve more in less time.

Unfortunately, that extends to scamming, phishing, and hacking. Meaning this is now easier to execute at a greater scale.

Secondly, I don’t trust that my data won’t somehow be used as training data for large language models when it’s in Google’s hands.

There are opt-outs, but they are limited and don’t include metadata, aggregated data, or engagement patterns, etc. It’s also easy to miss an opt-out you don’t know exists. Or you might assume an opt-out covers all of a corporation’s services, but only extends to their mail client, for example.

If you continue using these services, or even just have a dormant account there, make sure to opt out of AI scraping.

But deleting is better.

After Musk bought Twitter, I deleted all my tweets and went inactive. Twitter had been incredibly important to my career. But I could not justify contributing to Musk’s X. Then, when he announced Grok, I logged back in to permanently delete my account, so xAI’s child sexual abuse material-spawning MechaHitler could not be trained with any remaining metadata, nor would the site ever come up if someone Googled my name.

Delete more.

The uneasy feeling I’ve always had about my privacy has been exacerbated by the AI race. These companies are willing to take huge legal risks because they can earmark part of the billions they’re raising to cover lawsuits and settlements. Meanwhile, the US government seems to tolerate these practices as long as the tech billionaire lackeys keep funding the Trump administration’s coffers for the sake of ‘winning’ said AI race.

Geopolitics

I am incredibly uncomfortable with my data being in the hands of US corporations. This discomfort was bearable and a tradeoff I was willing to make for a long time.

But no longer.

Where it’s reasonably convenient, I want my data encrypted and stored in Europe. You’re more secure with European companies because, unfortunately, the EU, for diplomatic reasons, is reluctant to act swiftly against US companies.

A good example of the EU’s hesitance to act is the current Grok / xAI scandal, in which Musk’s edgelord chatbot took photos of women and minors and undressed them, posting them publicly on X. If any of us were to do that, or to create a system allowing anyone in the world to do that, we’d be in a jail cell tonight.

Meanwhile, X and Grok remain available in EU app stores, and no arrests have been made.

Why? Well, Musk and Trump are buddies again. Money talks.

Personal momentum

It’s been incredibly cold and icy in Berlin these past weeks, so it’s a nice time to stay in and to do some digital cleaning.

A few years ago, I set up a personal homepage by linking a Notion page to a custom domain using Super Publishing. This setup cost me about €200 per year and limited me to Notion’s customisation options.

I decided to vibe code a simple one-page version myself. It took a few hours to get everything right and make adjustments, but now I have a site I control myself completely at marginal cost. Check it out.

I’ve also cut ties with streaming services and have been organising my owned music collection (read more here).

So when the impulse to complete my switch to Proton came, I opened my laptop and locked in.

Why switching to Proton was easier than I expected

I imagined this would take weeks.

I have email forwarders set up; my Gmail collects emails from external inboxes via POP3/IMAP, and I have dozens of accounts set up via Google’s single-sign-on (if not hundreds).

This was fuel for my procrastination.

A wall so solid it would only crack under the US literally sliding into oligarchical fascism.

But Proton’s “Easy Switch” made it... well... easy.

With a few clicks, you ensure that all messages landing in your Gmail account now land in your Proton account. A few more clicks and your entire email history finds its way over to Proton’s more secure platform.

Registering and completing these steps can be done in just a few minutes.

That’s your starting point. Voilà.

Now, when people or services email me on my Gmail address, I can access it and reply from my Proton inbox.

I then set up my custom domains (this is optional, btw), which required some DNS configuration. I had been using custom domains for a while, as a strategy to link things to a domain that I control (as opposed to @gmail.com, which is controlled by Google) in case I ever wanted to do a migration like this.

I had this custom domain running via my Gmail, but now I could just reassign that and have everything addressed to that domain bypass Google and go to Proton directly.

Now all that email is private.

No longer scanned by Google’s algorithms.

From here

My to-do list from here is a bit of a project, but the most important part is done: I’m untethered from Google.

• I’ve started using Proton Drive instead of Google Drive, BUT I still need to migrate a lot over. I’m actually writing this post in their text editor, and frankly, so far, I prefer it to Google Docs.
  
  Sidenote: the first time I opened Proton Drive, they gave me 10 minutes to upload data for free, which I assume means it would fall outside their data allowance. I wasn’t quite ready for this, so make sure you have something ready to upload when you first use Drive.
  

• Proton Calendar has been easy to use, but unfortunately, for privacy reasons, it doesn’t support scheduling app integrations like Calendly, nor does it have a native version like Google Calendar’s meeting slots. I’ll need to figure something out here.
  

• They have a service called SimpleLogin that creates email aliases directly from their password manager, allowing you to create unique logins for various services (in general, it’s a great security practice to have as few things as possible tied to a single email address). I was already signing up for many services using email addresses I don’t use for correspondence, and only I know.
  
  You can even do this with a custom domain, so you’re not locked into Proton the way you’re locked into Apple when you use their anonymiser tool. My plan is to disconnect my Gmail address from various accounts and use SimpleLogin to create unique logins.

There’s a lot to be done, but from here I can just take an extra minute when using a service to update my email address and point it away from Google.

The heavy lifting is done, and it only ended up taking a few minutes.

Downsides

There are things I will miss.

I’ll miss my travel tickets showing up in my calendar. I’ll miss the locations of calendar events being linked to maps. And I’ll miss the speed of Gmail’s search feature, which comes from Google keeping an index of all my mail.

Google has a mind-boggling amount of cash to spend on building really good products. Proton’s products are solid, but with good privacy and security also come some limitations. Think of it like this: if you give all your neighbours a key to your front door, you’ll always find someone to help when you lose your key. But each copy of your key creates a new security risk. Convenience has a cost. Inconvenience can be valuable.

In the end, I can deal with the downsides in exchange for peace of mind.

If I can live life without my smartphone for a month, this will be a piece of cake.

How to make the switch

Just sign up for free and use the Easy Switch feature. See how it feels.

You can still access all your emails from your Gmail account, so if you change your mind, it’s easy to revert.

I didn’t write this to convince you to use Proton. I had just been procrastinating for ages and am writing this to help people like myself along.

If this has been the right impulse for you to get the switch done, you can sign up:

• By going to Proton’s homepage: https://proton.me/

• By typing proton.me in your address bar, to circumvent Substack’s trackers

• OR by using my refer-a-friend link, which will prompt you to pick a free 2-week trial, but you’ll need to add in payment data. If you choose not to cancel and become a paying Proton user, I’ll get a $20 credit on my future Proton payments. This is only valid for new users (i.e. you use this link to create a new account). Here’s my link: https://pr.tn/ref/JJBKR1CJ

But really, I encourage you to check out their homepage first. Their deGoogling resource is also a good place to start.

Made the switch?

I’m really curious to hear from others who have already made the switch, especially from businesses that rely on Proton’s Business suite.

Also, if anyone has clever workarounds for calendar scheduling stuff.. Let me know. I’m considering vibe coding a browser plugin that can scrape the upcoming weeks in my calendar before I send an invite, but it wouldn’t prevent scheduling conflicts. 🤔

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Further reading

• Bye Bye Big Tech: How I Migrated to an almost All-EU Stack (and saved 500€ per year) on was a great signal for me that switching would not only be easy, but might even be cheaper.

• How to delete 99% of your digital footprint from the internet by is a helpful resource to track every account linked to certain email addresses and to either delete them or connect them to a more secure option. In general, it’s a good privacy guide that will help you get the most out of whatever your setup is.

ᕱᕱ For your ears ᕱᕱ

I’ve been RINSING Calvin Harris’s 2009 album Ready for the Weekend these past weeks. It’s pure nostalgic, millenialcore. It might be poppy, especially for my taste, but it also carries a lot of sonic references to musical trends of the ‘00s.

I’d say this album has aged really well as a time capsule. An absolute joy.

My TIDAL subscription has been cancelled.

I’ll no longer drink from that well of infinite music for a low fixed monthly fee.

But what about if a friend sends a song? Or if I want to check something out? And am I really going to only play the music I’ve stored on my device?

I’m not going to be an extremist. Here are my guidelines:

1. I will primarily listen to music I own.

2. I may listen to owned music directly from my devices or stream it via the Bandcamp app or a connected hard drive (i.e., an NAS).

3. I’ll still check out music that friends send me via ad-supported tiers of streaming services or YouTube.

4. Streaming music on sites like Bandcamp or YouTube while I’m exploring new releases is fine.

5. If I want to listen to something repeatedly, I should consider purchasing it and adding it to my collection.

6. If music is not good enough to warrant spending money on it and integrating it into my collection, I should withdraw my attention from it.

7. 2-5% of my disposable income will go towards building my collection.

8. Online radio stations and DJ sets are fine as long as there is intention in the curation.

9. I will not replace music streaming with piracy.

Now to practicalities.

I’ve been sorting through my music library to decide what I want in my collection and what stays out. That means categorise the music I own as follows:

• Rotation: music I want to have more immediate access to, anywhere, anytime.

• Library: the music I want to come back to. Some music, I only listen to once a year, or even less. I still love it, value it, but it doesn’t need to be at my fingertips when I’m trying to decide what to listen to.

• Archive: everything I own. When I used to DJ, I’d plunder SoundCloud and Bandcamp for anything relevant I could get my hands on. I’d then try out the tunes while practising to see how I really feel about them. The result: lots of music I’m not that hot on. I might come back to it one day, but it has no purpose in my life anymore. A bit like that offbeat coat you bought on a whim, and are keeping around for years, because an odd-themed costume party might thrust the garment into relevance.

When I actually purchase a NAS, the Rotation and Library ones might merge.

What I’ve already noticed is this:

Albums are by far my favourite format for this. It’s a major pain to organise lots of 2-track single releases or 4-track EPs. And my mind will rarely go: “hey, let’s listen to this single.” I think the listening share of artists who don’t release albums will drop significantly over the coming months.

I don’t know how long I’ll run this experiment.

Could be a few months, could be a year, could be the rest of my life.

For now, I’m just excited reunite with old favourites, both in terms of software (Winamp <3) and music.

Happy 2026, everyone!

I prepared for this challenge by interviewing music writer and curator of , who left streaming behind in 2024. You can read the interview here:

ᕱᕱ For your ears ᕱᕱ

Written while exploring the Ethio-jazz inspired sounds of The Sorcerers, whose Other Worlds And Habitats album has a marked retrofuturistic energy to it.

The question I’ve asked over and over is:

How can I help myself and others be calm and fluffy, like happy clouds?

Since starting, for each edition sent out, about 10 people have subscribed and joined the journey. Glad to have you here!

Whether you’ve been here for the whole ride or just joined… a reflection is in order before we leave a time of year in which many of us are not working and have a bit more space to sit with our thoughts.

Here are some of my favourite takeaways from the past year:

• The city is made of music. You don’t need headphones to hear it. If you, like me, have a habit to listening to music everywhere you go — leave your earbuds at home from time to time.

• Is always being available worth being less present in every moment? As I left my phone at home for one month, I learned to value the preciousness and precariousness of each moment. What’s the cost of being available?

• My phone auto-disables notifications when I arrive home. It’s been a game-changer. This was the result of my “30-day offline after 8pm” experiment. I look at my phone a lot anyway, so to have notifications muted when I come home in the evenings is a great way to make home feel calm.

• If you want to stream more ethically, ditch the algorithms. If you want to introduce more mindfulness into your music listening, spend more time with a music collection you own.

• For those using AI: be proactive about your privacy. Clean ChatGPT’s memory feature, or even consider deleting your account every now and then. There’s more you can do in this guide.

• Speaking of AI: I used it to build several tools for myself through a process called vibe coding. I think it’s wonderful that we can easily build our own tools to solve our problems instead of waiting for someone else to do it one day.

• It’s possible to protect your mind against AI-related cognitive decline.

• Finally, I want to encourage everyone to do things outside your comfort zones.
  For me, it was dance classes.
  And I’ve learned so much from it:
  “By making myself smaller, I’m creating ambiguity rather than clarity, which doesn’t do anyone any favours.”
  Find the sweet spot of curiosity and discomfort.
  Feel the hesitation.
  Do it anyway.

If you’re a fan of the list format, here are more that may help you:

You can find the full Calm & Fluffy archive here.

ᕱᕱ For your ears: 2025 ᕱᕱ

A chronological overview of the music featured in the newsletter this year.

• Emeka Ogboh’s album 6°30’33.372”N 3°22’0.66”E. It fuses electronic musical compositions with recordings of interviews and the hustle and bustle at Lagos’ Ojuelegba bus station and surroundings.

• The super fun Odo Refre Wo tune from Paa Jude’s ‘burger highlife’ record Seaman Jolly.

• Multi-instrumentalist Walt McClements’ atmospheric On a Painted Ocean.

• Enigmatic Pale Jay’s Spend More Time With Your Friends.

• An old ambient favourite: Ephemeris by H.U.V.A. NETWORK.

• Sitting between ambient and techno, I really enjoyed the hypnotic 3-track Tension of Opposites release by Endless Ritual.

• J.G.G.’s BOMBOLLA, traverses the realms of psychedelic, exotica, and early electronica with heartwarming melodies.

• Electronic producer FaltyDL explored a more playful side by testing the tracks from his new album, like We Have Everything We Need, on his young daughter.

• Singer and musician Lucrecia Dalt’s well-textured, organic, yet slightly glitchy, electronic A Danger to Ourselves album.

• William Basinski’s timeless ambient masterpiece The Disintegration Loops.

• Blue Camel by Rabih Abou-Khalil is a fantastic fusion of jazz and Arabic music.

• Another all-time fav: Biosphere’s downtempo Black Mesa to infuse a sense of mystery into your day.

• DECIUS’ performance in Berghain’s Panorama Bar created such a buzz that I had to check out and share their fusion of acid house, disco, and techno.

• Djrum’s cinematic journey Under Tangled Silence.

• Cambodian music combined with psychedelic rock: Dengue Fever’s Escape From Dragon House.

• Possibly the least calm & fluffy release shared this year: electronic supergroup VIER’s debut album IIII.

• The Human Language ‘Goat’ Tape: a rework of Goat’s self-titled album by producer human language. If you’re into DJ Shadow, you’ll dig this.

• Dreamy, dancefloor-adjacent Temple of Love by techno-scene mainstays Len Faki and Honey Dijon.

• A whole set of winter-y ambient recordings.

• This three-hour techno journey by Dustin Zahn recorded live in Berghain in 2013.

• Oneohtrix Point Never’s new, experimental Tranquilizer album.

• A thoughtful mix of experimental jazz and hiphop on Ambrose Akinmusire’s honey from a winter stone.

• Torus’ 00s dance-inspired, dreamy aesthetic Summer of Love.

• In our interview, Stephan Kunze recommended the vaporwave album Birth of a New Day by 2814.

When Spotify launched in the Netherlands, I fell in love with it. While I was spending almost all of my disposable income on live music and sometimes CDs, I was also pirating. A lot. Streaming changed that immediately. Instead of spending hours a day browsing through Soulseek and private genre-specific torrent trackers, I now spent my time on Spotify.

After graduating, I started leading product at streaming services, with the mission to establish them as the base layer to underpin a new music economy. My adult life has truly been intertwined with music streaming.

But after 15 years of streaming music, I am particularly interested in making my music consumption more intentional. Slower streaming isn’t quite cutting it.

When January comes, I’m not sure what to expect. Or how to prepare.

I have questions.

So I’m asking music writer & curator Stephan Kunze. Stephan runs the best-selling newsletter for ambient and experimental music, . Stephan, like me, has spent a significant chunk of his career working in music streaming as a Senior Music Editor at Spotify and later as the service’s Global Editorial Lead. If you listened to playlists on Spotify between 2016 and 2022, there’s a good chance you’ve been exposed to Stephan’s curation, directly or indirectly.

In August 2024, Stephan cancelled his music streaming subscription.

I wanted to know how it’s been for him and what anyone else considering cutting the cord might learn from him.

Do you remember how you first got into music streaming as a subscriber? What impact did it have on your music listening and collecting habits?

I started streaming just shortly before I started working for Spotify in 2016. I had a neat iTunes library that I’d built up since the early 2000s, and I didn’t want to let go of it. I’d started curating playlists for the launch of Apple Music in Germany; realising this could turn into a lucrative line of work in a time when the magazine business basically went down the drain, I applied for an editorial position at Spotify – and set up an account there as part of the interview preparation.

I’ll admit that I got converted rather quickly. Of course, I loved the convenience of having the world’s music catalogue at my fingertips at first. I definitely listened to more hours of music from a bigger number of artists from different parts of the world, though that might have to do with my actual work in playlist curation as well. In terms of my personal music consumption, I created a bunch of evolving playlists that I’d keep adding to, and they turned out to be much more mood- than genre-based. I also noticed that I listened to way more individual songs than albums, though I’d always considered myself an album listener.

In 2024, you decided to cancel your Spotify subscription. How do you look back on that?

For some time, I viewed music streaming as the ultimate value proposition. A monthly tenner for the world catalogue, anytime, anywhere? Come on, that’s sick. But in the long run, I felt that I was missing a deeper connection to the music. I listened to so many songs, but increasingly found myself clueless about the artists, or their role in their scene; I didn’t understand how these songs fit into their body of work or the genre as a whole. I also realised that I didn’t own or have control over my collection, because I just rented access to it from a tech corporation.

I look back on dropping out of streaming as a value-driven act of reclaiming agency. I didn’t really want or need access to millions of songs; a curated library just serves my purpose much better. I’ve made the conscious decision to let each of these pieces into my life at one point, and that in itself creates a deeper relation to the music. Last but not least, I really enjoy the feeling of owning the music again; nobody can revoke my access to this music, and I don’t need to search for it on an interface that tries to capture my attention and direct it towards brainrot podcasts and AI slop.

I know you’re a big proponent of active listening. What about passive listening? How do you pick music for moments when you’re working, doing chores around the house, or when you’re on the go?

First of all, even with what I just said, I do engage in a lot of passive listening myself. I’m not opposed to that in general, I just think that we should also consider listening to music actively for a certain portion of our time. Most people don’t do that at all anymore – there’s a pervading second-screen mentality that I’m witnessing, even at concerts, which I totally despise.

Back to your question – I listen to a lot of ambient, electronic and jazz music, most of it being instrumental, so by definition a huge portion of it does work for background as well as foreground listening. That’s one possible definition of ambient music after all. I have certain seasonal go-to genres for work and travel, like dub techno, barber beats or balearic house. I’ve gone back to almost exclusively listening to full artist albums (or EPs, my favourite format in electronic music). Even for background consumption, I rarely listen to playlists or albums on shuffle, as I try to respect the auteur’s vision of their body of work.

I’ve also returned to buying physical products. It has a nostalgic element to it, for sure, but it’s also about the act of putting on a record, which felt much more deliberate and mindful than just pressing play on a stream. I’m collecting these small-run DIY ambient tapes, and one way of passive background listening is actually that I randomly grab something from my tape collection and play it front to back on my portable Sony cassette recorder.

After adopting minimalism, you owned fewer than 100 things at one point, and documented them in a spreadsheet. One could argue that streaming, rather than owning, allows for a more minimalist lifestyle. How do you look at this?

It’s true, but I just don’t believe in minimalist orthodoxy anymore. I’m still a follower of minimalism’s core values and principles, but the mainstream has twisted it into this perverse, hollow consumption trend. That’s one thing capitalism’s really good at – appropriating its critiques.

While streaming definitely allows for a more flexible minimalist lifestyle (“access over ownership”), the negative aspects I mentioned earlier started outweighing those advantages for me. I looked for a way to retain the flexibility but get rid of that massive disconnect and consumption mentality. I’ve actually abandoned some minimalist practices because they clashed with other, more important values, like ecology and sustainability.

How do you organise your collections? Do you use any tools?

When I moved away from streaming, I found some great articles on Pitchfork about collecting and storing digital music. My solution was a NAS, which is a big local hard-drive carrier that you can store your music collection on and then access from anywhere through an internet and/or local network connection. That way, you can basically curate your own HQ streaming service.

I store all my digital music in FLAC quality on my NAS, which I’ve mirrored to a Dropbox cloud. I don’t use any tools for organising, other than keeping my ID3 tags proper and clean. Additionally, I use my Music library on my laptop to remain on top of new promos, which makes up a large portion of my professional daily listening. I will only have current stuff on there, probably around 80-100 albums at any given time. I only download promos that I find intriguing, and I will usually stream them once or twice before I download. I’m quite mindful about letting new things into my life, which I guess is something I’ve kept from my hardcore minimalist days.

What were the biggest points of friction when you left streaming behind? How did you solve this?

First of all, a daily work situation for me – how do I listen to stuff that I don’t own and don’t want to buy, but need to check for an article? I’ve resorted to YouTube as an easy solution here. Sure, the sound quality might be subpar, but this is not pleasure listening after all – and for these more scientific cases, YouTube is perfectly fine.

Secondly, I had a few amazingly curated, mood-based playlists with hundreds of songs in my streaming days, which I would often default to in my daily routines. I really missed those for some time. But I’ve managed to rewire my brain so that I always spend at least a minute or two thinking about what I actually want to listen to now. It might feel less convenient, but it’s definitely more mindful. That was one of the most profound insights for me – understanding that convenient consumption rarely leads to true, lasting fulfilment. The Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss developed this formula, which asserts a direct correlation between the effort you have to make and the purpose you’ll find in an activity (or “happiness”, if you will). I tend to believe he’s mostly right.

A benefit of leaving streaming behind is that it forces one to be more intentional about what to listen to and when. This must pair well with your mindfulness practice, which seems to have become deeply embedded in your lifestyle.

Imagine a younger, perhaps less mindful, version of yourself in 2025. How do you think leaving streaming would have played out for him? What advice would you give?

I’d probably tell my younger self that while surely convenient, new technologies aren’t always just net positive, and to carefully consider the downsides of streaming as well, instead of just shrugging them off. Look, even now I’m far from a Luddite; I’m a digital knowledge worker, and I spend a substantial portion of my life in the digital realm. I just think that we should generally question the usual tech corp narrative based on inevitability and “progress” arguments. That’s not limited to streaming, but to technology as a whole. Then again, I’m not a missionary or crusader. Everyone needs to find out for themselves.

Is there any practical advice you’d give someone on the verge of making the switch?

Keep your streaming subscription running for a while. Maybe you don’t even need to cancel it. I am seeing a near-distant future where most music fans (not the casual ‘lean-back’ listener type) have both a streaming account and a personal, owned music library (physical and digital).

So don’t try to make the switch all at once. You’ll need some time to organically build up your library. If you still have old hard drives and music libraries floating around, take an afternoon to go through them and check what you’d still want to listen to. Don’t just import everything – this is probably music you liked a decade or longer ago. Some of it has not aged well. You don’t need to clutter your new library up with that stuff. I actually took the switch as an opportunity to build up a new library from scratch, containing only DRM-free music from Bandcamp and other independent sources.

What needs to be clear is that this will not be an easy or convenient switch – that’s why streaming is so popular, after all. This will definitely come with some friction, and you should be prepared and okay with that.

Lastly, to kick off people’s post-streaming journeys, what is an album everyone should have in their collection?

You do realise this is the one question you should never ask a music writer, right? I spent hours assembling my list of The 100 Albums That Rocked My World, and the result would basically change every single day since I published it. But I suspect that you won’t let me off the hook so easily, so I’ll just pick one that I’ve been returning to for a decade at this point.

2814’s Birth of a New Day is simply the best vaporwave album of all time, even though it contains absolutely no slowed-down muzak or smooth jazz samples; it doesn’t feature a Roman bust on its cover either, but a whole lot of Japanese characters and a cyberpunk aesthetic. Forget the vaporwave tag, though – this is some of the most gorgeous, melancholic ambient electronic music of all time. The perfect album for the dark and cold season, and it does absolutely work as passive background listening too.

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zensounds

newsletter for ambient and experimental music

By Stephan Kunze

Further reading

Six years ago, the world’s most popular music streaming service added 40,000 songs per day to its catalogue. Now, even smaller streamers are receiving more AI-generated tracks than that every day.

In 2019, I explored this topic in a column on the emergence of generative music (authorless) and how this could be contrasted by a countertrend of music that is less faceless (authorful).

The attention economy’s revenue models are optimised for personalisation:

• Ad-supported platforms: personalised content makes it more likely you’ll keep listening or watching, thus allowing platforms to serve more ads to you. $$$.

• Subscription platforms: the time spent watching or listening is a key metric to determine whether subscribers will stick around or cancel. If someone doesn’t use a service much, how do they justify the monthly payment?

While not every service has to chase these dynamics to their conclusion of extensive personalisation, the financial incentive to do so is ever-present.

The end state of personalisation

I believe authorless music is the logical conclusion of the attention economy’s drive towards personalisation. Here’s how I defined it in 2019:

Authorless Music:

• primarily driven by AI or the listener is unable to tell whether the listed artist is a real person or an algorithm.

• specifically targeted towards augmenting certain activities, moods, and environments.

• due to its obscure origin, the listener has little emotional involvement with the creator.

• in many cases it will be personalised to the listener’s music taste, environment, weather, mood, etc.

In contrast, one of the characteristics of ‘authorful’ music is “driven by human intent.”

And this has recently got me thinking…

What happens when the media we consume is no longer driven by human intent?

Culture is inherently social. But through pursuing never-ending personalisation, we’ve created a non-social, algorithmic form of human culture that has now entered hyperdrive through generative AI.

In the drive for more ad views, more time spent on services, we’ve ended up with advanced algorithms that can synthesise human cultural expression without further intentional input from people.

And those AI systems are far better than humans at reverse-engineering the recommendation algorithms that reward engagement with visibility. This guarantees abundant visibility for synthetic expression.

We have reached post-culture.

This is cause for reflection.

There are many questions to explore — each worth its own article.

Today, I want to highlight just one aspect:

When we think about cultural expression, we see the creator, the artist, the writer, the craftsperson. But that side of the equation is overvalued. Because the supposed ‘receiver’ is as much a participant in this culture, enabling the expression, as the person doing the expressing is.

The debate around whether AI can ‘truly’ be creative is philosophically interesting, but increasingly secondary. If the listener of AI-generated music can form a creative connection to this synthetic cultural expression, then the fact that there is no direct human intent involved in the creation of that specific music doesn’t matter, since it’s still enjoyed by a person, with intent.

The other side of the medal

As people spend more time with synthetic media — soon unable to distinguish between media created by human intent and that created by algorithms — they will experience the cost of this hyperoptimised personalised media environment: loneliness and disconnection.

Therefore, I believe in digital artisanship (authorful creations). About things that can be enjoyed in person, so you have a subconscious confirmation of its viscerality when you enjoy it digitally. I believe in communal experiences and social iteration, whether that’s dancing, jamming, remixing, or other forms of expression inspired by other people.

Our relationship with the internet’s entertainment culture will change, since ‘real’ and ‘synthetic’ will become indistinguishable unless there is some form of intervention by governments or platforms.

But in the age of post-culture, the need for culture won’t change.

So spend some time with all the well-curated end-of-year recommendation lists. And, in the words of London-based grime music producer and DJ Elijah:

٩( ᐛ )۶ work with me ٩( ᐖ )۶

I’m looking for interesting missions to support starting early next year, either as a freelancer or in an embedded leadership capacity.

What I’m passionate about:

Culture, technology, music, mental and physical well-being, sustainability.

Where I add the most value:

Strategy, product leadership, team development, workshops & education, writing, concept development, innovation management.

In recent years, I’ve led teams at global music entertainment brand COLORS, headed up product at classical music streaming service IDAGIO, and taught at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute’s Berlin campus.

Learn more about me on my personal website or on LinkedIn where you can also find my contacts.

Notes

I jot down a lot of ideas in my Notes app, but also on paper in small notebooks I can keep in my pocket together with my trusted 10+ year companion pen, the LAMY pico. When I’m feeling particularly stuck, I take out a notebook and start penning down ideas until I find something I like.

Figma

If you’ve seen the Calm & Fluffy front page, you will have seen the many doodles that accompany the articles. I use Figma to draw these. I’ve also used Figma to design the logo, special assets, and social media posts, though I no longer use it for the latter.

Canva

When posts go up, I usually also prepare some assets for Instagram, where I’m also building an audience. That audience needs a different engagement strategy, though, so I usually turn posts into a few slides with key takeaways, rather than posting screenshots of blocks of text.

Check out Calm & Fluffy on Instagram.

Grammarly

I started a trial earlier this year to see if it had improved at all in recent years. It’s alright. Unfortunately, I forgot to cancel the trial, and it renewed for a year. It does occasionally offer some good suggestions, and at minimum makes sure any punctuation oversights are caught without the watchful second pair of eyes from an editor.

Notion

I never intended for Calm & Fluffy to be as centred on my voice as it is now, so soon I’ll finally be adding interviews to the regular mix of newsletter posts. To keep track of my outreach and all the details, I built a small CRM in Notion.

I was already paying for it anyway (I use it in conjunction with Super, to power my personal homepage). Otherwise, I’d likely use Trello or a simple Google spreadsheet.

Google Docs

For larger writing projects and interviews, I usually use Google Docs. I’m often fine typing directly into Substack’s editor, as it’s quite minimalist, but for bigger projects, I find Google Docs more helpful, as it allows me to jot down thoughts in comments, mark things, etc.

Google Calendar

I keep a little Google Calendar with a schedule for upcoming posts and interviews.

Namecheap

To manage my domains, including the calmfluffy.cloud, which is where the Substack currently sits, I use Namecheap. It’s fast and easy to use. Never had any issues with it.

ChatGPT

Firstly, I’m very selective in how I use ChatGPT as its output can be really iffy or misleading. However, it can be useful as a second set of eyes. For some of my writing, when I’m done, I’ll ask for a critique. It may bring up a concept I introduce but don’t close the loop on, or let me know when an argument I’m making is weak. It can be useful input, but the suggestions it makes are often very poor, so I ignore those.

In the past, I also used it for social media captions, but no matter how much I tweaked, it would keep coming up with the corniest copy, so in the end, I had to ask: is the time saved worth the lower quality in how I present my hard work? I decided it wasn’t. Especially after I realised the Instagram audience needed its own strategy completely.

I also think there’s a lot to say for digital craftsmanship that doesn’t lean on cultural synthesis, which I’ll be writing about more later this month.

That’s it. I don’t use any extra analytics tools beyond what Substack offers natively, because the type of optimisation it unlocks simply doesn’t matter at this stage of building a publication.

Curious to hear about your processes. Drop a note in the comments.

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• Sustainable & fair fashion campaigner dropped an ‘anti-excess gift guide’ for the holiday season, with ideas ranging from self-made, to gifting experiences, things to make clothes last longer, and lots more. 🌱

• One of the first blogs I wrote for was Techdirt, which offers a critical, but often hopeful view of technology. Its founder, Mike Masnick, was recently involved in creating a manifesto to inspire Silicon Valley to have a more positive impact on the world. Read the Resonant Computing manifesto here (and sign it, if you like).

  

ᕱᕱ For your ears ᕱᕱ

I love the darkness of the shorter days we’re currently experiencing in Berlin, but I’m also a big fan of how infinite summer can feel on a good day, where you’re totally in the moment, and the sun takes many hours to set. That, in part, comes from a sense of nostalgia, because that presence seems to come naturally to young people. Or at least, it did to me.

A song that captures that feeling well, including the nostalgia, is Torus’ Summer of Love, which features a 00s dance-inspired, dreamy aesthetic and includes the famous ‘right here, right now’ sample from Fatboy Slim’s dance banger of the same name.

But a few years ago, as I came out of a particularly challenging period, I began to confront the uncomfortable in my personal life. I had hard conversations with important people in my life, and I started joining fitness classes, which eventually led to pilates. And dance.

I dove into all sorts. Improvisational classes, contemporary dance workshops, floorwork, gaga, house and hiphop and, recently, even tribal fusion belly dance.

At first, I felt like a fish out of water, especially as one of the few men in most of those classes (if not the only man). But after getting over my own discomfort a bit, I noticed others were uncomfortable too (not because of me, lol). I wasn’t the only fish out of water.

Observing the shared discomfort calmed me. It gave a sense of shared experience. And suddenly I was no longer a fish out of water. Had the tide picked me up?

Nothing had changed. The water, whether I was in or out of it, had been an illusion all along. My perception of myself changed the water's position. Not the other way around. If you feel like a fish out of water, that’s where you will find yourself.

In one improv-based dance class I occasionally join, led by Basque performer & facilitator Maddi Fuente Ubani, we’re given movement instructions and themes to work with. For the first part of the class, this is a solo activity. I would habitually keep my movements quite small and curbed. It was challenging to express myself with the entirety of my body and to extend myself. Every inch of me resisted. But I danced anyway.

In the past, I had solved dancefloor anxiety with alcohol and had only really danced in club or party contexts. Now, I had to either move through the anxiety and be immersed in it throughout the 1.5-hour session, or leave.

I knew I was there to challenge the discomfort, so no matter how bad it would get, I would stick it out and keep going. No matter how out of place I felt. I hated some of it, but also learned that the more I hated it in the moment, the prouder I’d feel of myself that I stuck through.

(A small note on the word ‘hate’: I approach this word playfully when I use it, and with softness. It’s shorthand for something more complex. I’ll feel the emotional reaction to the discomfort, acknowledge it, and dance anyway.)

But solo exercises are one thing. Partner exercises are a different beast altogether. At this stage in the session, you’re asked to explore the themes together with someone. You also get an instruction to follow, which can simply be “if one is low, the other has to be up.” But you don’t define who leads; this is a dynamic you’ll have to explore together.

Suppose one of the people in such an exercise starts bouncing up and down without looking at their partner. In that case, they come to fully define and dominate the dynamic of that dance, with their partner being stuck following that pattern (at least until they figure out how to use this limitation to express themselves).

So at first, I approached these exercises gently. Trying to read my partner and softly nudging towards where I wanted to go with my exploration. I didn’t want my expression to be their limitation.

Then one day, I could tell I was paired up with a fellow fish out of water who didn’t seem to be all that sure of herself. I decided to extend myself and to make my movements bolder and easier to follow. It helped immediately. It gave her structure and clarity, and instead of me becoming overly dominant in the dynamic, it helped her express herself and push towards where she wanted to go and explore, too.

It opened up space for both of us.

Suddenly, I realised: “By making myself smaller, I’m creating ambiguity rather than clarity, which doesn’t do anyone any favours.”

But it wasn’t really a ‘thought-realisation’. It was physical. I experienced it with my whole body, my emotions, and my thoughts.

It was as if a life lesson had just zapped me like a lightning bolt. I would have paused to contemplate and integrate it, but the dance continued, partners switched, and I got to put it into practice immediately.

That doesn’t mean I’m the most confident dancer. Hell, those tribal fusion bellydance classes I mentioned at the start are among the most uncomfortable, humbling, and frustrating experiences I’ve had this year. Nearly 40 years of learned movement won’t change overnight. But I’m rewiring.

And this is why I think everyone should dance, or more broadly, explore movement.

Push out of your comfort zone into domains where you have nothing familiar to lean on. What you might learn could be quite different from what I learned; in fact, it could be the opposite.

જ⁀➴ for your curiosity જ⁀➴

• Two of my favourite publications on Substack just hit 300k subscribers. One is called , which writes about art and history (this explainer of Lord of the Ring’s Tom Bombadil character is a great example of why I’ve been following them since back when X was still Twitter). The other is called which mostly sends out digests containing a broad variety of wholesome topics. Both warmly recommended. Congrats!

• Carlo Kiksen and I go way back. We studied together for a year and teamed up in 2020 to run a free marketing & business bootcamp for musicians called the during the pandemic. Carlo writes a regular newsletter aimed at artists, , and in his most recent piece he describes how he built a web-based synth in just a few hours (and how basically anyone can do so). If you want to build something, but don’t have any ideas, I hope this can serve as a creative spark.

• If you find New Year’s resolutions work for you, how about cutting social media next year? has written an excellent guide about how & why she did it, that you can use as a template for yourself. Maybe it convinces you not even to wait any longer.

ᕱᕱ For your ears ᕱᕱ

I love it when people bring genres together in a way that creatively mix the best of both. On his latest album, composer and trumpetist Ambrose Akinmusire brings together a thoughtful mix of alternative jazz and hiphop featuring words by improvisational vocalist Kokayi.

I was impressed with how easy it was to generate interfaces on the fly. Then realised I should start thinking about LLMs as operating systems; an operating system being something that launches software to assist the user with tasks.

But what if, for many tasks, pre-installed software isn’t necessary anymore, and the user interfaces (UI) can just be generated by the AI?

“This is not the future of the internet. It is here already. It’s just not how most people use the internet yet.

• Today: widespread ChatGPT use. People spin up mini-apps in the form of prompts to solve basic, everyday problems. Answers are usually returned in a conversational format.

• Tomorrow: people will engage with AI to let LLMs generate custom user interfaces, tailored to their or their team’s specific needs.”

Fast forward to November 18, when Google announced the rollout of ‘generative UI’ to their products, including search. Our media environment is evolving at a breakneck pace.

To get a sense of how astonishing this is, try to rewind time by five years. It’s the first year of the pandemic, and the ‘metaverse’ is popping off (or is it?). The momentum of the VR and online gaming domains was suddenly bolstered by everyone staying at home. People went clubbing online, virtual events became mainstream, and elsewhere, creatives banded together to build exciting infrastructure on blockchain through NFTs and DAOs.

We thought we were seeing the future. Yet nightclubs set in Minecraft still took multiple people months to build. And don’t even get me started on the complexity of building on blockchains.

The question then was: what does the future hold now that online culture has become part of the average person’s daily life?

The question today is much bigger: what does it mean when we primarily connect to the web through operating system-type interfaces, which then spin up personalised and custom interfaces at the tap of a button?

What if solving one’s problem isn’t about finding a good app for it, but simply spawning one?

In a study, Google examined how people evaluate generative UIs for topics such as the history of timekeeping devices, fractals, and teaching basic puppy tricks. While custom-made sites by human experts slightly outperformed AI-generated interfaces, the latter outperformed other AI output and Google’s top search result by a large margin. (link to study PDF)

One important caveat is that the time to serve results wasn’t included in the study participants’ evaluations. This means that if a website takes a second to render, whereas a custom-generated UI takes a minute to appear, the frustration someone experienced while waiting is not captured in the score.

So, we’re not there, in the generative operating system version of the future, quite yet. But given the amount of data Google has access to, it should be trivial for them to quickly render commonly requested interfaces for their users. And from there scale to more niche cases.

While it’s easy to generate a user interface, they’re still a far cry from fully-fledged apps, so don’t expect popular services like Duolingo, Uber, or Spotify to go anywhere.

I want to leave you with a few thought starters to think about the future.

What does it mean when:

• apps become temporary tools instead of destinations?

• most interfaces you use only exist for a few minutes?

• operating systems interpret goals instead of launching apps?

• interfaces are personalised by default?

• two people see different interfaces for the same task?

• the fastest way to solve something is to spawn a UI instead of searching for one?

• the boundary between “searching” and “doing” disappears?

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ᕱᕱ For your ears ᕱᕱ

I’ve been listening to the intricately experimental electronic album by Oneohtrix Point Never called Tranquilizer, which came out last week. I enjoy that it sounds futuristic and nostalgic simultaneously, likely due to OPN’s smart use of old 90s sample libraries found on the Internet Archive.

This happened against the backdrop of the recent Dutch parliamentary elections following the fall of a populist right-wing government. In the run-up to these elections, anti-asylum seeker demonstrations erupted in violence multiple times, with one in The Hague leading to torched police cars and the smashing of the party office windows of the Netherlands’ liberal democratic party, D66.

Those far-right AI songs? Not against the terms of service, according to a statement by the music streaming market leader, reports Dutch newsletter AD (translation mine):

“Spotify does not allow work that “incites violence or hatred against protected groups or promotes violent extremism” with an “immediate risk” in the real world. According to Spotify, the song does not do that.”

This definitely made me scratch my head for a moment, at the risk of entrapping my fingers in my luscious though oft-tangled locks.

Last week, another music streaming service, Deezer, reported receiving over 50,000 fully AI-generated tracks per day. At this rate, that would mean nearly 20 million per year, or 38 per minute.

With anyone able to generate tracks with a few clicks, streaming services will have to reckon with moderation, lest they become comment sections.

Popular music = economics

Music has undergone massive changes over the past 150 years. Popular music, as in music that people in your community are all likely to know, was folk music. Songs that travelled. Songs that a person in your community was best at performing. Some songs would be new and specific to your community, and others might be centuries old.

Then the recording came. And mass consumption.

Instead of a participative music culture, most music was primarily consumed: through records, then downloads, then streams. Music as a format shifted, too: from albums, to single-track downloads and iTunes playlists, to infinite personalised recommendation-based radio stations.

Music creation is also a tale of consumerist culture and economics. Big bands got dethroned by pop and rock bands, who in turn lost their place at the center of popular culture to hiphop (or pop influenced by the genre): economically much more efficient with drum machines & microphones. And then electronic music blew up globally, which can be made with just a laptop and performed by DJs travelling with not much more than a USB drive.

This is not intended to read like a tale of cynical greed, but rather one of systems and incentives. The system of consumerism rewards economic efficiency until every last cent of profitable return has been squeezed out.

In the process of the economic squeeze, a few genies have been let out of the bottle, undermining the system built by the recording industry itself.

Genie in a out the bottle

Around the time Christina Aguilera released her breakthrough hit Genie In A Bottle, the systemic incentives toward cost-efficiency had come bearing down on the recording industry. This happened most notably through online technologies, which reduced the cost of music reproduction and distribution to almost zero. Many music fans chose to sail the high seas of piracy. We all know the story from there: over a decade of decline in recorded music revenues.

The other genie that had been let out of the bottle was that almost everyone could now make music. Got a PC? Got an internet connection? Now you can have a small studio on your laptop, whether by purchasing music production software or donning a virtual eye patch and sailing the high seas (which is how many producers of that generation got started).

No longer did you have to get an A&R at a record label to ok your project for it to have a chance to be recorded and heard by people. Just do it yourself.

The 2008 documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto, featuring mash-up artist Girl Talk, perhaps captures this cultural moment of the late 2000s best.

Slowly, active participation in pop culture returned to the mainstream through remix and mashup culture, which many corners of the record industry vigilantly tried to fight until it found ways to monetise it through content identification systems that redirect digital revenue streams to rightsholders.

Online, popular music started behaving a bit like folk music again. Participative. Communal. And context-specific.

Over time, these remixes could behave like memes. Music catalogues made their way into Instagram Stories and TikTok. If you’re too young to remember the internet before that era, it’s hard to make clear how restrictive things were.

Music creators, who could now really be anyone, started gaming the existing structures. Some through nefarious means like botting streams, or by now-common industry practices like releasing loads of short tracks, so you rack up higher streaming counts (and royalties), or releasing so regularly that you never fall off of people’s Release Radar playlists.

The result:

Many tens of thousands of tracks are added to streaming services daily.

And this was before AI.

We should not be surprised that music has lost many of its 20th-century characteristics.

Entire industries have focused their energy on ensuring that music is ever easier and ever cheaper to make and distribute, whilst hyperpersonalising it to ensure people have something to listen to all the time. “Music for every moment”, as Spotify’s marketing campaign slogans rang.

Generative and adaptive music was always going to happen.

Music as language

In a way, we’ve come full circle. Music has historically been one of humanity’s most important venues for storytelling. In recent centuries, music has gone through an extraordinary process of professionalisation. In the 20th century, it became incredibly difficult for the average individual to tell stories through music that sounded on par with music supported by record labels.

The economics pursued by the record industry ultimately undermined their cultural monopoly by weakening their gatekeeper position. If anyone can create & distribute music cheaply, creators don’t have as much need for record companies’ financial resources. So the record industry went from taste-making to taste-chasing, supporting artists at slightly later stages of their careers, often after they could show traction with fans or the ability to go viral.

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke once called Spotify “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.” His critique came in the context of a hopeful era of the web. He thought music didn’t need another intermediary, and certainly not one as closely aligned with the major labels’ interests. Ultimately, the battle for the web was won by middlemen who sit between artists and fans: Meta, TikTok, Google / YouTube, Apple Music, the list goes on. For what it’s worth, I think it’s good that at least one of these intermediaries has its roots in music. But I digress.

Thom Yorke called it. He thought the recording industry was losing relevance compared to its role in the previous century.

Now we’re seeing that play out.

If everyone can express their ideas through music with just a few clicks, what role do the recording industry’s streaming services have?

The choices streaming services face

The Netherlands’ viral charts on Spotify turned into your typical 2025-era internet comment section. This was only changed after the distributor of most of the far-right AI tunes, DistroKid, became aware and decided to pull the plug on them.1

What’s worse is that 97% of listeners struggle to distinguish between AI-generated and non-AI music. That means the emotional impact of generated songs will, at least upon discovery, be similar to ‘human music’.

I believe that music in the 20th century was an anomaly. It was a product of an era of mass media and a time when few people had the means to produce and distribute music. As we moved into networked media, music could become small again: relevant only to specific contexts. This can be a national political context, but also a particular WhatsApp group. Memes already behave this way, because they’ve long been easy to create with image editing. Now it’s music’s turn.

And this is not new. I used to be on hiphop forums where people would record tracks to battle each other, for an online audience of maybe a few hundred people. This was in the early 2000s, when computers didn’t come with built-in mics or sound cards that made recording easy.

The future already happened, and now it is taking hold of popular culture.

At the start of 2024, I published a piece titled Will AI correct the anomaly of the 20th century music business? in which I concluded:

“We might comfort ourselves with the thought that we’re not there yet, but if the last 2 years have shown us anything it’s that things can move fast. Lightning fast.

In the introduction I mentioned the question “what happens when anyone can just make a song with a text prompt?” but I believe this question to be irrelevant, because before we can formulate a meaningful answer, the above will have already come to fruition.

Even with the above just around the corner, we should act like we are already there. What we believe to be true in the future, is true now. If we hold it to be evident, inevitable, the best thing we can do is to behave like it is already the case, at least part of the time.”

Streaming services will have to pick a strategy.

Are they going to be comment sections? Will they be vestiges of the type of recorded music that emerged in the 20th century? Will generative music services like Udio (now licensed by the world’s largest major label) and Suno (still under legal pressure) become the platforms for this type of music instead?

There are many, many roads.

Reasons to stay Calm & Fluffy

My goal with this newsletter is to bring calm to people. That means explaining technology and exploring paths forward. While topics like far-right violence and AI displacing human-created music in the charts might not be the calmest and fluffiest of topics, I find it important to address these issues regardless.

What makes me hopeful is this:

• More people are making (recorded) music than ever.

• Many people, especially musicians, are dissatisfied with the status quo of music streaming. This is not something that is fixed. As a matter of fact, I think music is going through its most significant transformation in decades.

• The future is uncertain. This means YOU get to play a role in it. Your imagination, your creativity, and your expression can all play a part in it.

• What is surfacing today feels like the future, but some of it has been decades in the making. What is the future that is happening now that nobody is paying attention to?

What do you want to see? What do you want the future to look like?

Let your light be the spark.

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Want a deeper dive on the above topic? Travel back to the future with me and see how well my predictions from early 2024 have held up so far:

MUSIC x

✘ Will AI correct the anomaly of the 20th century music business?

Musicians and other artists worry about their futures in the age of AI. Rightfully so. We may have assumed that we had fully entered the Information Age when PCs got hooked up to the internet in the 90s, or when smartphones found their way into every pocket, and practically all information was available at our fingertips via community-built datasets on …

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2 years ago · 25 likes · 3 comments · Bas Grasmayer

YouTuber The Plain Bagel is a level-headed financial analyst who regularly challenges the myths peddled by ‘finfluencers’ and creates educational videos on personal finance and investing. In a recent video, he addresses the question: Are we in an AI bubble?

I get why people jump to AI to generate some artwork for their latest Substack post or a presentation. I’ve been there too. I often find that AI-generated artwork undermines the creativity and original thinking in someone’s work.

To make it easy to give your work the visual support it deserves, Jordan Acosta has put together a great piece on free-to-use picture resources for writers, with paintings and photography from around the world (+ more in his follow-up post).

ᕱᕱ For your ears ᕱᕱ

One for the technoheads… or the techno-curious. Nowadays, DJ slots are often limited to 60 or 90 minutes, leaving performers little room to truly take their audience on a journey.

For this reason, every once in a while, I’ll pop over to Berghain, where DJs get 3-hour slots, so they have room to express and experiment.

One regular name to perform there is Dustin Zahn, who put together this excellent set in 2013, back when the average tempo hovered around somewhat lower BPM ranges than today.

Most of us didn’t listen.

Surveys show the average European kitchen relies on only a handful of herbs, though each one adds thousands of unique plant compounds linked to better health.

Through those compounds, spices do more than make things taste nice. People who cook with a wider variety of herbs and spices tend to have better markers for heart and metabolic health.

If that sounds overwhelming, start small. Here are a few easy ways to start spicing up your life immediately:

1. Use spice mixes instead of single spices and use those instead of plain salt and pepper. For a versatile start, check out za’atar, garam masala, and herbes de Provence.

2. Add a bit of cinnamon and/or cardamom to your coffee.

3. Gently spice up your morning oats or cereal with cloves, cardamom, or allspice (aka pimento).

4. For your potato chips, add curry powder to your mayonnaise. Or for the Berliner twist: add curry powder to your ketchup.

5. Make your own low-effort mixes:

   1. a fresh blend to lift cold or mild foods like salads or eggs (dill, parsley, lemon zest)

   2. a warm mix for roasts, soups, and stews (cinnamon, cumin, paprika)

   3. a bright mix to add punch to dressings, sauces, and snacks (chilli, coriander, lime zest).

6. Roast some nuts in a dry pan and sprinkle chilli flakes on them when done.

7. Add warmth to your rice or scrambled eggs by stirring in turmeric.

8. Vegetables like Brussel sprouts or even potatoes are well complemented by a dash of nutmeg.

9. Alternate parsley and coriander leaves as a garnishes for soups, vegetables, or chop them and mix in with couscous, bulgur, or rice dishes.

10. Once you’re used to adding in some spice, try out a new one each month. Easy starts: mustard seeds, fenugreek, nigella, and sumac.

I think it’s incredible, almost magical, how these spices, especially if eaten variedly, nourish our bodies and brains in so many different ways.

Cooking is the alchemy we do every day. For example, did you know that when pasta is cooked and then cooled, its starch structure changes? This then has various benefits like lower glucose spikes, better gut health, and lower insulin response (reducing risk of type 2 diabetes). Small difference; big impact.

Now put on your 90s platform shoes and open that spice rack.

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જ⁀➴ for your curiosity જ⁀➴

I want to give a shout out to the book How To Build a Healthy Brain here. I read it a while back and it sparked greater awareness of my eating habits and their impact on my life. This, in turn, led to the above article. As well as my piece about blueberries:

The book’s author, psychologist Kimberley Wilson, has just launched a new podcast with BBC called Complex, which does a great job at unpacking psychological terms and labels you hear every day. Find it on your fav podcasting app.

~

Amsterdam’s legendary record store & label has launched a Substack that is well worth your time, if you’re into deep musical and subcultural dives. Their first post dives into the 1980s rise of “Techno Kayō”: a genre of poppy melodies, Kraftwerk-influenced electronic sounds, with a distinct Japanese twist:

“Japanese pop music producers and songwriters were constantly following the latest musical inventions and trends from abroad, and as a consequence elements of disco, dub, hip hop, New Wave, R&B and reggae began to be incorporated into techno kayo.”

Read more on Rush Hour’s Substack.

~

An essay caught my eye titled How to end your extremely online era, which has a good analysis of how we end up spending so much time looking at screens, and what do do about it:

“The biggest problem is that you cannot just rip out three or four hours of your day you used to spend on a screen and expect to get along fine. You have to replace the online stuff with something else. Ideally, something better.”

It then follows-up with a variety of suggestions for how to spend your time. I have some suggestions of my own, too:

ᕱᕱ For your ears ᕱᕱ

I am ready for winter. So much so, that I wanted to find ambient music that reminds me of the crackling of ice and the bite of freezing cold air on my cheeks. I should have probably asked of , an excellent newsletter that dives deep into the world of ambient, and other music. Instead, I turned to /r/ambientmusic and the community certainly delivered. I got dozens of recommendations within hours of posting.

Here are three that stood out to me (and I wasn’t familiar with yet).

What I’m still looking for:

• Most of the recommendations were fairly drone-y. I like that, but I’m also curious about more melodic winter adventures.

• All the recommendations I looked into were produced by men. Surely, there must be women producing fantastic, frosty ambient.

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Thomas Köner - Permafrost (1993)

Ominous. Lonely. Isolating. This is a rather minimalist album of cold drone that at times feels like the reverbs of a deep icy cave, and at others like the winds on a blindingly white arctic plain.

YouTube | Discogs

Sleep Research Facility - Deep Frieze (2007)

Inspired by Antarctic weather stations and the deeply minimalistic inhospitality of polar regions, this album has a bit more texture than Permafrost, but still feels ice cold.

Bandcamp

Pjusk - Sval (2010)

Hailing from Norway’s west coast, Pjusk do a great job of translating the “harsh weather and wild landscape” into sound. This album is the most rhythmic of the three and a good way to awaken from your brief ambient winter slumber.

Bandcamp

Calm & Fluffy started as a tattoo idea; a note to myself to find resilience in softness. The newsletter came later, when I realised that what I was doing may also benefit others.

I kept hearing from people around me that these are challenging times.

And I knew it, too, but I didn’t feel it.

Despite believing things are only going to get harder, I felt great in the present moment. In fact, I can’t remember a time when I felt as good as I did earlier this year, despite worries.

The world is full of trouble. Genocides, increasing wealth inequality, growing authoritarianism, and climate change on top, which will keep manifesting challenges throughout our lifetimes and the next generations’.

In the face of all that, it’s obvious to be angry. But anger can quickly turn into a sense of embittered powerlessness. Considering my foray into politics, I certainly wasn’t a stranger to that feeling.

But I refuse to feel bitter. I refuse to carry the emotional burden that is the result of the greed, incompetence, or misguidedness of a powerful few. I can harden in response to the toughness of the material world, dominated by their decisions. Or, I can take control of the part of the world that will always be mine and mine alone.

So I choose softness. Over and over.

To be fluffy like a cartoon cloud.

To occupy my mind with ideas that nourish it.

To nurture my body to foster resilience; physically and emotionally.

I want to be there for myself. To feel agency, despite challenges. And no matter how hard things get, I’m going to be able to show up for friends and to support the people around me.

To be an oasis of calm in a harsh desert.

Something fluffy to squeeze, to make you smile, and feel optimistic.

No matter what.

And despite believing the future is full of challenges, I’m incredibly optimistic about our capacity to confront them. As long as we can find moments to be calm & fluffy, we’ll be ok.

જ⁀➴ for your curiosity જ⁀➴

American journalist A.J. Jacobs is no stranger to life experiments. Previously, he attempted to live ‘biblically’, to show how selectively fundamentalists follow scripture. In his latest stunt, he went 48 hours without AI. Sounds easy, but it’s not. AI runs through everything:

• our food supply chains

• our electricity grids and water systems

• our phones and apps

He had to live offline, collect rainwater, and even forage for edible weeds in New York’s Central Park. Read (or listen to) the article here.

~

just penned a fantastic essay titled Healing is making us mean, which reads as a criticism of post-Covid era individualism, abetted by therapy-speak:

““healing” became less about connection and more about control. Less about understanding ourselves, and more about explaining ourselves; justifying every boundary, every reaction, every ~vibe shift~ with a diagnosis.”

Read the article here.

ᕱᕱ for your ears ᕱᕱ

Len Faki and Honey Dijon are both mainstays of the underground electronic scene with sizeable followings among techno fans. This week I stumbled upon their track Temple Of Love, released on Ostgut Ton, the in-house label of Berlin’s Berghain nightclub, in November 2021, as club culture worldwide was finding its footing after nearly two years of disruption.

Rather than a peak-time banger, the 10-minute track carries a type of dancefloor-adjacent soothing ambience many yearned for as they spent lonely days at home during shutdowns.

Check the whole compilation out here.

The challenge

Earlier this year I ran an experiment in which I left my phone at home whenever I’d go out. It was challenging, fun, and wholesome. I did not get bored, and everything was much more manageable than I expected.

For the month of October, I wanted to do an inverted version of the same challenge: can I go offline at home after 8pm?

My rules were: no notifications in the evening, no TV shows, no video games, or other digital media besides music and podcasts. If you’d like, you can go back and read more here:

The first difficulties

I almost immediately ran into things I didn’t consider before starting the challenge.

I’d go to a dance or yoga class with a friend at 6pm. This means I’d leave the house at 5.30pm and return around 8pm. The end result: I’d be offline and unreachable for 14 hours at a time, multiple times a week.

That’s not always convenient, so I’d want to quickly check my messages before “offline time”. Do I do that at the studio? Do I ask my friend to wait, since we’re cycling in the same direction? Or do I hang out in the street to get my online-fix before I go into my building?

It felt like the online world forced itself into my life more that way, instead of less.

So I broke my rules.

Or rather, I made a new one.

I’d allow myself a 5-minute window in the evening to quickly settle a few things if I’d been out before.

That worked quite well and is something I’ll keep doing from now on (probably in the form of using my phone just briefly, once per hour, after dark).

What sucked

As the month progressed, I found the experiment much more challenging than my no-phone experiment. The way I had set it up, basically meant that I wouldn’t look at screens after 8pm.

Seemed easy. I enjoy spending vast amounts of time by myself, in my own head.

I currently live alone, mostly work from home, and might see friends a few times a week, if that. I’m comfortable with that. I used to move around a lot between countries, so I had to learn to enjoy my own company and that of friends who might not be in the same city.

However, ripping the prime time of the day during which I communicate with some of my friends was quite an isolating experience, especially without anything to put in its place besides reading and cooking.

So, after a week, I switched out of monk-mode, allowing myself to watch Twin Peaks to finally see what the fuss is about.

The lesson learned is that I may need a few more offline hobbies so that I can switch it up more easily in the evenings.

Eventually, I also ended up shifting from 8pm to a looser 9-9.30pm so that I could communicate with some friends in the evenings.

By deviating from the original constraints of the experiment, I found a new rhythm for myself that I intend to nurture.

What stuck

Despite the changes, some things stuck almost immediately.

After that first week of being fully offline in the evenings:

• I still ignored all notifications in the evenings.
  Or rather, they were muted. I often enter focus mode for work, where I mute everything, so I can get stuff done. Having a daily ritual in which I treat my free time the same way has become so worthwhile.

• No more ‘procrastination’ consumption.
  I no longer check news sites, social media, or short video apps in the evenings. They’re not adding much to life in that moment, other than entertainment, but it’s not a particularly valuable source of entertainment either.

  

  Instead, I chose art & entertainment with intention, such as those Twin Peaks episodes (from which the meme above stems). This emerging rule made it very easy for my mind to distinguish between time-wasting and time-investment. And to zap whatever behaviour doesn’t belong in my evening ritual.

• I found it easier to wind down & fell into a very stable rhythm.
  I’m not someone who easily calls it a day. Exercising has been a big help, as it allows me to release excess energy that comes with a pretty sedentary lifestyle. Unfortunately, I entered this experiment with an injury, which meant I couldn’t rely on my usual exercise to calm my often-overstimulated mind. Luckily, I didn’t need to.
  
  I found myself winding down and waking up at the same time each day. Without looking at clocks or setting alarms. Even after nights out that disrupted that pattern.

So what is the result of the experiment?

1. I developed some new habits that I’m keeping (the list above).

2. It turned out to be significantly harder than leaving my phone at home for a month. Which makes sense, because I’m either all-in or I struggle to remain interested and motivated. This made it interesting to observe how that expressed itself during this challenge.

If you’ve also been participating in the challenge, I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments.

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જ⁀➴ Elsewhere

In August, I penned a piece making the case for distributed ownership of platforms built on human creativity (e.g. ChatGPT). For , followed up, arguing that generative AI is a structural turning point, the ownership of which is crucial to securing the future of music. Read it here.

(- ‿- ) For your ears

Goat is a Swedish band whose music is best described as psychedelic. The Guardian once described them as:

“If Slipknot dug Sun Ra they’d sound like this.”

To celebrate the 1st anniversary of their most recent self-titled album. The band got producer human language to rework the album, resulting in some of the most pleasant beats I’ve heard in a minute. If you’re into music like DJ Shadow, J Dilla, Mr. Dibbs, or RJD2, this is probably right up your alley.

I’m considering making quarterly mixtapes of tunes to nurture your calm & fluffy self. It’s totally fine to vote no. We all have our own ways of discovering music. •‿•