About (continued)

IT ALL STARTED WHEN...

My friend Vasco designed an album cover for me and left it as a surprise when he was fixing my laptop and returned it. He inspired me deeply through his dedication to his creative pursuits and was the first one to believe in me as an artist, before I even believed in myself. That was in 2013.

At the time I was making arrangements of pop songs on the cello, practising performing with my loop machine and playing in other bands and as a session musician (my highlights to date are performing with Imogen Heap, Michael Kiwanuka and RY X). I was starting to get interested in recording and editing music, but didn’t have the knowledge or skills. I was also working full-time in a corporate dream job where I did have the knowledge and skills (as a community manager and social media manager), and travelled the world to cities like New York, Portland, Berlin, London, Barcelona and Prague for events and photo shoots with the likes of Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez and other ‘influencers’.

Fast forward to 2016 and I had started to feel stuck both at work and in my personal life and I needed to get out of it - but nothing was really working. So I decided to sign up for a 10-day Vipassana meditation course (as taught by S.N. Goenka in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin), which is a 10-day retreat with very strict rules, done in complete silence. Not only was the 10-days the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life, physically and mentally, it was the most rewarding experience I’ve ever had that would change my life forever. I learnt about freeing oneself from suffering, and that we hold the keys to our own shackles. This was an incredible insight and from that moment onwards I chose the most important pillar in my life: freedom.

But what did freedom mean to me? After the Vipassana course I started to explore this meaning further. In a strike of misfortune, which turned out to be the best twist of fate in the end, I lost my job through a company restructure and had to look for something else. Since my heart was always beating strongly to music, I knew that I wanted to work in music, and the first idea that came up was to work in music therapy as I was in this ‘healing mode’, but then I remembered my dream during university was to work at a record label, so there was that idea too. Let’s say I had a lot of options and I didn’t know exactly which direction to take.

I started reading the book ‘The Artist’s Way’ and it opened my mind to the next phase of my life. In one of the first chapters, Julia Cameron wrote ‘if you’re a true creative, you won’t be satisfied working next to creatives.’ In addition, she said if you were a writer at heart, you wouldn’t be happy being a copywriter writing texts for advertisements. Damn. This really spoke to me. I knew this meant only one thing: that my next chapter was to be a musician - of some sort. Still, with the mindset that I needed to make a living, I decided a music producer was the way to go and my aim was to work in a music agency that made music for advertisements.

That led to studying at Abbey Road Institute in Amsterdam to learn the skills necessary for a music producer, and one year later, in 2018, I graduated on the stage at Abbey Road Studios in London, where The Beatles recorded! What a special moment.

After my graduation, I tried to compose a lot of different types of commercial music: from soundtracks for film, game music, advertisement music, electronic music with cello, and I also tried to get a job at the best music agencies in Amsterdam, however without any success, not even one interview, even with my shiny new Advanced Diploma of Sound Engineering and Music Production under my belt. I was both disappointed and frustrated and it seemed that I wasted my time studying because I was at the very beginning of a new career switch and wasn’t going anywhere. At the time I was working at Red Bull Studios Amsterdam as an assistant recording engineer but I realised that that wasn’t for me either. I didn’t like recording the musicians behind the window, when it was more exciting to be the ones playing the instruments.

Then, I looked at all the options I had written down on my brainstorm for ‘how to make money in the music industry’ and asked myself:

‘if you could do something every day for the rest of your life - without money being an issue, what would that be?’

And the answer was: meditate & play the cello.

And that’s how I started my journey in 2019 as a music artist - a cellist who decided to make ambient cello music for the purpose of meditation.

I didn’t always make this kind of music though, in fact, I never made music at all! I started as a classical musician, where predictability, control, and mastering the art of a piece again and again through repetition was the norm. When meditation crossed my path and freedom became a key pillar of my life, it was clear that freedom would be the philosophy of the music I wanted to create and share with the world.

When I started to share my ambient cello music in 2019, I realised that it was powerful. Listeners told me the music helped them reach a meditative state, helped calm their nervous system down, helped them get to sleep, increased clarity and transformed their mood. And when I play, specifically when I am free to play without any rules or anything, I also reach a deep state where I am free to flow, with full trust in myself and I am totally present, and that’s the essence of what I want to share with you through my music today. Every piece of music that I make is created in the moment - sometimes with a small idea before I start but nothing is fully planned or pre-programmed.

I never imagined myself as a cellist composing original music, and I never believed that this was an option to make a full-time living, until I looked deep inside myself and realised that that was the only path that I would truly be happy with. The rest is history and I couldn’t be more happy with my chosen life path.

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For more about my story, read and watch these interviews: