About The Artist

I've always been an engineer of context.

I trained as an audio engineer, and the job was never really about the knobs. It was about shaping everything around a sound so that the right feeling came out of the speakers: the room, the order of the takes, what you leave out. Years later it dawned on me that I'd never actually stopped doing that. I'd only swapped the medium.

From the studio to the search box

These days I call myself a Context Engineer, which is the same instinct running in a different gear. I design the full context a system operates in so the right thing comes out the other end. In practice that splits two ways. Sometimes the work is making something legible wherever people happen to be searching. Sometimes it's making AI actually function inside a real business instead of demoing beautifully on a stage and then hallucinating an invoice on Monday. Same discipline, same engineer, very different room.

Why a search guy won't shut up about hip-hop

Here's the part most "about" pages would file under hobbies. I won't, because it's not decoration. Hip-hop is where I learned how I think, and if you've read anything else on this site you've already met the metaphors. So let me just tell you where they come from.

The culture stands on four elements: the DJ, the MC, the b-boy, the writer. DJing, MCing, breaking, graffiti. The record is where I actually live, which is why I came up DJing, collecting wax through the 90s and making beats before I ever studied any of it formally. The MC I hear less as the boss of the track and more as one more instrument sitting in the pocket, telling the story the music sets up. Take that voice away, though, and it's a chair with three legs. You need all four or the thing tips over.

So my corner is the crate. Hours in a dusty shop flipping through records nobody else stopped on, hunting the four-second break or the forgotten horn line that, in the right hands, becomes the spine of something brand new. It's patience disguised as a hobby. It's paying attention to the thing everyone walked straight past.

And there's a deeper thing in sampling that I've never quite gotten over. Nothing is new. Not really. Every record I love is built on an older one, and the magic was never in pretending otherwise; it was in what you did with the old thing. A producer pulls four bars off a record from 1971, slows it down, chops it, loops it, and says something nobody in 1971 could have said. The source still matters. The history still matters. You're standing on the shoulders of giants, and the polite thing, the right thing, is to know whose shoulders those are and say so out loud. Sampling done well is half craft and half credit.

So sampling became my model for almost everything. It's how I read the history of an idea, it's how I make a comparison land, and it's the honest answer to where any "new" thing actually comes from, including this one. When I frame AI as just another instrument waiting for someone with taste, or treat a SERP like a record bin, that isn't me reaching for a cute line. It's genuinely how the wiring runs in my head. I'll be honest: I only recently put words to the connection. The wiring is old; the noticing is new.

And before anyone asks: yes, I'm that guy about most new rap, the two old men in the balcony heckling the show. Usually I'm right. But the whole point of digging is that the gem is always in there somewhere, so I keep flipping, even through the stuff I'm grumbling at. The crate is the method.

The lenses I think through

Music is the loudest one, but it's not alone. Barbecue taught me patience, which is the exact opposite of every prompt trick I've ever been sold. Travel keeps me curious about the actual person behind a question. Sci-fi keeps me guessing about where all of this is heading. Sport is supposed to be on this list too, and in the interest of honesty I do far too little of it, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

The community

I'm tied into the SEO community both at home and abroad, which means SEObrein here in the Netherlands and the international circuit beyond it. Peers are the thing that keeps you honest, and they're where the genuinely good arguments happen. So if you ever feel like arguing with me about whether "GEO" is a real discipline or just a rebranded one, you know exactly where to find me.

Dig through the crates →