How a Week-Long Experiment (Almost) Became My Most Streamed Work

I remember the exact moment I opened Spotify analytics after three weeks of ignoring the upload.

(I was rather concentrating on promo and keeping an eye on my main artist channel, Symphonic ASMR being a side project).

So after three weeks of launch I opened the Analytics…

It was late 2023, and 101 Variations on Sadness Vol. I—thrown together in a single frantic week—had quietly gathered 33,000 monthly listeners.

Streams already past 100,000, climbing without any promotion.

The ascent lasted over a year and a half, steady and almost invisible, until Spotify shifted its recommendation engine and royalty policies and the curve dramatically leveled off.

Not my most streamed work by far (some of my spoken-word and trap albums have crossed a million all-time plays), yet this one felt different—strangers finding something personal in its fractured moods.

What exactly did they hear in those seven days of recordings?

The album began as a private exercise.

I sat at the piano and synths, pulling fragments from Mozart and Mahler—those luminous, aching motifs—and let them warp.

Some tracks are pure improvisation: a chord sequence that arrived unbidden, repeated until it frayed at the edges.

Others start with a recognizable classical phrase, then drift into lo-fi hiss, slowed tempos, reversed echoes.

Piano lines surface crisp for a bar or two before sinking into tape saturation.

Synth pads linger like half-remembered dreams.

Nothing is polished.

The style is almost conversational—music thinking aloud, circling sadness without forcing resolution.

It refuses the usual ambient comfort; instead, it lingers in the gray space where emotion feels distant yet persistent (a state psychologists might link to mild dissociation, where the self observes its own dulled affect).

The variations never quite repeat, yet they never escape the same narrow emotional bandwidth.

I produced it in one week because waiting felt dishonest.

Not seven polished studio days—seven late-night, half-improvised sessions where I chased a single impulse: take fragments of Mozart and Mahler, stretch them, fracture them, bury them under vintage lo-fi grit and drifting synth pads.

No grand plan.

No overdubs for perfection.

Just variations—101 short pieces that circle the same emotional territory without ever repeating themselves exactly.

The sound is hard to pin down because it refuses categories.

Piano lines emerge clean for a moment, then dissolve into tape-like warble.

A Mahler adagio motif appears, slowed until it sags, then snaps back into focus.

Everything feels slightly off-balance, as if the music itself is unsure whether to resolve or keep falling.

Melancholy that week was sharp and uninvited; the quickest way to process it was to distort familiar structures until they matched the inner distortion.

What do listeners say?

Listeners often describe it as “sad but not sentimental.”

That tension interests me most.

Sadness here isn’t cathartic release; it’s closer to what psychologists call anhedonic depression—the flat, gray zone where feeling itself becomes effortful.

Yet the variations keep moving, refusing stasis.

In that refusal there’s a small, stubborn persistence (something akin to Camus’ absurd hero pushing the rock, aware of the futility yet continuing the motion).

Vol. I stands at 35 pieces (out of the intended 101), but the series continues. Vol. II—35 more variations, leaner and even more stripped—has been on Spotify for some time.

Vol. III is already taking shape.

Now, for the first time, the complete Vol. I is on YouTube as a single uninterrupted video.

No breaks, no cutting the flow—just the full cycle with timestamps for every variation.

If you’ve ever needed sound that mirrors quiet persistence amid emotional flatness, this might speak to you.

Listen to the full album here: https://youtu.be/yEWRyj0m0MU

(And if Vol. I pulls you in, keep an eye out—Vol. II arrives on YouTube soon.)