The Urban Monk

Short Album • Released 05.12.2025

The name Urban Monk has been with me since 2001.
Back then – shortly after MING – it wasn’t a title.
It was a tension between two worlds.

On one side: the cold skyline, concrete, noise, acceleration.
On the other: the longing for retreat, for inner stillness,
for a space untouched by the demands of the outer world.

That friction shaped the term.
And in the same year, I founded my Tai Chi Chuan school Shen Ming –
a place where I first understood that the real path does not lie outside,
but in the body, in the breath, in the act of aligning oneself.

For more than two decades, Urban Monk remained a shadow concept –
a quiet companion, always there, never fully defined.
I knew it was more than a name.
It was an archetype.
A posture of being.

Twenty-four years later, I finally spoke it out loud.
In music.
Short. Raw. Stripped back.
An imaginary soundtrack to a figure born from conflict,
now carrying the clarity of someone who has lived long enough
to understand what an Urban Monk truly is.

The Urban Monk (Original Soundtrack) is not a traditional album.
It is a retrospective –
but told through the eyes of someone
who learned that the monk is not found in the mountains,
and the city is not the enemy.

It is the courage to find stillness in the middle of movement.
The body as temple.
The breath as path.
The music as mirror.

The album is brief, deliberate, laconic –
an echo from the past,
shaped by an insight that could only emerge
through 24 years of practice, rupture, and transformation:

Urban Monk is not external.
Urban Monk is internal.