about

Jasper Wijnands Recording and performing as Shook

Music found him early. Through the keys of a family piano, through a worn copy of Bach's organ works discovered in a bookshop with his father, through the sound of gamelan heard live in Indonesia with his grandmother. Those early moments didn't just shape his taste. They shaped his understanding of what music is for.

He grew up between worlds. Born in the Netherlands to a mother who emigrated from China via Suriname, with roots that stretch across Asia, he has spent his life as a bridge between East and West, between classical structure and electronic freedom, between what is felt and what can be said. As a kid in Delft, he spent hours in a record shop that no longer exists, pulling Herbie Hancock and CAN from the shelves. Funk and krautrock sitting next to each other like it made perfect sense. It did, to him. It is no coincidence that his musical heroes, from Ryuichi Sakamoto to Yellow Magic Orchestra, were themselves bridge-builders. Or that Debussy, who transformed Western music after hearing gamelan for the first time, understood something Shook has known since childhood: that the most honest music has no single origin.

What followed was a decade of building something harder to define. He collaborated with Shinichiro Yokota, pioneer of Japanese house music and co-founder of Far East Recording alongside Soichi Terada. Both Terada and Hideki Matsutake of Logic System and Yellow Magic Orchestra have spoken about his work. He collaborated with Legowelt, performed in Tokyo's underground, and composed a soundtrack for Lowell Observatory that TIME Magazine included in their list of the World's Greatest Places. His music found its way to NASA and Netflix' Better Call Saul.

Then there is this: his track "Always" became a personal anthem for astronaut Christina Koch. She played it to her husband from the International Space Station, 400 kilometers above the Earth, during her record-breaking mission. NASA shared it. The song traveled further than most music ever will. She is now heading to the Moon.

He releases selectively. Not everything makes it out. Only what feels true, only what comes from what he calls a harmony of heart and mind. The titles come after the music, never before. The music comes from somewhere he doesn't always fully understand himself.

That's the point.

Shook doesn't make music for a moment. He makes music for the long after — the kind that sits quietly in a room and means something different each time you return to it. Like an old book with someone else's notes in the margins. Like the first song you ever played, and never stopped hearing.