About me & the relaxdaily project

How and WHY I do what I do. And why I believe you and I can not only live a peaceful and fulfilled life, but also positively change our being, thinking, our environment and the world. One moment at a time.

I currently live and work in Heidelberg, Germany, where I find inspiration also through daily walks in the region’s beautiful forests.

My Artist Statement

…to create, to be aware, to dream, to connect

To create

I enjoy playing the piano freely, experimenting with sounds and patterns on a keyboard, adding simple elements with an electric or acoustic guitar, recording my ideas into a laptop or a computer, and structuring things until wonderful music emerges, one that feels just right and sounds tasty to my ears. When I create, no one tells me what to do and when to do it. I decide. I feel free. I like the independence and responsibility that comes with creating and sharing music I’m proud to share.

To be aware

I'm a very sensitive person. Yes, I experience love, warmth, and happiness around me. I also experience and see harshness, coldness, and misery. Sometimes I feel like an alien being on the wrong planet. How can a smart species like ours keep doing things that make many of us feel unnecessarily and permanently stressed, making many mentally or physically hurt or ill? I feel sad when I think about the toxins we release every day through products and processes into our environment, destroying the planet, our home, and steadily poisoning ourselves. I feel stressed by the noise we produce mostly through vehicles and machines. I feel sorry for all who become ill or even die from living a wrong life or maintain a wrong work style or both. Most don’t see it coming. I get really sad when I think about how inhuman we treat each other in some areas of work and life, still today in 2020. Why do I keep seeing this, instead of focusing on what good we already accomplished and what beauty there already is in my life? I don’t know. But that’s how I am and who I am. This negative energy gets into my system. And then, what I believe happens is, I try to turn it around and create a soundtrack that wants reality to be the opposite.

To dream

So I create music. For myself, and for you. Music that possibly could be summarized with the German word ‘Geborgenheit’. I only recently stumbled upon this word. There's no direct translation into most languages. It means on the one hand feeling safe and secure and on the other hand feeling closeness, warmth, calmness, and inner peace. A place that makes you feel safe, where you know you are loved and treated well, no matter what happens. Like home should be. Like we could be. There's simply not enough ‘Geborgenheit’ thinking in our global society yet. Imagine it to be a core idea of life on earth and the overarching code for how we behave, do business, build cities, treat each other, the planet, and ourselves. What a foundation this could be. What a base to develop our true, almost limitless capacity as individuals and society upon.

To connect

I started the relaxdaily music project in 2011 with a simple mission: To create the planet’s most influential relax music collection. Back then I didn’t see my WHY as clear as I do today. I know that my music can do much more than to help feeling well. For many it additionally serves as a trigger to unlock an already existing body function: To enter a state of mindfulness, presence, and connection with the inner and outer world, which can be so powerful. This way we allow our best self, our best being, our best work to emerge. And like in my project's name, relaxdaily, when we allow ourselves to take breaks, rests, time-outs, when we stop thinking, worrying, being busy, consuming, when we just become present, become relaxed, maybe also allow our quiet inner voice to tell us something, that’s when magic can happen. In rests, you invite your subconscious power, your heart-brain, to have a word. Often it says something very true, something your thinking brain would not tell you, something that can change your life positively. It’s up to you to follow, to plan, to manifest. Big dreams, or small steps, it doesn’t matter. What matters is it feels true to you. If you tick like me, you’ll go for something that leads to ‘Geborgenheit’, health, true growth, and true happiness.

More than 100.000 wonderful humans choose to tune into relaxdaily music every day already. For me, this is a sign that we’re on a right path. Transforming our days, our lives, our world, one tune at a time, one moment at a time.

I’m Michael Fesser. I proudly relaxdaily.

“I don’t use lyrics in my music. So the story of your life has space to breathe.”

- Michael, relaxdaily

“Everything happens in a logical order, even when we can’t see it ourselves.”

— Julia Westlin (a friend of mine)

The relaxdaily Timeline

>>> I’m still writing this ‘Timeline’ section here, slowly. I hope it will be complete in a few weeks, and then I’ll probably ad a few items per year, not sure about the final format yet. Feel free to start reading, in case you’re into history ;)

Pre relaxdaily

I got a little keyboard from my uncle when I was about 10. I remember I always loved creating my own little melodies since then. Freestyler from day one. Never was into sheet music. Call me lazy. My Latin teacher later would say so at least. Throughout the years most of the time you would find me playing on some keyboard, just for myself, record ideas, create tunes. I also played in a few regional German bands, really mixed, Punk Rock, Christian, Big Band, Pop-Rock, even one gig with a Ska band on an organ. I would play electric guitar, bass, keyboards, even sing, write a few songs. Also experimented with being a singer songwriter, developing my own material. I would educate myself with music production, record my ideas again and again, record a few bands, but always gravitating towards a career in music, and my own creative, artistic project, while supporting myself doing a non music day job.

During that time, while mostly educating myself through books and lots of own training, I earned an Audio Engineer Diploma from SAE (Campus Cologne, Germay), did a wonderful Berklee Online course on music production, and learned about the concept of YouTube from from Adam Bahner a.k.a. Tay Zonday. We met at the ASCAP Expo in Los Angeles in 2011. Adam introduced me to YouTube and the idea of being an online DIY music artist. Already then I was all about trying to slow down the busy life on earth: Find the easter egg (me, stopping the clock without worrying too much on the lines Adam sings) in our collaboration “This Is You”, for me a song about personal growth.


Relaxdaily - the name [2011]

Already on my flight back home I scribbled down ideas for a relaxation music project. I had the idea in mind to create an important relaxation music album. Only not on CD (the standard back then), but on a YouTube channel, one tune at a time. Collected countless ideas, I decided on the word combination relaxdaily, to relax daily. Being not a native American speaker I had no idea if this would be a sexy name for US ears. I still don’t know. I believe I wanted it to be universally understood. Once I decided, I sticked with it since then. Today, if I’d researched for a new one, I’d add my current Artist statement into account, going one step further, what a relaxed and happy person can achieve. I’m still very happy with relaxdaily though. It’s a good base.

First relaxdaily tune

It became N°001. I went for a titling strategy that was based on numbers, like classical composers did with their Symphonies. The ‘N°’ is inspired by a numbering system I once saw in France. Only after more than 100 relaxdaily tunes I’d start to wonder if this choice was the right decision…

B-Sides N°1 [2012]

A year into the project, after creating over 50 tunes, not much happened. I received beautiful comments that helped me to understand I’m doing something of value to others, but I was already giving more energy I actually had, creating music with as much love as I got, while making a living through a rather exhausting day job. I summarized the first 10 months with a collection I called “Essence N°1”. And a few weeks later I did a mix I called “B-Sides N°1” - yeah, the tunes I thought were, well, the B-Sides of year one. Turns out the B-Sides would basically become my hit and main channel driver for years to come, with the video having over 80 million plays to date.

I’m rich - let’s buy me a camera

With the video’s success came the first real YouTube money, the first money I felt great receiving, because it was based on over 10 years of past hard work preparing for a life as music creator. OK, not really rich, I still had to work most of the week on that day job, but now I had a grand to buy my first own camera and lens. I was inspired to do my own video footage, since I met Carlo, today an Award Winning Photographer / Director in the hostel I lived in during my visit to L.A. in 2011. So, now I have an own camera, let’s go shooting…

First relaxdaily videos with own video footage

I used licensed pictures for my YouTube videos up to N°051. Now possessing a camera I drove to Croatia with my brother in our family car. N°053 got a simple video that is based on footage collected on that trip. It felt exciting and important for me to add my own visual experiences to my project.

A few weeks later I was in Switzerland for a job with the company I still did my day job with. I took a day of to capture views for N°054, a production that felt like a film production for me from both, the video perspective and the music side - crazy me took a production setup with me to Switzerland, producing the tune in the hotel room. I’m proud of that one, it got the second name “Angel Mountain”.

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