The discovery happened by accident, which is how the best discoveries tend to happen.
I was in a hotel room in Graz, practicing late at night as usual. I had my props laid out on the desk and a streaming playlist running through the room’s Bluetooth speaker — not performance music, just something to fill the silence while I drilled sequences. The playlist was one of those algorithmically generated mixes that streaming services create based on your listening history, a chaotic soup of genres and decades that bore no relationship to anything I would have deliberately chosen.
A track came on that I had never heard before. It was from a genre I do not normally listen to, with a tempo and energy that felt completely wrong for the routine I was practicing. But something about the way the music built — the tension in the verse, the release in the chorus, the way the dynamic range expanded and contracted — aligned with the dramatic arc of what my hands were doing. I stopped drilling the technical elements and just performed the routine, start to finish, with this unexpected music playing underneath.
The combination was strange. It should not have worked. But it did. The music brought an emotional texture I had never associated with that routine, reframing the effect in my own mind. I saved the track and spent the next three evenings refining the timing until the music and the magic moved together as a single experience.
That routine became one of the highlights of a corporate keynote I delivered in Vienna a few weeks later. Several audience members specifically mentioned the combination — the way the music and the visual impossibility worked together to create something that felt unlike anything they had seen before.
I would never have found that track through a deliberate search.
The Limitation of Intentional Searching
When you sit down to find music for a routine, you bring your assumptions with you. You have a mental picture of what the music should sound like. You search within genres you associate with magic performance. You filter by tempo, by mood, by instrumentation. You are looking for something specific, which means you are excluding everything that does not match your preconceptions.
This is not necessarily wrong. Intentional searching, as I wrote about in the previous post, is one of two valid approaches to pairing music with effects. But it has a structural limitation: it can only find music that matches what you already imagine. It cannot find music that you would never have imagined, music that creates connections you did not know were possible.
Dan Harlan makes this point in his lecture on magic as theatre when he talks about crossing genres freely. Whatever fits the mood, he says. He mentions starting with obvious keyword searches but then moving beyond the obvious. The key phrase is “beyond the obvious.” The most interesting musical pairings in magic — the ones that distinguish a performer from everyone else doing similar effects — come from unexpected places. They come from genres and artists and tracks that a rational search process would never surface.
The challenge is creating conditions where these unexpected discoveries can happen. You cannot force serendipity, but you can make it more likely.
The Practice Radio Method
Here is what I started doing after that accidental discovery in Graz, and what I have continued doing in hotel rooms across Austria ever since.
When I practice — real practice sessions, the kind where I am drilling technique or running through routines — I leave music playing. Not silence. Not a curated performance music playlist. Something unpredictable. A streaming service’s discovery playlist. A genre-hopping radio station. A “release radar” mix. Anything that will expose me to music I did not choose and would not have chosen.
I keep the volume low enough that it does not interfere with concentration during technical work. The music is background, not foreground. Most of the time, I am not consciously listening. I am focused on whatever I am practicing. But the music is there, and my subconscious is processing it alongside the physical work my hands are doing.
Every once in a while — maybe once per ten or fifteen practice sessions — something catches my attention. A track comes on, and I feel a shift. The music connects with whatever I am doing in a way that makes me pause and listen more carefully. Sometimes the connection is rhythmic — the beat of the music matches the natural cadence of a sequence. Sometimes it is emotional — the mood of the track amplifies or interestingly contradicts the feeling of the routine. Sometimes it is structural — the song has a build, a turn, a resolution that mirrors the dramatic arc of the effect.
When this happens, I stop what I am doing and perform the routine from the beginning with the music playing at full volume. If the connection survives a complete run-through — if it still feels right when I am performing the whole routine rather than just drilling a fragment — I save the track and make a note. If it does not survive the full run, I let it go and return to practice.
Over the past year and a half, this method has produced about a dozen viable pairings. Of those, four made it into my performing repertoire. That conversion rate might sound low, but consider: four musical pairings that I would never have found through deliberate searching. Four combinations that feel fresh and distinctive because they come from outside the narrow genre boundaries that most performers search within. Four pieces where the audience hears something they do not expect, which heightens the unexpectedness of the magic itself.
Why Radio Still Works
I know that recommending radio in an age of streaming algorithms sounds almost quaint. But radio — actual broadcast radio, whether terrestrial or internet-based — has a quality that algorithmic playlists often lack: genuine randomness constrained by human taste.
A good radio station is curated by people who love music and who make unexpected programming choices. They juxtapose tracks from different eras, different genres, different emotional registers. They create transitions that a streaming algorithm would never produce because the algorithm optimizes for consistency while a human curator optimizes for surprise.
I started listening to Austrian radio stations during long drives between consulting clients years before I discovered magic. FM4, in particular, has a programming style that jumps between indie rock and electronic music and hip hop and obscure international tracks with a fearlessness that I find endlessly stimulating. When I started using background music during practice sessions, I found that streaming these same stations through my laptop produced better discovery results than algorithmic playlists. The human curation introduced a degree of creative friction that pure algorithms smoothed away.
Internet radio stations from other countries work even better, because they expose you to music from traditions and cultures you would never encounter through your own listening habits.
The Genre Expansion Principle
Here is the deeper principle at work: every genre of music carries its own set of emotional associations. Most magicians who use music in their performances draw from a narrow range. Dramatic orchestral for serious pieces. Upbeat pop or rock for comedy. Maybe some jazz for sophisticated close-up work. These are not bad choices, but they are predictable. The audience recognizes the genre conventions even if they cannot articulate them. They hear dramatic orchestral music and they know they are supposed to feel awe.
When you pair an effect with music from an unexpected genre, you disrupt those conventions. The audience does not have a ready-made emotional template. They have to feel their way through the combination without the safety rail of genre familiarity. This creates engagement at a deeper level, because the audience is actively constructing their emotional response rather than passively receiving the one the genre signals.
I once paired a mentalism presentation with a piece of ambient electronic music that had no obvious dramatic arc — just slowly evolving textures and gentle pulses. Conventional wisdom would say that mentalism needs dramatic music, something that builds tension and releases it at the moment of revelation. But the ambient track did something different. It created a sense of floating, of suspended reality, that made the mental effect feel less like a demonstration and more like a shared altered state. The audience sat in a different kind of silence than I was used to — not the tense silence of dramatic anticipation, but the soft silence of collective wonder.
That pairing came from a streaming discovery playlist. It was the kind of track I would have scrolled past in three seconds during a deliberate search.
Building a Discovery Library
Over time, I have developed a system for managing the tracks I discover through these passive listening sessions. It is simple, because complicated systems do not survive the reality of hotel room practice and touring schedules.
I have a single playlist on my streaming service called “Performance Candidates.” When a track catches my attention during a practice session, I add it to this playlist with no filtering and no judgment. The bar for entry is low: if the music made me pause and listen while I was practicing, it goes on the list.
Once a month, usually during a quiet weekend, I go through the playlist. For each track, I ask a single question: which routine does this remind me of? If I can answer that question immediately, I flag the pairing for testing. If I cannot, the track stays on the list for another month. Tracks that survive three months without triggering a pairing get removed. This is not because they are bad tracks, but because the connection was probably momentary — it existed in the specific context of that practice session and did not generalize.
The flagged pairings get tested in full run-throughs during rehearsal sessions. I perform the complete routine with the music playing, filming the whole thing so I can review it afterward. Some pairings that felt magical in the moment of discovery feel flat in full rehearsal. The emotional connection was real but too subtle to translate to an audience. Others — the ones that survive this testing — become the musical pieces that audiences remember.
The Collision of Worlds
There is a concept in innovation theory that I use in my consulting work called “creative collision.” The idea is that genuinely new ideas rarely come from deep expertise in a single domain. They come from the collision of two domains that were not previously connected. When knowledge from one field meets a problem in another field, the resulting combination can produce solutions that neither field would have generated alone.
Music discovery for magic performance works exactly this way. The magic and the music come from separate worlds. When they collide — when a track you love for purely musical reasons meets a routine you have been developing for purely magical reasons — the combination can produce something that transcends both.
That is what the practice radio method does. It creates the conditions for collision without trying to control the outcome. It puts music in the air while your hands are doing magic, and it trusts that your creative instincts will recognize a meaningful connection when one appears.
Keep the music playing. Let your ears wander. The best pairings are the ones you never went looking for.