🇳🇱 In Dutch

–  SEPTEMBER 2026  –
IN THIS NEWSLETTER:

 

– Why we decided to start doing things differently
-Our journey in Paris — what happens when you let go of certainty

 

 

A few years ago, one day, I collapsed.

(In slow motion, with high pitched screaming and a mournful soundtrack.)

I couldn’t do it anymore.

During the day, our neighbours on the right were making horrible noise renovating.

In the evening, the neighbours on the left took over with singing.

And beneath our feet, fumes of fuss from our criminal downstairs neighbour with psychiatric problems.

Meanwhile I was attacked by migraines.

I remember thinking: this cannot be how it’s supposed to be.

Something has to change.

Which led to a question I started asking myself:

Why had I allowed this living situation to come into existence?

Isn’t our outer world, after all, a reflection of our inner world?

Give me someone with a chaotic life and I’ll show you their chaotic computer desktop.

I realised I must have had a pretty bulky blind spot somewhere.

Our affordable apartment with a studio made it possible for me to focus fully on my music and art:

Which had been my absolute top priority ever since being a teenager.

And things were going fine.

Except that I was living in a place, in a neighbourhood, that gave me the exact opposite of inspiration.

‘Anti-spiration’. Which sounds like something that might start to smell.

Which is pretty accurate.

I realised that, day after day, I was working towards the moment when we could finally leave.

Towards a place or a home that actually did inspire me.

So what was the blind spot?

I started trying to figure that out.

And it gave me a number of very useful answers.

For example, when I was young I had absorbed the ever-present idea of the starving artist.

The artist who gives everything to their art and manages to just about get by.

And the Calvinist idea of ‘working hard and suffering’.

So over the years, without really noticing, I had built an identity in which autonomy, hard work and having just enough somehow belonged together.

Which already explains a little better how I ended up living in a home that was literally giving me headaches.
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In The White Tiger, the main character Balram realises that he needs to make an extreme, non-linear leap to escape his situation.

Huda and I realised that, with our housing wishes, our projects and lives as independent artists, we would probably still be working towards ‘our wonderful new home’ long after the death of our solar system.

Unless we forced a non-linear leap of our own.

So we traded our solid, affordable apartment for a temporary place to live.

A place where we don’t know how long we’ll be able to stay.

And we consciously keep making new moves.

Earlier this year, we spent some time in The Hague to see whether it might be a place we’d want to move to.

Instead of a conventional gallery exhibition, we organised a series of private open-studio days for art collectors in our own studio.

We started our Tuning Sessions.

And — importantly — after more than twenty years, I said goodbye to the name Delic.

That was obviously much bigger than simply changing a name.

Reclaiming my birth name, Peter Bloom, is a symbolic move into a new chapter.

A new chapter of art and music that feels very personal to me.

And so we’re now racing — on new tyres — across unfamiliar terrain.

Which is how we ended up in Paris.

Without knowing exactly where it will lead.

We’re looking to see whether this could be a place where our Tuning Sessions might find the right entry point.

At places that bring visual art and music together, for example.

So far, we haven’t found one.

We’ve emailed a little over fourteen thousand people and visited a series of venues.

And we’re getting enthusiastic responses.

But so far, nobody is actually making the decision.

We’ve also discovered that part of this is cultural.

The Dutch see an opportunity and immediately attach a date, a plan and a deadline to it.

The French prefer to let an idea mature for a while, place it on the (cheese) shelf, schedule lunch for sometime next spring, and then calmly discuss the whole thing over a glass of wine.
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below: Huda and me in our neighbourhood

 

 

 

 

PARIS:
A STRANGE
HALL OF MIRRORS

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That said, all kinds of interesting things are happening.

Huda and I are jumping onto new timelines in Paris.

And at the same time, things from our past keep resurfacing.

For example, it turns out we’re staying in the apartment of Jane Birkin’s grandson.

— yes, famous Birkin bags Jane Birkin —

but, to us, more importantly, of the hit song Je t’aime… moi non plus with Serge Gainsbourg (saucy Serge)

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Huda and I used to listen to that track often because of its beautiful, warm mix and production.

Grandson R gave us a blanket that had belonged to his grandmother…

Which naturally makes you wonder:

Did Jane and Serge Gainsbourg ever nestle their slender, knotted toes underneath this very blanket?

The answer, to this, lies in the lap of the gods.
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photo above: Herb Alfonso and me in Le Marais

FILMMAKER

Two weeks ago, in Le Marais, we literally bumped into filmmaker, photographer and artist Herb Alfonso from Zwolle — someone I know but hadn’t seen in years.

He was travelling through Europe to write a new screenplay for an ongoing project.

The project is about someone who gets on a train but keeps ending up back at Zwolle station.

Someone determined to leave their old life behind.

Carl Jung might have called this a synchronicity.

Even one that’s worthy of a high five.

Although I don’t know the extent of exuberance Jung expressed in his body language.

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But despite the fact that we still haven’t done a Tuning Session in France, something else has happened.

I’ve fallen into a writing flow.

Every day I sit at our little table in the kitchen and write.

A light has started blinking somewhere inside my system.

Something has started shifting.

As if — if your inner world were a giant cave — you could feel the floor of that cave beginning to move, and somewhere underneath it an enormous snake, a snake that has been sleeping there for hundreds of years, slowly wakes up and raises its head.

There is a world I’ve discovered.

Planet Pulsor.

A planet far away from our Earth.

And now that I’m writing about life on Pulsor, I realise that I’ve actually been painting this world for quite some time already.

Like the work in progress below, for example.
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That’s it for our news.

We’ll speak again soon.

Much bless.

Peter & Huda