Soda Paapi created an ambient documentary featuring Toronto, a ‘walking video’ called 40 Nights in Toronto, where he realised that, sometimes, instead of thinking we need to escape, all we need is a different perspective.
His work is shortlisted for the Marŝarto Awards 2025. Below, he is interviewed about the work.

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In April 2024, Soda Paapi flew from Berlin to Toronto, planning to stay a year, maybe longer. He wanted a different life, in a different environment. 

Two weeks later, after moving on to Montreal, he changed his mind. He followed an intuitive impulse and decided not to find a place to settle, but to go back to Toronto for as long as he could afford, and then eventually return to Berlin. 

Back in Toronto, he let himself exist outside of regular society, consumed only what he needed, and embraced solitude. At night, he explored the PATH and the streets above it. These experiences became 40 Nights in Toronto. 

Interviewer: Why did you leave Berlin? What kind of change were you looking for?

Soda Paapi: I had this feeling of wanting to be as far away for as long as possible, to break out of my usual environment and the roles I had been playing in it. 

I was diagnosed with autism in early 2024. I realized that I was [autistic] already a couple of years earlier, but I felt the need for an official confirmation. It gave me the confidence and motivation to create a life that is right for me. 

It wasn’t explicitly on my mind back then, but I now know that I required space to become aware of what I need, which is different from what I wanted for a long time.

I: Why did you go to Toronto?

SP: Another reason I left Berlin was the city’s aesthetic. In most parts of it, or at least those that had made up my daily life during the seven years I had lived there, messy streets and never-ending massive, old buildings with monotonous stuccoed façades, without space in between, dominate.

I don’t actively search for inspiration, but want to be in an environment that makes inspiration inevitable. And that wasn’t the case in Berlin at that time. It felt like the wrong environment for my life and my art. 

When I closed my eyes and thought of the music I wanted to make, it automatically connected to vast, modern cityscapes. Skyscrapers, glass and steel, lobbies with often unused, slightly obscure modern furniture, things like that. Something you find in downtown districts of large North American cities, which I have been drawn to my whole life, growing up listening to rap music and playing basketball. 

When I talked about this with my friend A., who had lived in Kingston, Ontario for a while, just a couple of hours from Toronto, she mentioned that Toronto might suit me well. 

I love the atmospheric soundscapes Drake and 40 have created. The first basketball jersey I got as a kid was from the Toronto Raptors. It just made sense to go to Toronto.  

I: So why did you return to Berlin?

SP: I had a Canadian visa for one year. Initially, my plan was to stay that long, maybe even longer if I really liked it and found a way to do so. Find an apartment, have a simple job, maybe in a café or restaurant, that leaves enough mental capacity to make art while living in a creatively stimulating environment — that’s what I had in mind.

Shortly after arriving in Toronto, I started looking for a long-term place, but quickly realized it would be nearly impossible to find something I could afford working in a simple job like I had imagined. The couple of rooms I visited that would have fit into my budget were in miserable states, or rented out by dodgy landlords, or both.

Even though it was kind of a love-at-first-sight situation, I realized I wouldn’t have been able to live in Toronto. So I decided to move on to Montreal. I wanted to check out the city especially because of its music and art scene, and it is supposed to be the most affordable large city in Canada.

I: But you left Montreal again after two weeks. 

SP: When I arrived, I felt uncomfortable. I knew it had the reputation of being the most European city in North America, but I didn’t think about it too much. I was astonished, even thrown off, by how similar the style of the people, the parks, the cafes, restaurants, and shops were — ironically, particularly to Berlin. All I wanted was to go back to Toronto. I reminded myself, though, that it was unrealistic because of the housing situation.

I explored Montreal for two more weeks, during which I realized that my dream of living in a big city outside Europe that matched my creative vision didn’t fit into my life vision.

During the year before I left Berlin, I worked four days per week in an office job, which allowed me to dedicate a lot of time to music without worrying financially. Living in Canada with a part-time job would have been difficult, even in Montreal. 

I also realized I wasn’t willing to put in the effort to settle in a new country at that time. I wanted a life that allowed me to have as much capacity for art as possible.

This is exactly what I had in Berlin. But I became bored and frustrated with being in the same place and around the same structures for too long. I needed a change of environment to realize that Berlin is a great place to live my life the way I want and need it, no matter what it looks like. 

I didn’t need to start a new life because I didn’t like my previous one anymore. I needed space to get a new perspective, which you sometimes can only get by being all by yourself, far away from familiar surroundings. So I decided to return to Toronto as long as my savings allowed me, to focus entirely on making art. I felt I had something to finish there before returning to Berlin.

I: How was returning to Toronto?

SP: When I decided to go back, it was essential for me to have a place just for myself. I spent a significant amount of money on an Airbnb, so I had to keep an eye on other expenses.

At first, I was worried about needing to restrict myself too much to fully enjoy my second stint in Toronto, but it turned out to be a blessing. I only bought and consumed what was truly necessary and beneficial. I had never felt this good before, physically and mentally. The calm, close-to nature environment the apartment was in only added to that. 

This absence of the inessential let my creativity flow uninterrupted. I collected ideas about my artistic vision and creation process for 40 Nights in Toronto and beyond, wrote notes after notes after notes every day. The kitchen/living room wall filled up quickly, looking like the wall of a police station with a complicated case to solve, or maybe the wall of a maniac. I produced music daily. Making art had never been this much fun.

Then, at night, I regularly took the subway downtown. It still felt like the otherworldly wonderland I had discovered a month before. I went on aimless walks, explored the PATH, no destination in mind. To let my mind wander, to process what I conceptualized and created during the day. And I started filming.

I: What was so fascinating to you about downtown Toronto and the PATH? 

SP: Dimly lit, huge, futuristic office lobbies, empty hallways and subway corridors that double as malls, shops closed, but still accessible at night. Experiencing this unexpected solitude and emptiness in the heart of a buzzing city. And the skyscrapers. People who say skyscrapers are soulless probably haven’t wandered between them at night and absorbed their calming presence.

Modern architecture and urban design in downtown districts are often criticized as generic and blank. I don’t see it that way. During the day, these places are efficient, full of people moving between offices, shops, cafés and restaurants. At night, when they become empty, when I wandered through these vast areas of glass and concrete, expansive squares, long corridors, their blankness allowed my mind to wander freely.

These surreal night walks made me question my reality. They were the catalyst to becoming aware of what I really needed, and that sometimes, in unexpected ways, it was different from what I wanted. 

I: How did these experiences turn into 40 Nights in Toronto?

SP: I’ve enjoyed watching walking videos on YouTube for a long time, especially walks through downtown districts of big cities at night. Inspired by those, I had the idea of filming walking videos as a visual companion to an album even before I arrived in Toronto. Walking through downtown Toronto at night for the first time felt like a full-circle moment. Aesthetically, it matched exactly how I imagined my music to sound. 

It wasn’t only about capturing an aesthetic that goes with my music though. I find first-person walking videos fascinating because of their documentary value. They are the rawest form of an observational, first-person documentary of a very specific place at a very specific time, without added information. It is all about ambience. 

So with 40 Nights in Toronto, I wanted to create something that transfers the ambience of my experience to those who experience it. 

I: Tell me more about the music of 40 Nights in Toronto.

SP: To mirror the cityscape I encountered, I reduced the atmospheric jungle and drum and bass influenced sound of my first LP, Out Of Office, which I had released shortly after arriving in Toronto, into something slower and more ambient. 

In Montreal, a lucky coincidence helped me create this new sound: my Airbnb host had a Nord Stage synthesizer that had been sitting unused in the corner of their living room. I got to try it out and ended up playing and recording without any particular intention every day. These recordings became the sonic foundation for 40 Nights in Toronto. 

I’ve been making music for almost two decades, so I initially saw the project from a music-first perspective. Then the idea of producing an audiovisual album slowly turned into a project that focused on music but expanded beyond it. My intention shifted from making a meditative audiovisual experience to showing a different — a positive — perspective on solitude and emptiness. 

In a world where we are constantly connected, flooded with input, and listening to others, my time in Toronto and these night walks made me embrace solitude and emptiness as spaces to process, reflect, listen to myself, and become aware of what is right for me.
Documenting this and transferring it to the audience wasn’t only about putting the right music and visuals together, but also about finding the right way to present it. That turned out to be an exhibition for the album’s release.

I: How did the idea for the release exhibition come together?

SP: I noticed striking similarities between the atmosphere of the night walks I went on and the atmosphere of museums or galleries. It often felt like I was walking through an unintentional outdoor museum. 

Since I wanted to present 40 Nights in Toronto in a way that transfers what I experienced to the audience, creating an exhibition just made sense. 

It took place in the shared studio space where I used to have a music studio in Berlin. I set up everything in the largest room, a ceramic studio, and left as much as possible unchanged. I projected 40 Nights in Toronto on long white curtains that covered a 10 or maybe 12 feet high floor-to-ceiling shelf with ceramic pieces and supplies. I wanted my art to exist in an environment that is a work of art on its own — a different world to step into within a different world to step into.  

At the same time, I wanted to recreate the environment where 40 Nights in Toronto started:

I built an interactive installation with a fridge filled with 40 different exotic sodas as well as unsweetened rooibos tea for everyone to drink, representing the contrast between what we want and what we need. On top, a CRT TV played still shots from my night walks, resembling the fridge-microwave combo from my Airbnb, right next to the table where I sat for hours every day.

I exhibited my weekly schedules and my 9-page creative process breakdown of how I produced the songs — symbols of the structure I introduced to my life that gave me a sense of mental clarity I’d never had before.   

And I created A Path Of Being At Peace, a sequence of 40 phrases that map the unfolding of the production process of 40 Nights in Toronto and served as reminders to avoid overthinking and being distracted by outside influences. I wrote them with a sharpie on printer paper and spread them out on the walls of the studio, just like I spread out notes on the walls of my Toronto apartment. 

I: You first called 40 Nights in Toronto an audiovisual album. How come you label it an ambient documentary now?

SP: When I started creating 40 Nights in Toronto, I imagined an album with a visual component. So I called it an audiovisual album, simply describing what it was.

When people asked what kind of music I was making for it, I would say ‘ambient breakbeat.’ Take away the drums, and it is basically ambient music, paired with visuals that document an ambience.

Only after releasing the album, premiering the full audiovisual version at the release exhibition, and submitting it to a few awards and project spaces, did I realize that ambient documentary fits better — because it describes what the final artwork actually does.

Brian Eno said about ambient music: ‘[it] is intended to induce calm and a space to think. […] It must be as ignorable as it is interesting.’

This is true about the places I walked through, and about the ambient documentary 40 Nights in Toronto. To many, the empty corridors and streets may seem ignorable. To me, walking through downtown Toronto at night was like a spaziergang on an empty canvas.

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The winner and honourable mention of the Marŝarto Awards 2025 will be announced in late January 2026.