June 2013. September 2014. One email that changed everything and what I still think about when I make something new.
In June 2013, I started a blog about the English language in Singapore. There was no grand ambition behind it. I had been living here long enough to notice things: the way certain British phrases had quietly survived decades after disappearing from Britain itself, the way local English had drifted in directions nobody had planned. Fossilised words. Evolved expressions. A language shaped by a colonial history and then left to find its own path.
I found it fascinating. So I wrote about it. I called the blog AngMohDan, a Singlish phrase for "white person + Dan (my name)," which felt fitting, and I started posting observations. Nothing polished. Just things I noticed.
To make the posts more visual, I started using LEGO figures as characters. I cannot draw well enough to illustrate anything convincingly, but I could build a small scene, add speech bubbles, and suddenly the thing I was trying to show had a shape. It was a workaround. A storytelling device. Nothing more.
September 2014
About fifteen months in, something shifted.
I had always loved Peter Gabriel and Genesis. If you know that era, early to mid-seventies, Gabriel still fronting the band, you know the costumes. The bat wings. The flower. The fox head. The sheer commitment to theatrical excess. They are the kind of images that stay with you, and at some point I had a thought that felt obvious in retrospect: those costumes would translate perfectly into LEGO.
Not as a product. Not as a business idea. Just as an interesting problem. Could I build the bat wings in a medium that was not designed for them, using only the parts that existed?
I spent a few weeks on it. Hunting through small shops in Singapore that kept individual LEGO pieces in little drawers, picking out heads, torsos, accessories that might work if rotated the right way. Slow work. Slightly obsessive. Completely without a plan.
In September 2014, I posted the finished figure on Instagram. A photo, a caption, a few hashtags. Then I went to bed.
The email
About a month later, I received a message from Real World Studios.
The lego pieces have been requested by Peter G - they were brought to his attention recently and we would love for his archive.
Peter Gabriel's team had seen the figure. They liked it. Peter wanted a set for his personal collection.
I read it twice. Then I read it again. At that point, none of this had a name. There was no brand, no store, no sense that what I had made was anything other than a thing I had made. And suddenly it had crossed into the real world, into the hands of the person who had inspired it.
I later found out how it happened: his social media team monitors hashtags. Someone spotted the image, showed it to Peter, and that was that. No algorithm gamed. No promotion run. Just a specific thing, in the right context, seen by the right person.
What I have come to understand
Within a month of that email, I set up a separate website for the builds. That became Musical Brick, a name derived from the Genesis song 'Musical Box'.
For a long time I thought of that email as a lucky break, the kind of thing that happens once and does not repeat. But the more I have thought about it, the less I believe that framing.
Between June 2013 and September 2014, I had been writing consistently, posting regularly, working within a specific niche. I had not thought of any of that as "building a platform." I was just doing things I found interesting and putting them somewhere people could find them. But that fifteen months of quiet, unspectacular consistency had created something: a small signal, a context, a surface on which the right content could become visible.
The bat wings figure did not appear from nowhere. It appeared on top of a year of accumulated presence. And I think that matters more than the figure itself.
If I had tried to engineer that outcome, tried to get noticed, tried to reach the right people, I am fairly certain I would have failed. What actually worked was much simpler: making specific things I genuinely cared about, and putting them somewhere they could be found.
That is the thing I still come back to. Discovery does not respond to intention. It responds to signals. And signals build slowly, over time, through work that does not look like strategy while you are doing it.
Where it went from here
Musical Brick grew from that October 2014 starting point into something I still run today, ten-plus years of builds, collections, stage recreations, instruments. Always alongside teaching, always in the evenings, always because I find it genuinely interesting.
AngMohDan kept going too, doing what it had always done. Observing. Writing. Being a place where things could be found.
If you want to see what the building side of this looks like, the actual craft, the research, the engineering problems, that is all over at Musical Brick. And if the question of how any of this connects to the broader problem of discovery in an AI-saturated world interests you, I have been thinking through that at Kerson.ai.
What I know is this: the most useful thing I built between June 2013 and September 2014 was not the bat wings figure. It was the fifteen months of quiet work that made the figure findable when it arrived.
