Chapter 1
What The Hell Are We Doing?
Two scenes from the inside of something that shouldn't work this well
It’s 2 AM and I’m standing behind a pair of CDJs in a dark room full of strangers who aren’t strangers anymore.
The track I’m playing has been building for ninety seconds. The room knows it. I know it. There’s a moment — you can feel it if you’ve been behind the decks — where the floor locks in. Not everyone, not all at once. But enough. A critical mass of bodies moving in the same temporal frame, breathing the same arc of tension.
I drop the next track. Not on the one — slightly ahead of it, pulling the room forward. The bass comes back and two hundred people exhale through their feet. Nobody told them to do that. Nobody choreographed it. Nobody decided it. It just… happened. Except it didn’t just happen. I made a hundred micro-decisions to create the conditions for that moment, and the room made a thousand micro-adjustments to meet me there.
What the hell are we doing?
Three weeks later I’m sitting at the foot of a berimbau in a capoeira roda, playing the gunga — the lead instrument. Two players are in the circle, and the game has gone sideways. One player is too aggressive, not reading their partner. The energy is wrong.
I don’t say anything. I shift the rhythm. Slow the tempo slightly, change the toque. The singing adjusts. The clapping adjusts. The players adjust — they have to, the music won’t let them continue at the old pace. Within thirty seconds the game transforms. Not because anyone gave an order. Because the music restructured the space of possibility.
I’m holding a single-string instrument made from a stick and a gourd, and I just governed a social interaction with it.
What the hell are we doing?
You’ve felt this too. Maybe not behind turntables or holding a berimbau. Maybe at a concert when the whole room locked into something. Maybe at a wedding when the right song hit and everyone moved. Maybe at a funeral when the singing held you together when nothing else could.
These moments aren’t rare. They’re not mystical. They happen whenever humans make music together — or move together inside music someone else is making. They’ve been happening for as long as we’ve been human.
And yet we have almost no language for what’s actually going on.
We call it “vibes.” We call it “energy.” We call it “being in the zone” or “the groove” or “the spirit.” We know it when we feel it. We can’t explain it when we don’t. The experience is universal; the understanding is almost nonexistent.
This book is an attempt to take that experience seriously. Not to explain it away — not to reduce it to neuroscience or anthropology or music theory — but to look at it as a capacity. Something humans can do. Something some traditions have gotten extraordinarily good at cultivating. Something our contemporary world has almost entirely forgotten how to value.
The question isn’t “what is music for?” — as though music were a tool waiting for a purpose. The question is: what are we doing when we make music together, and what does it tell us about what humans are?