Kicking In
“Kicking In is the moment something shifts”
Welcome to the track notes.
These sit alongside the music as a companion piece. Not to explain it, but to stay close to it, offering another way into the same experience.
They don’t analyse or break things down. Instead, they follow what happens beneath the surface: how sound interacts with your state, what begins to shift, what rises, and what remains after.
Each session is less about the music itself and more about the space it creates. A place to notice your own response to it, and how that response changes over time.
There’s nothing you need to do with them.
They’re simply here to be read, returned to, or left behind. Whatever feels right.
This session sits in Performance Room
A space for feeling alive, and ready to lose yourself.
An immersive space to amplify your energy and express yourself openly.
Track Notes #1: “Kicking In ”
Before you PRess Play
This session sits in the Performance Room. It is not about reflection or emotional processing. It is about movement. Momentum. Energy returning to the body before the mind has fully agreed to participate.
It lives in that strange moment where things stop feeling theoretical and start actually happening. Where hesitation slowly loses control of the conversation and instinct takes over instead.
There is nothing heavy being asked of you here. In fact, this session probably works best when you stop trying so hard altogether.
Put it on loud enough to interrupt your own thinking.
That’s usually a good start.
A tHreshold Moment
This session started with a yes.
Specifically, saying yes to DJing at a friend’s birthday during a period where I was very much not feeling like the most socially vibrant version of myself.
I had been in a quieter place for a while. A bit inward. A bit emotionally tangled. The kind of period where you still function normally on paper, but internally everything feels like it’s running through an unnecessary amount of buffering.
So when the invite came in, part of me genuinely felt relieved. It felt like a doorway back into something more alive again. Music. People. Movement. Shared energy. All things I normally thrive on. Naturally, I responded to this healthy opportunity by immediately overthinking it into the ground.
Which, in fairness, is one of my core personality traits.
I told myself I needed to prepare properly. Organise the set. Build the arc. Be structured and intentional about it all.
Instead, I spent most of the time avoiding preparation in increasingly elaborate ways while pretending I was still technically preparing.
Very ADHD. Very believable to absolutely nobody except me.
Session Origins
The funny thing is, somewhere inside all that avoidance, the session was quietly building itself anyway.
I’d start testing tracks, then abandon them halfway through because suddenly another idea felt more exciting. Then another. Then another. At one point I think I reorganised the same thirty minutes of music about twelve different times, each version apparently solving problems I had invented roughly four minutes earlier.
None of it looked organised from the outside. But underneath the chaos, something was happening.
My brain has always worked like this with music. What looks like distraction is often actually pattern recognition happening in real time. I just usually realise that about six hours later when everything somehow clicks together and I pretend it was intentional all along.
Eventually, the set started revealing itself. Not as a plan. More like momentum.
Certain transitions suddenly felt obvious. Energy started connecting naturally. Tracks began pulling each other into place without needing to be forced there. And once that happened, the whole thing became much less about thinking and much more about responding.
That’s the feeling this session came from.
The moment where instinct finally outruns hesitation.
the Arc
This session doesn’t really “build” in the traditional sense. It kicks in.
At first, there’s a kind of restless energy underneath everything. Excitement mixed with uncertainty. The feeling of movement trying to happen before confidence has fully arrived to support it.
Tracks circle each other. Test each other. Push forward slightly, then pivot again. There’s curiosity in it. Playfulness too. The energy is still searching for itself. And then, somewhere along the way, something locks. Not dramatically. Not with some huge cinematic breakthrough moment where the universe opens and everybody suddenly understands themselves better. More like your body finally remembering something your brain was still overcomplicating.
From there, the session starts moving properly. Momentum takes over. Transitions tighten. Decisions become instinctive instead of analytical. You stop asking whether something works and start feeling that it does.
And honestly, there is a very specific kind of joy in that. Especially if you spend a lot of your life inside your own head. There’s something incredibly relieving about reaching a point where thinking finally gets out of the way long enough for you to just be in something.
By the later stages, the session becomes fully outward-facing. Less about self-awareness. More about connection. Shared movement. Shared release. The strange intimacy of a room full of people collectively agreeing that for the next few hours, joy is important enough to prioritise properly.
Which, as an adult, feels mildly irresponsible for no real reason.
On Returning
I don’t really come back to this session to analyse it. I come back to it because it reminds me that energy is often much closer than I think it is.
Sometimes I only need movement. Noise. People. Music loud enough to interrupt the endless internal committee meeting happening in my brain at all times. And sometimes I need reminding that excitement is not something I have to earn through perfect organisation or emotional readiness first.
Sometimes it arrives because I finally stopped resisting it.
This session also reminds me that some of the best moments of my life have started with me almost talking myself out of them beforehand.
Which is both deeply annoying and unfortunately very consistent.
After THe Session
Afterwards, there’s usually a very particular kind of emotional comedown. Not sadness, more like your nervous system looking around afterwards going, “Right… what the fuck do we do now?”.
Sometimes there’s relief. Sometimes there’s adrenaline still bouncing around long after the music has stopped. Sometimes there’s the sudden realisation that being around people and feeling connected to something larger than yourself was probably exactly what you needed all along.
And occasionally there’s the deeply humbling experience of remembering you spent three hours panicking about something that ended up being one of the best parts of your day / week / month.
Very efficient use of emotional energy.
Still, that’s part of it too.
Final Reflection
Kicking In was never really about DJing. It was about rediscovering what happens when I stop trying to think myself into readiness and allow instinct to carry me the rest of the way instead.
Looking back now, I think this session captures something very specific about the relationship I have with music, especially as someone whose brain is almost permanently searching for stimulation, movement, excitement, connection, anything that makes me feel fully awake and engaged with life again.
Music has always done that for me. Not just as entertainment, but as regulation. As momentum. As therapy disguised as fun. Because sometimes healing doesn’t look like sitting quietly with your feelings.
Sometimes it looks like standing in a room full of people while a bassline reorganises your entire nervous system (and internal organs) in real time. And honestly, I think both matter equally.
This session reminds me that joy is not shallow. Movement is not avoidance. Excitement is not something to apologise for.
Sometimes energy itself is the thing that brings you back to yourself. And sometimes you’re not lost at all.
You’re just waiting for the right track to kick in…
