Six years ago I was barefoot in a Bali jungle, learning to read a crowd by the way their shoulders moved before their feet caught up. I had already spent two years finding my feet behind the decks in Sydney, but Bali is where it became a life. I did not know yet that the same instinct would carry me across open water, behind the decks of a yacht with no land in sight.
There is a feeling that never gets old. Standing behind the decks before a set starts, looking out at a few hundred people who do not know yet what is about to happen between us. My heart goes first. Then the first drop, and I watch the room shift from heads to hips, from thinking to feeling. That moment, every time, is why I do this.
Most people pick a lane. I refused to.
I have played sunrise sets on cliffs above the ocean and quiet sets for forty people who came just to feel something. I have been the only woman behind the booth at a corporate gala in the same month I played barefoot at a full moon gathering in the jungle. The contrast used to confuse people. Now I understand it is the whole point.
The magic lives in the contrast. In the ceremony and the celebration. The jungle and the ocean. The ritual and the dance floor.
If you are a woman still finding your footing behind the decks, I want you to know something nobody told me early on. You do not need permission to take up the booth. You do not need to play it safe to be taken seriously. The room will follow whoever is brave enough to lead it, and that can be you.
Music has taken me further than I ever expected it to. Onto big stages in front of celebrities, into quiet resorts on islands most people only dream about, across oceans on a superyacht with a different country out the window every day. Different rooms every time, same job. Find the body in the room and remind it how to move.
These days a good part of my year is spent as resident DJ on the Ritz Carlton Yacht Collection, moving between ports with a different crowd every week. It is a strange kind of home. No fixed dance floor, no fixed audience, just the work of finding where a room wants to go and taking it there.
People sometimes call me a Sound Alchemist and I used to feel shy about the word. Now I think of it simply. My job is to help a room leave its head and come back into its body. To turn thinking into feeling, even for one song. That is true whether I am at sea, in the jungle, or on a stage I have never stood on before.
Eight years in, I am still learning what a room needs before it knows itself. If you are planning something, a wedding, a festival stage, a quiet gathering, that is the work I show up for. Every room is brave enough to feel something real, if someone is brave enough to lead it there first.