003: Placemaking in the Key of Memory

On the Intersection of DJing, Sound, and Placemaking

I’ve spent almost half my life as a DJ—moving between weddings, nightclubs, art galleries, and festivals across the globe. There were moments when it felt like the center of my world: diggin’ for rare vinyl, practicing late into the night, juggling gigs and day jobs, playing sets with my baby on my back, watching complete strangers lock eyes on the dance floor. But I never thought of it as placemaking. Not in the way we talk about placemaking now—city plans, community-led design, or theoretical frameworks. It’s only recently, looking back, that I’ve realized each set, each mix, each playlist, each carefully chosen transition was its own kind of architecture. A sound-built place. A temporary but real gathering of memory, love, and belonging.

Placemaking is often framed in physical terms—bricks, borders, benches. But sound complicates that. It spills beyond the edges. It reverberates, loops back, samples, and gets inside your soul. As Brandon LaBelle puts it, “Sound shapes how we inhabit and make sense of the spaces we dwell in—creating borders, communities, and belonging.”¹ The dance floor, the living room speaker, the crackle in your headphones—they all become sites that aren't fixed on a map and, yet still, they persist in the cartography of memory.

When I think about DJing now, I understand it as a practice of building those kinds of places. It requires reading a room. Tracking that room’s pulse, adjusting its tempo, feeling when to bring people in and knowing when to give them space. There’s an intimacy to it, especially in Black sonic traditions, where survival often depends on knowing how to shape atmospheres. Ashon T. Crawley speaks to this in his exploration of Black pentecostal traditions: “Sound is a way of being together, breathing together, and making space for what exceeds language.”² The same can be said of DJing, production, and composition. Even silence, the pause between beats, carries weight. These are not accidental decisions; they’re acts of care, control, and resistance. “Listening to the quiet is a practice of attunement to the frequencies of the quotidian and the fugitive.”³ DJing is full of these quiet moments, too—not just the peaks but the subtle shifts, the teasing of tracks, the beauty of marrying of two songs, the near silence before a dramatic drop. It’s in these moments that space expands, becomes relational, responsive, alive.

And then, there’s the voice itself as placemaking.

Whitney MFin’ Houston—one of the greatest vocalists of all time. Her technical brilliance wasn’t just impressive; it was architectural. She moved effortlessly between scales, shifting from delicate softness to powerful crescendos in a single breath. Her voice made space—space for longing, joy, grief, triumph. A Whitney ballad isn’t just a song; it’s a room you can walk into, stay in. The precision of her technique created structure, but the emotional resonance gave it texture. Of course, there are far too many vocalists to name here but a few of my favorites stay with me. Mahalia Jackson’s voice carried more than melody, it carried spiritual grounding, communal healing, and the weight of generations. Luther Vandross built sonic rooms you never wanted to leave. Whether belting songs of heartbreak or joy, Vandross made space for us to feel held. Lauryn Hill’s vastness from the perfection of “Joyful Joyful" to the raw, unpolished cracks of her MTV Unplugged performance, she is another example of crafting intimate, vulnerable place through vocal performance. Sade. That’s it, just Sade, period.

Fred Moten gestures to this, writing about the ways Black sound, particularly through voice, carries the social and spatial weight of survival: “To strain to listen to this voice is to strain to enter the vibrational space it opens up.”⁴ The vibrational spaces these vocalists open up are both intimate and expansive, places where we find ourselves reflected, witnessed, held. In this way, Black vocal performance becomes a kind of sonic architecture. One that holds us, transports us, invites us in.

There’s also an album as place.

Solange's A Seat at the Table album doesn't just narrate place but actively constructs it—a sanctuary where Black narratives are honored and explored. Central to this construction are the album's interludes, featuring voices like Master P and her very own parents. These interludes serve as intimate conversations, inviting us into personal reflections on identity, resilience, and empowerment. In "Interlude: Dad Was Mad," Mathew Knowles recounts his experiences with racism and the lingering anger it caused. This storytelling approach transforms the listening experience into a communal space, as if we're seated in a living room, sharing stories that resonate deeply.

Of course, Solange's placemaking extends beyond the auditory realm. An Ode To, at the Guggenheim Museum, reimagined the traditional art space into one that centers Black presence and expression through choreographed movements, visual aesthetics, and immersive soundscapes. She crafted an environment where Black artistry was both the subject and the medium, challenging conventional boundaries and asserting a space for Black narratives within institutional settings.

Sun Ra, who built entire worlds through sound and beyond, wasn’t just avant-garde music; it was speculative cartography—a refusal to be confined by earthly geographies, a declaration that space could be reimagined, re-sounded. But Sun Ra’s placemaking extended to the very structure of his Arkestra, a community rooted in collective living, costuming, film, and radical Black imagination. Kodwo Eshun captures this beautifully: “Afrofuturism presupposes sound as a form of time travel, as a machine for manufacturing worlds.”⁵ Listening to Sun Ra isn’t at all passive; it’s stepping into a place where Black existence isn't bound by gravity, oppression, or timelines.

DJing, too, operates on that edge. Every set is a negotiation between the known and the improvised, the historical lineage and the now. Sampling, looping, scratching—these aren’t just technical tricks but methods of spatial memory. To sample a track is to fold one place into another, to regenerate it, to create a layered sonic terrain where past and present are in the same timeline. Production, composition, beat-making—all become tools for crafting environments where memory and imagination meet. Ashanté M. Reese reminds us: “Place is never only about location. It is a relationship, a story, a struggle, a hope.”⁶ Sound carries all of that—its own geography, its own resistance, its own archive.

I didn’t know I was making place then, but I do now. Each record dropped, each fade, each carefully selected track was part of constructing not just a vibe—but a container for memory, for possibility. Sound makes place. Not permanently. But sometimes the ephemeral is the most powerful. A single night, a 90-minute set, a three-minute loop that lasts forever in the body.

The music ends, but the place doesn’t disappear.⁷ It lingers in our bones, in our breath.

Reflections: When a song is ‘stuck’ in your head, where does it go next? What sonic memories do you carry that aren’t tied to a specific location? Are there specific artists, vocalists, or songs that feel like shelter, like home, like resistance? How does sound hold space for you?

1. LaBelle, Brandon. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. New York: Continuum, 2010.

2. Crawley, Ashon T. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

3. Campt, Tina M. Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

4. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, 2013.

5. Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books, 1998.

6. Reese, Ashanté M. Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

7. It’s worth mentioning on the day of writing this article I had an HVAC repairman servicing our home. When he arrived I was washing dishes and happened to be in the middle of blasting a Frank Sinatra playlist. About 15 minutes into his work he turned to me and ask why I was playing those “New York sounds”. I laughed. I didn’t really have an answer. But clearly, he’d been transported out of DC and into NYC with only a few minutes of that playlist. :-)