SAMANTHA PLANTAGENET: Why Adriatique's "Tullum" session changed her life.
This was the introductory drug — the stair-step boost that lifted Lucky into a world where she finally felt understood. The set was so lovingly curated, so unerringly sequenced, that the old standard got it exactly right: "Last night a DJ saved my life."
This was the set — delivered on YouTube after a night the 15-year-old prodigy spent wading through a throng of algorithms and equations. She was a brain, not yet a woman. A questor, not yet fully alive. Would she ever be understood? Would she always be an alien? She felt like the girl in that classic from years back, "Just Another Girl On The IRT." — a young Black woman trying to find her way.
But then she stumbled onto Adriatique's Tullum set, and her life was altered for good. The mounting of tunes, one banger feeding the next, the emotional pitch building toward a stair-step glory of passion — it was over. It didn't hurt that the two Swiss DJs were gorgeous, and that the set's closing stretch brought in DJ Hoss and then that monster of EDM glory, Solomun (whom Lucky would come to love just as hard). Game. Set. Match. Here, finally, was something she could do. Something she wanted to do. Something that gave her life even in the lonely room where she was building her own AI assistant (which she'd go on to pull off, and call Scram) — something that could pull her away from data, numbers, squirrelly symbols, and endless text.
She hit her dad up for Ableton Live software, and the horses left the stable.
DJs, beats, endless melding of music and sound. She grew greedy for RZA, Dre, Marley Marl, DJ Muggs, Budda, Kruder and Dorfmeister and folded these into Rautavaara, Messiaen, Pärt and Bach (always Bach). Her dad challenged her further, and she was floored by Mingus, Ellington, Ornette Coleman, Miles, Trane, Nancy Wilson, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Rosemary Clooney. It was crazy. It was wild. It was insane. And it all cohered — it made the numbers flow, it made the algorithms dance, it made the texts soar, and it made the Lucky Kid fully alive!
Reading? You already know: Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick, Dante, Orlando Furioso, Christopher Logue's Homer, and anything by Jorge Luis Borges. It all cohered. It came together the way it does for the rare brain fully attuned to its own autodidact switches (most people's never get flipped) — a trust in the moulding, edifying pull of what's good, what's excellent, what's worthy. A great author points you to another. A friend you trust points you somewhere else. A professor you trust points you somewhere else again. There are misses, sure, but the hits just keep on coming.
In the end, it all coheres — the way Bach and Mozart refresh the spirits of music lovers, resolving their works so pleasingly. It all coheres.
This is The Lucky Kid, aka Lucky, aka Samantha Plantagenet. And she would be one of the pillars tasked with saving Earth as we know it, during one terrifying weekend in the novel Terra Firma!
As always you can always hit me up at:
[fromandromedaandback@gmail.com](mailto:fromandromedaandback@gmail.com)
Meet the rest of the team: Jennifer "Gunz" Rocker | Three Women vs the Galaxy II | Dr. Berryann "The Berry" Priss | Sisters From Another Mother | Sgt. Estella Vasquez
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