There are landscapes so vast that they seem to erase the scale of everyday life. I remember an immense desert, with sand stretching toward a horizon that felt almost unreachable. I remember, too, the great expanse of snow in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan.

One was defined by warmth and open sand; the other by cold, altitude and whiteness. Yet they shared something unexpected. Dance music was playing in both places.

It would be easy to describe the music as a contrast to nature, or as something that interrupted the silence. That was not how I experienced it. The music belonged to the moment. In places that could hardly have looked more different, I found myself thinking: music is necessary everywhere.

Travelling has taught me not to assume that a particular sound belongs to a particular setting. A rhythm heard in a desert can become inseparable from the light on the sand. A track played against snow can stay in memory with the shape of the mountains.

The world does not need to become a concert venue to be musical. Sometimes the landscape, the people and the sound simply arrive together — and the memory of one cannot be separated from the others.