Music is not an adjunct to Dr Lisa Nikulinsky’s life or work — it is foundational. Long before her clinical career, she was immersed in sound culture: a former DJ and radio presenter shaped by the early days of UK Acid House circa 1986, when electronic music became not just a genre but a social movement. That formative period — communal, rhythmic, boundary-dissolving — continues to inform how she understands belonging, identity, and altered states.

A veteran of Glastonbury Festival, she has returned year after year not simply as an attendee, but as a cultural participant —supporting her family curate The Tree Stage ( ambient electronica) introducing Ambient Gaza and Chris Watson on the Tree Stage 2025. She is attentive to how music creates temporary communities, rites of passage, and spaces of psychological transformation. For her, festivals are living laboratories of collective regulation and shared meaning-making.

Her listening life is deliberately expansive. From the cosmic jazz of Sun Ra, to the propulsive electronic architectures of Underworld, to the lyrical intelligence of Mos Def, to the raw poetic intensity of PJ Harvey, her tastes traverse genre, era, and geography. Electronica remains a deep current — rhythm as regulation, bass as grounding, repetition as trance — yet she resists musical hierarchy. Jazz, hip hop, post-punk, ambient, experimental, folk: all hold psychological textures that speak to different states of mind.

Music is embedded directly in her therapeutic practice. She works with it as:

• A regulatory tool — using rhythm, tone, and tempo to support nervous system settling or activation.

• A narrative bridge — inviting clients to bring songs that articulate identities words cannot yet hold.

• A cultural mirror — recognising subculture as a site of resilience, especially for rural and marginalised youth.

• A memory portal — understanding how sound encodes autobiographical memory and emotional states.

• A creative pathway — supporting artists and cultural workers whose wellbeing is inseparable from their sonic worlds.

Her academic writing explores precisely this intersection: how music functions as attachment object, transitional space, and identity scaffold across adolescence and adulthood. Clinically, she meets young people where they are — whether in drill, grime, hyperpop, indie folk, or underground techno — with respect for the meaning embedded in their playlists.

Under the moniker Stella Orbit, she curates playlists that trace emotional atmospheres rather than fixed genres — moving from ambient drift to deep house pulse, from spoken word to cosmic jazz. These can be found on Spotify and SoundCloud (Lisa Nikulinsky / Stella Orbit), offering a living archive of her sonic sensibility.

For Dr Nikulinsky, music is not background. It is relational. It is developmental. It is political. It is spiritual without dogma. It is how many young people first experience belonging — and how many adults return to themselves.

In her consulting room, as on a dancefloor at dawn, sound remains a quiet but powerful companion to transformation.