In this contribution, Birgit Abels explores music-making as a knowledge practice that can teach us a lot about a postcolonial world where hegemonic and disenfranchised epistemologies compete. Music ›is‹ not; music is only ever becoming, and that becoming interlaces with our own becoming. In music's evanescence lies its efficacy. Process-philosophically, the efficacy of music can never be categorical: a signified, a given or purely subjective (however defined). Instead, music affects, and interacts with, the felt body as a continuous, amorphous stream of layered complexity. This complexity straddles the territorial boundaries of the material and the immaterial, of the referential and the essential; and, it is deeply relational in nature. Outlining music-making's relational capacities through the terms ›sound knowledge‹ and ›sound work‹, in this contribution, Abels will quickly arrive at the atmospheric workings of sonic practices. We know through music not least atmospherically, and we act on that knowledge in ways that cannot possibly be pinned down to either the signified or the sonically essential. Exploring music-making in terms of sound knowledge, she argues, has the potential to open up post- colonial studies' much lamented, but nonetheless persistent heavy textual bias in favour of a more encompassing consideration of cultural practices.