Terraforming with Language, or Why I Love Ambient Electronic Music, Part Whatever It Is Now

Ambient electronic music is not only music. It's also a sensibility expressed in the track and album titles and the artist's name. Like aphorisms and fragments, like Pascal's Pensee and Nietzche's Human, All Too Human and the bits and pieces of Heraclitus and fellow pre-Socratics, the titles and names are all that is left of a language, lost centuries and centuries and centuries ago, to tell us what we're seeing or listening to. Ergo, what they were seeing and listening to.

This is true of any and all instrumental music (that isn't just an instrumental version of a vocal composition). The title is everything - everything cognitive, that is. So the title is extremely important.

Read the playlist, while keeping in mind - if you don't already listen to ambient electronic music - the lack of vocal storytelling. The whole story is then the music, warped into some shape by the language of the title and the artist's name.

This shape is an actual place, if only a clearing in reality. As long as you don't think a place is solid. This is a place that has lately been terraformed. This process is creation. It's like laying railroad track, but with language, where you imagine the place in which 'circular ruins' playing 'we carry them with us when we leave' not only make sense, but they make the only sense, and fill in details and feelings and color as we listen to the music and think of the title.

But don't think I'm talking about text. Not text. Language. Thinking in action.