Published
Touch This Fragrant Surface Of Earth
In the shapeshifting field of experimental music, few artists approach sound with the quiet precision and philosophical depth of Finnish composer Marja Ahti. Her 2025 LP “Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth” (Fönstret) refuses the conventional boundaries of composition, unfolding instead as a meditation on both fleetingness and transformation. Listening to Ahti’s sound world means practicing the deepest of attentions, where sounds fade, return, and reflect the fragile flux of life.
Central to Ahti’s sound world is her engagement with Buddhist practice, where sound becomes a vehicle for contemplating the aforementioned temporality. The concept of biànhuà — transformation — resonates deeply with the way her music unfolds. Rather than treating compositions as fixed forms, she allows them to behave like living organisms, subject to the subtle laws of growth, erosion, and mutation.
In Buddhist thought, temporality is not a problem but a truth: the recognition that nothing is static, that all phenomena are bound to arise and fall. Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth can be heard as an auditory analogue of this teaching. Every sound already contains its ending. Each silence holds the change for something new to appear. The listener, by attending closely, learns to hear not only sounds but their transformations — to perceive the very fabric of becoming and the end.
This exactly is why this work feels less like a composition and more like a practice. To listen deeply is to meditate. To meditate is to become transformed.
The title itself is telling. The “fragrant surface of earth” is a layer — delicate, sensory, impossible to hold. It refers both to the natural ground we walk on and the ground of listening itself. Ahti’s music inhabits this surface, tracing the fragile points where perception brushes against the world.