Marja Ahti - Touch This Fragrant Surface Of Earth LP (Fönstret)

Marja Ahti’s Touch This Fragrant Surface Of Earth is continuing in the lineage of its predecessors: it asks something of its listener before it gives anything in return and yet once one enters its carefully constructed world the rewards are quietly profound. It is not music of gesture or drama, it is a practice in attention. Experience of sound. Numerous natural sounds sources and acoustic instruments and restrained electronics are assembled with a sculptor’s precision, each sound allowed to exist fully. To resonate, to decay. Piano and idiophones are not instruments here so much as surfaces that vibrate the sound. Transportive vessels so to say. They work as materials whose texture and resonance invite touch, even if only imaginatively. The cello, clarinet, and other collaborators are absorbed into the same ethic: their voices are not showcased, but extended into the subtle architecture of the record’s listening space.

Ahti’s LP’s power lies in its refusal to compromise. Each track, each side, unfolds with deliberate patience, rewarding especially the repeated attention. Notes and textures slip past the thresholds of conscious recognition, revealing themselves in micro movements: the way a scraping sound curls around a decay, the faint metallic ping that transforms the atmosphere of a quiet room. In these moments, time stretches, and the listener becomes aware not just of sound, but of the act of listening itself. Like watching itself from above. There is a Zen discipline at play here: attention is trained as a practice, a slow unfolding of perception. Ahti’s own engagement with meditation and contemplative performance contexts makes this alignment explicit. The album functions almost as a set of propositions that ask one to return, to notice, to inhabit the present fully.

This album is not “meditation music” and it does not accommodate casual consumption. Its reward is cumulative. Each listen uncovers gestures that went previously unnoticed, textures that were previously unheard. Silence is as carefully considered as sound and the space works as a collaborator in its own right. In a world where music and other things often demand their space through spectacle this record it refuses it.