​Eco-Chilling for the Common Good


​eco-planet psychedelic lounge music
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In contemporary slang to "chill" is "to calm down, to relax."

​Some people chill by listening to ambient music, also called easy listening or lounge music. 

Consider, then, eco-chilling. It is a form of chilling that occurs when we chill to music that evokes a sense of the more than human world, the desert, for example.

In the chilling our minds may wander into realms of images and ideas that give us perspective on life and animate our souls. A Jungian might call it active imagination; a priest might call it prayer. 

Consider the genre eco-planetary psychedelic lounge music, as illustrated on this page by the music of Sam Shepherd and his ensemble Floating Points.

A reviewer describes it this way: "They incorporate the vast, rocky landscape of the California desert into the very fabric of their ambient post-rock...Listen deeper and the smallest of sounds also arise, like the crunching of rocks under Shepherd’s feet as he moves through the space; the very breath of the desert is made audible. The result is transportive and supremely psychedelic."

If we are to help build and sustain just and compassionate communities that are good for people, animals, and the Earth; if we are to work toward Ecological Civilizations where people live with respect and care for one another and the community of life; don't we need this kind of chilling?  Call it eco-chilling for the common good.


Jay McDaniel

​Sam Shepherd and his ensemble, Floating Points, "incorporate the vast, rocky landscape of the California desert into the very fabric of their ambient post-rock.

"Floating Points has always been especially attentive to the way sound exists in space; many of his most electrifying moments take place along the periphery of silence. Here, the painstaking way he details the psychoacoustic properties of the landscape is remarkable.

"While 'Kites' might at first seem like a mere interlude, playback on headphones situates you in the remarkable headspace of the desert, evoking the kind of calm most modern urban listeners rarely experience.

"As Shepherd swings the mic, distant echo and miles-off reverb color the distant arpeggios of that synth situated on the rocks. Listen deeper and the smallest of sounds also arise, like the crunching of rocks under Shepherd’s feet as he moves through the space; the very breath of the desert is made audible. The result is transportive and supremely psychedelic."

- Andy Beta, Pitchfork, click​ here.

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Eco-Chilling for the
​ Common Good

What is an Ecological Civilization?

It is a civilization in which people live with respect and care for the community of life, as embodied in local communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, diverse, humane to animals, and good for the Earth, with no one left bend. Scroll through the slide show for more

​What is the place of music in the Earth Community? 

It is part of the acoustic ecology of the planet. We may tend to imagine the Earth Community in primarily visual terms, but it includes sounds, too. The sounds of "nature" to be sure: wind, surf, insects, animals. And also humanly produced sounds: the human voice, sounds of the city and music. See the field of acoustic ecology, which studies the relationship of people to their sonic environments. Any sounds of any sort, including lounge music, are part of the acoustic ecology of the Earth Community. 

What is lounge music?

It is ambient music, meant to evoke the feeling of being in a place, usually with a tranquil mood. Here's how Wikipedia describes it:

"Lounge music a type of easy listening music popular in the 1950s and 1960s. It may be meant to evoke in the listeners the feeling of being in a place, usually with a tranquil theme, such as a jungle, an island paradise or outer space. 

The range of lounge music encompasses beautiful music-influenced instrumentals, modern electronica (with chillout, and downtempo influences), while remaining thematically focused on its retro-space age cultural elements. The earliest type of lounge music appeared during the 1920s and 1930s, and was known as light music."

What is eco-planet, psychedelic lounge music?

It is music that is intentionally created out of experiences in the more than human world (eco-planet), evoking a free-floating imagination (psychedelic), in ways that create a chill sonic environment (lounge music). Electronic instruments and the music they create, too, are part of the Earth's ecology.

What is chill?

It means relaxing and cool, as in "I like her, she's chill" or "Wanna come over and chill?" or "Why you so mad? Just chill" or "Wanna listen to some chill music? 

Do people need to chill?

Of course they do. That's why they meditate, or take walks in the park, or watch television, trashy or otherwise.  They need to calm down.

Some forms of chilling are deeply spiritual or philosophical. They are contexts for gaining perspective on life, for being "away" from the freneticism of ordinary waking consciousness and entering into a cosmic depth dimension.

What is eco-chilling?

Eco-chilling has an ecological side.  It is entering into a depth dimension that feels connected with aspects of the more than human world: deserts, lakes, mountains, animals, plants, stars, galaxies.  Space music, for example, is chilling in outer space.  And Reflections - Mojave Desert is chilling in the desert, sonically. 

Can eco-chilling play a role in the lives of people who are trying to build Ecological Civilizations?

Without a capacity for chilling, we are doomed.  We will be too hurried and anxious to notice the beauty of the planet or the wonders of the mind. 

Is the desert a good place to chill?

Yes, ask the philosopher and theologian Roland Faber.

​Roland Faber on Desert Spirituality
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. . . Where is the Lord who brought us up from the land of Egypt, who led us in the wilderness, in a land of deserts and pits, in a land of drought and deep darkness, in a land that no one passes through, where no one lives?

—JEREMIAH 2:6 (NRSV)

I want to penetrate to the simple ground, to the still desert, into which distinction never peeped, neither Father nor Son nor Holy Spirit.

​—MEISTER ECKHART, GERMAN SERMONS, #48

All images from Unsplash: Creative Commons

​The desert was always, in the annals of spirituality, a special place. In the absence of distraction from imaginations and human constructs, it seems to bring us closer to the unconstructed: silence, solitude, prayer, meditation, fasting, frugality, introspection, the absence of mere ornamentation and from the clamor of human busyness and businesses. No wonder that the desert, in religious imagination and symbolic attraction, has never lost its call to exile and liberation from constraints of human organization, the city (polis), the state, the law of civilization, and became the intermediary or permanent place of religious reformers, prophets, holy figures, wisdom teachers, philosophers, shamans, ascetics and exiled, alien, alienated, and alternative communities, shamanic journeys and encounters with “native” spiritual guides.

​Roland Faber, THE COSMIC SPIRIT Awakenings at the Heart of All Religions, the Earth, and the Multiverse

Desert is not desert. Gobi, Kalahari, Sahara, Patagonia, Syria, Arabia, Karakoram, Atacama, Antarctica—their topography is nothing alike. They can be of high or low elevation; sand or rock or ice; with or without annual torrents of rain; continental or seaside; flat or mountainous; hot or cold, or both; habitable or inhabitable; hostile or connective; bland or subtle. The paradoxes of the desert haunt human imagination of dangers and surprises: while it is dry, you can find water; while it is empty, you may uncover oases; while it promises you to be parched, it might drown you; while it is a reminder of death, it may be full of life; while it seems to be abandoned, it may be the space of liberation; while it creeps towards fecund land, it warns us of wasting the mercy of the earth to sustain us; while it situates the wanderer, emigrant, nomad or fugitive into sceneries and scenarios of desolation, its formidable fierceness is patient to the travelers, offering them islands of life, water, food, relaxation, and rest.

​​Roland Faber, THE COSMIC SPIRIT Awakenings at the Heart of All Religions, the Earth, and the Multiverse

While the desert is a place where no one lives....it is the place of immediate experience of human contingency and divine transcendence: survival is a pure gift. In mystical topology, it is perhaps closest to the feeling of what it means that God is like the sun that shines over good and evil (Matthew 5).  It is a place of indifference. Here, the physical experience of indifference is more than just a symbolic representation of nondualism, the indifference of Reality from all realities. Rather, this indifference is, in stark tones and colors, feelings and intuition, the impact of a real environment of the earth onto the bodily immediacy of human consciousness: of what it means to be abandoned and free at the same time; where life and death come closest together; where the absence of restrictive human laws and the contingencies of the nomad fuse on a surface that dictates its own rules for the necessities of survival.

​Is this the indifference of God? Not a romantic immanence in everything, not an oceanic feeling of being in the divine All that is All in All, but the transcendence of absence, of being expelled from Eden, of a chaos of disorientation? If it is a divine plane, we are its foreigners, housed only as alienated from it, tolerated as external to it, moving around in desperate search for symbolizations that would create meaning. In this shock or epiphany of the realization of the desert, we discover the presymbolic place, the u-topos, the Ungrund, the groundless isolation from all illusions (Abgeschiedenheit)—illusions that we create in order to avoid this insight....The divine desert is the u-topos: beyond any image, imagination, difference, possession of personality or the procession of any difference, even that of the Trinity—how more so of anything else.

Roland Faber, THE COSMIC SPIRIT Awakenings at the Heart of All Religions, the Earth, and the Multiverse


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