There are moments in life that transcend our ability to describe. Sometimes some thing is too extreme, too profound, too intense, to assign the right word, or the right combination of words, to accurately convey its feeling. This is what it means to be ineffable. Some thought, idea, feeling, or concept that goes beyond the purview of modern human language, human explanation or understanding. In my limited life experience, few things have been truly ineffable, and it’s futile to attempt to describe them, right? That’s the whole point. But they do generally manifest as feelings of intense love, pain, or fear. Some may consider religious experiences as ineffable. And perhaps ineffability varies from person to person, experience to experience.

Or language to language. After all, there are some really handy words in German that describe the absurdly detailed and specific in ways the English language doesn’t. Recall this NYT article praising the German language’s ability to express the inexpressible from a couple years ago. Some examples: “leertretung,” which means “stepping down heavily on a stair that isn’t there.” Or “dornhöschenschlaf,” “feigning sleep to avoid unwanted sexual intimacy.” And my favorite, “zeigarnikfrustration,” or, “the gnawing sense of incompleteness knowing there is a partially uneaten snack lying around.” And sure, these can be translated, but in translating, some of the magic and essence is lost. Why aren’t there words for these familiar experiences in English? Throughout history did this occurrence not surpass a threshold beyond which the assigning of a word was necessitated? Do we not value the expediency of one-word-smash-ups as much as the Germans? Or did we just not leave around enough half-eaten sandwiches?

I digress. I bring this idea of ineffable up because of my recent fixation on electronic music. Not necessarily EDM and all that entails. Just electronic. I’ve been getting really into Aphex Twin, Amon Tobin, and The Glitch Mob lately. No lyrics, just musical notes sounds. The complexity of some of our emotions and experiences need not (or cannot, in the cases I’m interested in) be explained out in words. Sometimes we need to tap into an extra-lingual dimension: that of sound without linguistic meaning. Listen to “Avril 14th” by Aphex Twin and tell me you don’t feel something. Some je ne sais quoi that you can’t quite put into words. Or, perhaps the inverse: you experience something you can’t quite explain, and there is that song you encounter that inexplicably matches the feeling. Therein lies the power of music where bare words simply won’t do. And electronic music, stripped of language and pre-defined ideas, lets each listener bring their own experience to bear on what they hear.