British trip-hop heavyweight Massive Attack tried something interesting in 2009: they released an EP, Splitting the Atom, of remixes of songs from a forthcoming album. Remixes first? The notion isn’t as offensive to me as say eating dessert before the main course is. I find it creative, in fact. But I don’t know what it does to the meaning of a “definitive version” of a song. Maybe obscuring the whole question is what Massive Attack had in mind.

The EP features a slew of guests acquainted both long-term and short-term with the band. But the music retains a core aura, which is not a small feat considering the diversity contained within the EP. It all takes on a sort of downward-looking, melancholy and overcast feel. Perhaps this is a testament to Massive Attack’s long tenure in the music industry; the twentieth anniversary of their hugely influential Blues Lines album is approaching.

The title track leads off with a simple yet fresh beat that is juxtaposed with a spooky everything else: half-haunting vocals, almost-cliché while still quite effective strings that hover transcendently at the end and a sort of electronic minimalism. “Pray For Rain” features perhaps the most notable guest, TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe and is a powerful meditation on the necessity of water for human life that uses evocatively fitting music which takes its listener into, out of and into again, a drought. “Psyche” follows it well, unobtrusively remixed and ably sung by fellow trip-hop star Martina Topley-Bird. Arguably the most epic moment is saved for the EP’s final track, a remix of “Bulletproof Love.” Here, the feel of electronic remoteness is invaded poignantly and triumphantly by a brass choir crescendo. The original cold, electronic air wins out, but engages in an intriguing dual with the tormented but possibly hopeful lyrics sung by the British Guy Garvey.

I wonder if Massive Attack’s unorthodox release method for this EP will contribute to a shifting consensus on how definitive studio music should be. Perhaps music should borrow the mindset that exists in certain camps of literature: works are published but are never finished. This idea might help us see music as something ongoing, flowing, intangible and somehow indescribable.

Artists are capable of capturing a certain coresound like Massive Attack seems to on this EP and throughout their career. In this way they abstractly own a corner market of music’s own soul. And when a group can attain lyrical consistency and integrity, their sonic core is given added strength, creating “good” music.

This “undefinitization” yet non-anthropocentrically-relative view of music should help break apart arguments concerning the superiority of “studio” verses “live” and assist in decommodifying something that is designed to be a sacred and unique part of all of our essences. For music, it has been anonymously spoken, “is that which cannot be said but upon which it is impossible to be silent.” Music is that which, as Heinrich Heine put it in 1837, “stands halfway between thought and phenomenon, between spirit and matter, a sort of nebulous mediator, like and unlike each of the things it mediates — spirit that requires manifestation in time, and matter that can do without space.”

There is something so deeply intuitive about the quality of music; that is why I try to review it, to try to dance somewhere around that edge of my own soul in order to have it mirror what true soul should look like. “We do not know what music is,” Heine continues, “but what good music is we know well-enough…”