Terre Thaemlitz is hot shit in the American ambient scene. Having worked with such other hotties as Bill Laswell and Tetsu Inoue, Terre is a New York City resident and a leading artist on Instinct Record's excellent ambient series. Using an all digital setup and a big pile of samples, Terre has created some beautiful and unpredictable soundscapes, with a bit in one of the tracks that sounds like my doorbell (I have stopped getting up to answer it). One of the principal ideas behind Mr. Thaemlitz's work is formlessness, and and affinity to New York's "disjunctive" environment. Relaxing most of the time, jarring some of the time, and often times mentally stimulating, Soil is a romp through a New York computer technician's headspace.