No. 152 - Kiln’s “Amethyst” Changed My Life

Owen Lambert’s first out-of-body experiences, and finding true peace in nature

Jul 31, 2026

This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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Twinewheel [Lost-Sides and Dusty-Gems 1994–2005] by Kiln album cover

• 3 min read •

April 2nd, 2023 at 49 Black Sand Beach, Puako, Hawaii

Mauna, a local, takes me spearfishing. This is something I have always dreamed of doing. I approached the speargun with apprehension; five and a half feet tall, yet seemingly weightless. I enter the water, stared at by tourists, eluding, observing an act deemed exotic. Continuing further and further, knife attached to my calf, the speargun obtains great weight. Hiding on top of a spherical mass, akin to brain coral, I look down, peering at the life teeming in this umbral reef.

Three minutes later, twenty feet deep, the first shot connects. Attached by a rope maybe ten feet long, I pull the wriggling fish upward. “It’s important to look the fish in the eye as you end its suffering, so it won’t be alone.” Two more shots connect, each experience the same: I struggle to pull the fish up, I can’t get the knife out of the sheath, I am worried I heighten the pain of the fish more. Four hours pass. I am enthralled with this entire experience. I am lost in nature’s caressing embrace. It was my first real out-of-body event. An arcane stillness.

A close-up view of rippling water with sunlit highlights and hues of blue, lavender, and seafoam green. — Multi-plate intaglio print of waves by Owen (22” x 12”)

August 6th, 2025 at Tempelhof, Berlin, Germany

My brother and I were in Berlin and went to Tempelhofer Feld, a decommissioned airport turned into a public park. Entering the site, we see massive fields of towering foliage, hundreds of people gathering after work. We decide to head into the shorter brush, sitting on the edge of an abyssal field. The wind started blowing, children were laughing, families were gathered sharing food; I started a drawing and quickly became transfixed by the long grass, losing myself to the forms, textures, shadows, colors. The song comes on: “Amethyst” by Kiln.

I am immediately jettisoned back to my time in the water. The sun leaking through the plants mimicked the sea’s refraction. The wind matched the feeling of the cool, strong currents pushing and pulling me, undulating. A cocooned stillness.

I felt I was hearing nature’s voice for the first time, calling me back to a state of euphoria. So vivid, such a grandiose sense of wonder. There’s both a loss of the external world into the self, and a loss of self into the external world. When the internal and external are at play, folding and unfolding upon each other, time dissipates out of the picture. It goes from you and the world to you within the world, like a kaleidoscope. What this does for me, elicited by this song, cannot be overstated. It brings me true peace, groundedness, an enmeshment with the world that is unparalleled. The song also changed my perspective on how I experience the world every day.

A figure lies propped up on his elbows, reading, in a grassy field under a pale blue sky. — Hand-colored drypoint of Owen’s brother, Ethan, reading at Tempelhofer Feld (8” x 10”)

Before, I was treating every event, every moment, as these isolated experiences that mark who we are, what we become. Through finding true peace in these moments, I found that the only thing that is isolated, singular, in our lives is process itself: not the experiential thing that we try to isolate, like places, people, parties, but the act of moving through them. These events fold together, echo. The water becomes the wind, the wind becomes sound, the sound returns me to the water. So I no longer look for singular, defining moments. I return to the process, to that stillness within motion, where the boundary between myself and the world softens.

The beautiful, light tapping on the kick drum, the breathy rhythm. There is this movement that can be felt in the body, like being taken by the current, pulled forward. Ever so slowly. The song is a way for me to materialize and feel process itself momentarily.

I think back to looking those fish in the eyes. That strange closeness where there is no abstraction, nothing to hide behind. It’s an acknowledgment, a brief and undeniable connection within the larger process. That feeling, uncomfortable and intimate, is not separate from the peace I felt, but part of the same continuum. The song didn’t take me back to the ocean, it showed me that I have been moving within it all along. ◆