In 2009, Brian Eno wrote that we are living in a “stylistic tropics,” in which genres like ambient music have split into a multitude of subgenres—black ambient, ambient dub, ambient industrial, organic ambient, and many more—and listeners can increasingly access anything from anywhere as stylistic sensibilities decouple from geographic constraints. Thirteen years later, this all seems so obvious that it’s barely worth pointing out—the internet has refined the process so thoroughly that it’s more difficult to imagine the localized, timebound conditions that once sorted us into various rigid identities. “It’s all alive, all ‘now,’ in an ever-expanding present,” Eno continued (referencing
I saw this email's title and preview line and thought it was going to be a record review!