So I came inside and I put it on, and it was like the third bed that Goldilocks tried out in the Three Bears’ cottage: it was just right. It’s called Foreign Lands and People, and it’s by an act called Mandible Chatter. It is “ambient music,” more or less, which is an unfortunate genre name. One of the great rules of genre names, though, is that the ones that catch the public fancy always win, whether or not they’re any good. “Ambient” is itself such an empty word that the genre it means to delineate starts breaking itself down into sub-categories almost as soon as “A”-word is pronounced: there’s dark ambient, chillout, deep ambient, organic industrial, and my longtime favorite and perennial drinking buddy, ambient dub – all trying to describe something whose whole purpose is more or less inimical to the whole notion of categorization. |
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