Genre bins are a useful fiction. They help listeners find what they are looking for. But they obscure how music actually develops: through migration, cross-pollination, and exchange between scenes that have no formal contact beyond shared curiosity. The Sonic Atlas traces these routes, showing how a dub bassline in Kingston becomes a hip hop break in the Bronx, how Detroit techno moves through European clubs and returns as Berlin minimal, how the blues travel up the Mississippi Delta and cross the Atlantic to become British rock. None of these migrations fit into a bin. All of them explain more about how music works than the bins do. The map is not finished. Music is still moving.
Read more →