Indeed, today’s chill-out ambience feels less attuned to Eno’s atmospheres, which were intended to create “musical experiences” that the listener could enter and leave as they wished, and more like personalized pseudoscientific therapeutics. If the Muzak of the 1940s was about disciplining workers in factories—or selling to employers the idea that this was possible—then today’s mood music boom, in the age of being your own boss, might be more about the streaming user disciplining themselves, or being sold on that possibility, under the guise of self-improvement and empowerment, like an
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