There have been actually, huge waves of migration, but the nuum was really about the West Indies. There was a relationship there with Jamacian music. Since then you've had, to name a few
Somalian, Polish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Romanian, Lithuanian, Portugese, Columbian, Algerian, Moroccan, Egyptian, Albanian, and of course Nigerian and Ghanian (not to mention Gambian, Cameroonian, Angolans) It's a vastly more multicultural London than it was in 1993. Far more complex.
how that might pan out in music is not obvious. It's clearly ridiculous to posit some future amalgamation of all ethnic, cultural influences. It never works that way. (Some bagpipes over some daburka, with a nose flute and some reggae bass) you may get what Barty wants, which is localised scenes demarcated by ethnic/cultural/national origin, some of which could cross over to a larger audience. That doesn't seem inconceivable. Polish donk, Turkish reggaeton etc. Afrobeats was/is this to some degree. Asian garage was this is the late '90s.
funnily or not so funnily enough my mum really likes art blakey. she likes kool and the gang summer madness. she likes that sort of old afro american soul vibe. I've been looking for stuff from my personal continuum (bukem excluded) that i can show her. garage is just too twitchy. but i was looking at nightmares on wax and detroit electro and it's such an initiates sound. well, N.O.W is a bit flat in an electronic music context. I guess the jazz man synth was always a tendancy that was born out of all sorts of cheesy proportions. really though what I want is something more like the first black dog album. only thing that I can think of. that one they did in 1992 was basically perfect, almost a middle eastern elegance in the beat but also jazzed out.
now synthetic aesthetics are more fluid, promiscuity, baroque, overloaded, spongiform
Do you just mean in terms of music? Architecture and product design are still pretty clean and minimal for the most part. Apple in particular as Barty mentioned I think.
The rounded off shake and rubbery texture of iPhone app icons. The apple logo itself.
There's always been a vision of the future which is non-physical. Part of this presumably stems from dualism, not necessarily Cartesian, but also religious, always the division into corporeal and non corporeal. On the one hand the body on the other; mind, soul, spirit.
Eshun makes the point in more brilliant than the sun that the future always used to be represented in sound as diaphanous, floaty, weightless, Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, until dance music, acid house, techno, jungle. I don't know if that is entirely true actually. It's a shaky point, but you certainly have the two competing visions.
As I keep saying the switch to the post-industrial and into the Information Age is what seems to be the crucial thing here. We are not the robots any more. Not Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. We are synced to non human rhythms more than ever before perhaps, but not to the factory.