EVERY GENRE PROJECT - September 3 - Mallsoft

Genre of the Day - Mallsoft

Album of the Day - Palm Mall Mars by 猫 シ Corp. [Cat System Corp.] (2018)

An intriguing analogue to the era of streaming is the era of the faceless, vibes-centered YouTube compilation. A compilation grouping tracks of the same general ambience together is nowhere near new, but YouTube’s rendition of it might affirm the worst of those who rail against the streaming era—artists’ names are superfluous, they exploit trendy buzzwords, they’re grouped in aesthetic. Perhaps within those truths also lies their power, though. I was finding music to work to the other day when I came across one boldly titled “ＬＵＸＵＲＹ　ＷＡＶＥ　憶化ペ // Calm Vaporwave, Deep Chillwave, Lush Ambient, Night Vibes.” Its cover, a sunglass-donning woman bathed in blue light, her face slightly blurred like that of Sade’s soft gaze on Promise, caught my eye alongside the miscellany of tagged words. Clicking around, I was pleasantly surprised to be ensnared by the yearning, resonant synths around the eight-minute mark. Even in this strange new horizon of music proliferation, melodic beauty is never far, and apparently, vaporwave is far from dead. 

Mallsoft is an offshoot of vaporwave, something of a now-iconic Internet aesthetic mode of the early 2010s that I touched on a few months ago in dreampunk. Vaporwave envisioned hi-fi collages co-opting retro Japanese and nostalgic-fantastic aesthetics through lo-fi, ethereal music drenching synth compositions in waves of hazy ambience. Mallsoft is a meditation on another Internet phenomena I’ve observed reoccur over the years. There’s a palpable online obsession with the malls of decades past, when consumerism seemed alight with cheer. Most Americans have fond childhood memories of wandering around the mall, glossy marble floors and fountains brimming with paradisaic promise. I grew up frequenting Denver’s upscale Cherry Creek mall, watching shows where malls were the hubs of social life, and vicariously living through my relative’s stories of Cinderella City, a quintessential vintage example of malls as places of wonder and possibility. 

The oft-repeated lament that the American mall is dead doesn’t always ring true—I still find a few occasions a year where somehow the only choice is to pull up to the local mall (more than a few involving a primal desire for frozen yogurt), and while I find the journey more of a hassle than stupendous, I’m always pleased to see the throngs of people and mallrats still roaming about. Aside from my personal anecdotes, the numbers are a little more stark: there were over 2,500 malls in the 1980s in the US compared to 700 today. The derelict ruins of shopping oases litter the country. Mall culture in East and Southeast Asia still gleams, though, and their highrise shopping centers blast the best of American malls’ glory days out of the water with their maximalism and vibrancy. 

Perhaps that contrast between our domestically perishing mall culture and their exuberance abroad inspired mallsoft producers—for once, vaporwave’s co-optation of foreign aesthetics feels a little more relevant and less “thing-Japan.” Musically, though, mallsoft draws on the easy listening associated with a mall journey in the American 1980s. Smooth jazz and muzak, the original vibe-setting music before Youtube compilations in that same vein were glimmers in someone’s eye, form the musical basis for mallsoft. Their sense of sonic dynamics underscores thought and intricacy in production value—producers carefully find ways to manipulate their songs so that they sound as if they’re coming from a distant, overhead speaker, softly sweeping over the hopeful mallgoer. Mallsoft posits nostalgia’s bittersweetness—its gauzy beauty can elicit imagined delight just as it can exact ominous sadness for a time lost, or that never existed.  

猫 シ Corp.’s Palm Mall Mars whisks you to a mall of epic proportions, escalators ascending to heaven and fellow shoppers like familiar friends. The layers of distance add an eerie beauty to the drum machines softly crackling underneath luxuriant sax as in “スキポール空港Plaza.” “Virtual World Generator” toys with loungey, quiet storm piano through cloudy layers of abstraction, like going in and out of consciousness while sitting by a gently trickling ornate fountain. Sounds of people laughing sparkle through “Ring World Information System” and its yearning pads; across the album, unidentified, ambient noises suspend you between the frenzy of the shopping experience and the sleepy lull of nostalgia. Its hyper-specific vision of an imagined commercial space acts as retail therapy for escapists of the Amazon era, reminding us how music can draw out the charm of and make us pine for experiences that were once simply quotidian.