Conference Agenda

Muzak, a “corporate music” creative house, enjoys descriptions ranging from “elevator music” to “musical castration” (Lanza 2004; Hitchcock 1980) by normalizing a song’s tempo variances, dynamic changes, or even removing the voice to create sonic environments conducive to post-Fordist consumer culture (Jones and Schumacher 1992, 160). In my presentation, I explore how Mallsoft, a Vaporwave microgenre, decenters Muzak’s consumerist intent by using similar methods of depersonalization to create a post-capitalist commentary on an intrinsically capitalistic music.

Mallsoft artists embrace and parody the aesthetics that characterize corporate music by intentionally placing its background banality in the forefront (McLeod 2018, 123). Their songs are calculated and nonabrasive, produced with vintage-inspired instrumentation and filters that emulate Muzak’s 1970s–1980s heyday, but with an underlying uncanniness. These reproductions are often tinted with “chop-and-screw” samples that distort musical time (Killeen 2018, 629), instilling a post-Fordist temporal flexibility where the work/leisure divide becomes increasingly blurred. Ambient noise of crowds and piped announcements are also commonly sampled, evoking a sense of presence and community to the listener, yet this togetherness is a virtual artifact contrary to the shopping mall’s social experience. A third defining aesthetic –– mid-range frequency cuts (Glitsos 2018, 108) –– creates a hollow, liminal space suggesting the music is heard through walls, as if one cannot locate the sonic source in a labyrinthine consumer complex. These elements together introduce a sense of “false nostalgia” that transports listeners to pre-digital consumer utopias, but these malls sound eerily vacant, much like the deserted structures that twenty-first century digital shopping generated (Wilcox and Compton 2023, 69).

Mallsoft’s borrowing from Muzak’s depersonalized sounds constructs a contradiction with the capitalist culture that brought corporate music to public spaces. What once was music for consuming is now consumable music where liminal spaces exploit senses of “false nostalgia” that recall consumption and the accompanying memories (Wilcox and Compton 2023, 69; Raymen, 101). Just as advertising entices us into a store, Mallsoft also draws us into in its environment, but it is an imaginary space: surreal, but not uninviting where “the virtual plaza welcomes you. And you will welcome it, too” (/mu/, 2013).