Conference Agenda

Ambient music’s origin myth typically enshrines Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) and its provocative manifesto: “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening at once. It must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Yet, as Robert Fink’s (2005) account of 1960s barococo reveals, background listening as a marker of sophistication long predates Eno. Thus, rather than inventing an ambient listening modality, Eno more accurately supplied it with a distinct sonic and paratextual identity. The Ambient series’ liner notes, graphic scores, and stereo stagings positioned the music above “derivative” Muzak, subverting relaxed listening through gestures of highbrow legibility. The ignorable, in Eno’s hands, was first and foremost interesting.

But such media-tethered techniques inevitably expired. The compact disc and 1990s EDM culture relocated ambient into psychedelic chill-out rooms, where artists transformed digital detritus and glitch into expressive material, subverting ignorability through production aesthetics and altered states of mind (Cascone 2000; Szabo 2023). And, in today’s streaming era—characterized by ubiquitous listening practices (Kassabian 2013), AI-generated mood playlists (Drott 2024; Pelly 2025; Seaver 2022), and a resurgent “Muzak 2.0” (Hecker 2025)—background music has become a core mechanism of “platform” (Srnicek 2016) and even “surveillance” (Drott 2018; Zuboff 2018) capitalism. As Ambrose Field (2019) observes, “Today, nearly every space that can be filled with digital content is filled with digital content.” Victor Szabo’s (2019) titular “What Music Isn’t Ambient in the 21st Century?” recognizes a renewed tension between genre and listening mode.

I argue that some contemporary ambient artists have responded by relocating the site of subversion to the sonic fabric itself. Analyses of recent, seemingly “anti”-ambient albums by Fennesz, Bing & Ruth, and Tim Hecker show how twenty-first-century ambient artists use carefully chosen disruptions that avoid certain syntactical constructions, allowing only practiced listeners to tune out. Drawing on theories of genre’s diachronic transformation (Born 2011; Fabbri 2016; Straw 1991) alongside cognitive accounts of expectation and processing (Huron 2006; Patel 2007), these works demonstrate that, once paratextual distinction could no longer secure ambient’s autonomy, the genre’s function is being preserved by those most vehemently challenging it.

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).

Elden Ring is a game defined by illusions of juxtaposition. Implied forces of “good” are pitted against forces of “evil”; light seems to compete with dark in both narrative storytelling and game design; and the assumed forward march of time contrasts with the stillness of ancient relics, artifacts, and the distant past. The music and soundscapes of the game epitomize this juxtaposition of movement and stasis. While a large portion of the exploration gameplay state includes ambient drones performed by delicate strings and pads, the title theme and boss battles present epic orchestral arrangements emblematic of the high fantasy genre of RPGs.
Crucially, however, the game persistently destabilizes these oppositions. As players assemble the game’s fragmented lore through artifact descriptions and environmental storytelling, clear-cut distinctions between past and present become increasingly uncertain. In this paper, I analyze contrasts between movement and stasis in the exploration sounds and boss battle music of Elden Ring to show how sound and music align with the game’s core messages and themes about time, history, and power. I consider the music and sound design in Elden Ring as a curated illusion, like many elements of the game’s lore and narrative design. Incorporating Deleuze’s concepts of the “movement-image” and the “time-image” with Virilio’s philosophy of “dromology”—in which the movement of time causes stillness itself to become an artifact—I argue that the perceived contrasts in musical temporality reinforce the game’s core concept of time as an element of power that is manipulated, suspended, or distorted in such a way that the dominant ideology can present its narrative as eternal and natural.