Mallsoft (also known as mallwave) is a
vaporwave
Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music, a visual art style, and an Internet meme that emerged in the early 2010s and became well-known in 2015. It is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples of smooth jazz, 1970 ...
subgenre centered around shopping malls.
Overview
Often based on corporate
lounge music
Lounge music is a type of easy listening music popular in the 1950s and 1960s. It may be meant to evoke in the listeners the feeling of being in a place, usually with a tranquil theme, such as a jungle, an island paradise or outer space. The ra ...
, mallsoft is meant to conjure images of shopping malls, grocery stores, lobbies, and other places of public commerce. Mallsoft artists typically elicit nostalgic memories of these retail establishments, even to those who did not experience them firsthand, sampling
easy listening
Easy listening (including mood music) is a popular music genre and radio format that was most popular during the 1950s to the 1970s. It is related to middle of the road (MOR) music and encompasses instrumental recordings of standards, hit s ...
,
bossa nova, and
smooth jazz
Smooth jazz is commercially oriented crossover jazz music. Although often described as a "genre", it is a debatable and highly controversial subject in jazz music circles. As a radio format, however, smooth jazz radio became the successor to e ...
music. The music can also include intermittent advertisements, as well as the sounds of footsteps, conversations, and air conditioning. Much of the listening enjoyment is derived from nostalgia and the "pleasure of remembering for the sake of the act of remembering itself".
Characteristics
Some artists simply slow down and reverberate 1980s pop songs to make them sound as if emanating from the overhead speakers in an empty or abandoned mall.
Reverb and distortion are often overlaid on top of tracks to give them an isolating and disorienting feeling.
YouTube
YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...
videos frequently pair mallsoft tracks with images of malls, with an emphasis on those that appear to have been produced in the 1980s and 1990s.
The visuals intend to invoke a sense of loneliness along with the cold nature of meandering through overly corporate mercantile environments.
Reception
Music journalist Simon Chandler described Dutch artist
Cat System Corp.'s 2014 album ''Palm Mall'' as being "perhaps the definitive mallsoft album".
See also
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Ambient music
Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes Musical tone, tone and atmosphere over traditional Musical form, musical structure or rhythm. Often "peaceful" sounding and lacking Musical composition, composition, beat, and/or structured melod ...
*
Postmodern architecture
Postmodern architecture is a style or movement which emerged in the 1960s as a reaction against the austerity, formality, and lack of variety of modern architecture, particularly in the International Style (architecture), international style adv ...
*
Dead mall
A dead mall, also known as a ghost mall or zombie mall, is a shopping mall that has low consumer traffic or is deteriorating in some manner.
Many malls in North America are considered "dead" when they have no surviving anchor store or successor ...
References
{{Electronica
21st-century music genres
Neologisms
Microgenres
2010s in music
2020s in music
Nostalgia
Shopping malls
Vaporwave genres
Indie music