Mallsoft

Mallsoft pitches and time-stretches 1980s and 1990s background music — Muzak compilations, elevator standards, easy-listening jazz — down to a half- or quarter-speed crawl, then layers in reverb, room tone, distant footsteps, and HVAC hum. Tempos that exist at all sit around 40-60 BPM and there is rarely anything you'd call a beat. The reference image is a shopping mall after closing time: fluorescent lights, polished floor, no shoppers. Tracks routinely run six to twelve minutes and albums are designed as continuous environments rather than playlists.

Mallsoft branched off vaporwave around 2013-2014, named after Cat System Corp.'s 'Palm Mall' (2014). The wider vaporwave moment had been kicked off by Macintosh Plus (Vektroid)'s 'Floral Shoppe' in 2011, with its slowed-down Diana Ross sample 'リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー'. Mallsoft narrowed vaporwave's already specific subject matter — late-capitalist consumer space — onto the particular dead-mall imagery that was circulating on Tumblr and dead-mall photography blogs at the same time.

Treat it as a room rather than a song. The interest is in how the source recording's edges blur as it slows down, how reverb tails stack until the original melody is barely audible, and what diegetic sounds (announcements, escalator hum, far-away voices) get layered in. Played at low volume in a quiet apartment it does what it's supposed to do; played on headphones the seams are easier to spot.

Cat System Corp., 'Palm Mall' (2014) is the genre-defining release. For a related but slightly different mood, Vektroid's 'Floral Shoppe' (Macintosh Plus, 2011) is the vaporwave starting point.

Vaporwave's cover art convention — Japanese kana mixed with Roman characters, classical bust statuary, Windows 95 chrome — predates the music's name; mallsoft inherited it wholesale, which is why a record like 'Palm Mall' looks like it could have come out of 1995 Akihabara even though it was made by Canadian producers in 2014.