Mallsoft

It seems the late 1980s and 1990s are making a comeback, with new music genres like Vaporwave and Mallsoft.

Genres such as mallsoft, vaporwave, or hypnogogic pop, to name but a few, arise in a heartbeat and die out before many people, certainly mainstream music listeners, are likely even aware of them.

슈퍼마켓 Yes! We’re Open is categorised as mallsoft, the vaporwave subgenre which evokes the sounds and atmosphere of shopping malls, and which obliquely references their current, precarious state.

Such an aesthetic might recall some ‘hyperreal’ (Baudrillard, 1994) image of an American shopping mall in the 1980’s, one that could be said to have that unique aesthetic that has come to be synonymous with Vaporwave’s derivative, ‘mallsoft’.

An Ultimate Guitar contributor pungently described this music as “us[ing] ambience as an instrument.” “The most interesting part of ‘Mallsoft’ music is the inclusion of the ‘space’ around the music that’s playing,” he wrote. “When you listen to ‘Mallsoft,’ you’re not listening to a recording of the music that was played in a mall, you’re listening to how that mall sounded when music was added to it.”