Category Killer, qu’est-ce que c’est?

[eerietom]

My brother and I were given a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder when we were of elementary school age. We didn’t begin recording music together until 1985, but before then we sure recorded a lot of what we called “radio plays”—basically improvised (and usually silly) versions of our favorite shows and films. One was the sci-fi film THX-1138 (1971, dir. George Lucas), which we saw on TV in the early 80s. We were amused by the strangely placid music* playing in the dystopian setting, and too young to know that elevator music (or muzak) was an actual genre. In one part of our radio play version, one of us said, “Production is up 72%, and now for the enjoyment of our listening audience, we present (dramatic pause) mall music.”, then sang a made-up tune—using the syllable “ding” to imitate a vibraphone—that went something like this:
 

Jump ahead many years later. I don’t recall exactly how I came across “mallsoft”, but probably from listening to chillwave music, which led me to vaporwave, and then to the latter’s various sub-genres. I was fascinated that anyone would take elevator music, slow it down, add lots of reverb, then call it new music. Why, anyone could do that, right? It wasn’t until I saw a video explaining the motivation behind mallsoft that I got intrigued and began exploring the genre in depth. This led me to a number of artists, but my favorite was someone named Yu, who recorded an album entitled 過世的購物中心蕭條導瀉檔案完畢世界 / Blue Album or, roughly translated, “dead mall depression archive catharsis end world”. Yu seemed to go a little further than mere slow-down plus reverb, making some almost monstrously haunting pieces, with brass instruments sounding like dinosaurs in agony.

So—what if I took that silly little tune from our THX-1138 radio play, expanded it into a proper piece of music, then “slowed it down and added lots of reverb”?

I started with a bossa nova arrangement, but even when slowed down it sounded too boisterous, so I recorded a more languid ballad version. It came out fine, but just didn’t have that haunting quality present in Yu’s music, so I added a few elements.

1. Effects like record de-centering, and wow and flutter.

2. A phased noise effect, which can be heard on Yu’s tracks, though I have no idea if that’s something that was added or the result of slowing down the original tracks.

3. I would’ve sworn in court that, the first time I listened to Blue Album, I could hear a man, buried deep in the mix and nearly inaudible, slowly counting beats in Spanish (“uno, dos, tres, cuatro”) on one of the tracks. Upon successive listenings, I couldn’t hear it any more, so maybe it was my imagination, but I decided my song should have that.

4. While filming the video at a shopping mall, a security guard interrupted me and made me stop—I didn’t have permission to shoot there, after all. Her “Excuse me.” can be heard towards the end.

Here’s the result and music video!

Watch on Vimeo

Links: download the ep from archive.org or Bandcamp.

*Particularly around 7:30 when THX finishes his work shift and heads for the mall. The music that’s played does not appear on the THX-1138 soundtrack, but it’s “Elevator Music” from the 1956 film “Miracle in the Rain” by composer Franz Waxman. The music appears at about 3:45 in the film.