mallsoft

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English[edit]

Album cover of Palm Mall by Cat System Corp. Photos such as these are often used as artwork for mallsoft music.

Etymology[edit]

From mall +‎ soft.

Noun[edit]

mallsoft (uncountable)

  1. A vaporwave subgenre themed after retro shopping malls.
    • 2017 December 28, Tyler Fister, “Why acid rain is out”, in Lexington Herald-Leader, volume 35, number 360, page 9A:
      It seems the late 1980s and 1990s are making a comeback, with new music genres like Vaporwave and Mallsoft.
    • 2020, Ken McLeod, Driving Identities: At the Intersection of Popular Music and Automotive Culture, Routledge, →ISBN:
      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.
    • 2021, Roisin Kiberd, The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet, Serpent’s Tail, →ISBN:
      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.
    • 2022, Sideeq Mohammed, “The Ethnographer as Conceptual Persona: On the Many Shopping Centres”, in Barbara Simpson, Line Revsbæk, editors, Doing Process Research in Organizations: Noticing Differently, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 159:
      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’.
    • 2022, Alexandra Lange, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN:
      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.”

Further reading[edit]