Mallsoft is vaporwave rebuilt as the soundtrack of a shopping centre after closing time: slow, spacious ambient music made from muzak, long reverb and the noise of the building itself. In the Frekvenci archive it is also the steadiest branch of the family. It lists 403 mallsoft releases by 227 artists, starting in 2013, and since 2016 the yearly count has hardly moved.
What is mallsoft?
Bandcamp Daily's 2016 map of vaporwave sub-genres traces mallsoft back to utopian virtual and says it inherits that branch's cool detachment from consumer culture. Its picture of the sound is of sparse melodies and chords, with field recordings and stray noises filling the gaps, so that "the mall" becomes a state of mind more than a building.[2] Listeners drift through it with no destination.
The music is usually read as commentary. The Dutch producer behind 猫 シ Corp., widely presented as mallsoft's leading artist, calls malls monuments of consumerism and ties the style to 1980s consumer culture and to memories of his own early-1990s childhood.[1] Laura Glitsos, in a peer-reviewed study of vaporwave built around the artist 18 Carat Affair, argues that the genre's pull is memory itself rather than any particular past.[3]
Muzak, reverb and space
The recipe has a few reliable ingredients.
- Eccojam muzak. Corp. says eccojam-style muzak and 8- and 16-bit sound-card effects give his records their retro colour.[1] The technique is explained on our What are eccojams? The looped, slowed edits that started vaporwave page.
- Reverb as architecture. Long tails stand in for the building and make a room larger than anything in the track.
- Ambient clips and field recordings. Corp. says the ambience on his best-known record, Palm Mall, came from online sources, and that those clips have since been reused so widely that he calls them "the new Wilhelm scream". Later he began recording mall sounds himself, including in Helsinki.[1]
- Low drama. Where signalwave stacks voices and cuts between them, mallsoft tends to hold one sound in the air for a long time.
Why the mall?
The setting does a lot of work. In the Corp. interview, the mall is a place of nostalgia and the music a way out of a harsher present. The article reads one of his albums, built from cut-off news samples, as an attempt to shut out the events of September 2001, and another is named after a Welsh word for longing for a place that does not exist.[1] That fits Glitsos's argument that listeners are drawn to the feeling of memory, not to a real remembered object.[3]
It also explains the lack of rhythm. A mall soundtrack is made to be ignored, and the best mallsoft is tuned to be half-heard: pleasant, almost empty, a little uncanny. In our data mallsoft releases also carry the ambient tag (162 releases), experimental (158), plunderphonics (72), slushwave (63) and lo-fi (61). The tag utopian virtual, the bright corporate-future style Bandcamp names as mallsoft's parent, is on 57; for the slow, heavily processed side of the family, see What is slushwave? Vaporwave stretched into ambient. And if the beats are what you came for, What is barber beats? The vaporwave micro-genre named after one prolific artist is the neighbour with a drum track.
Mallsoft in the archive
Most vaporwave tags spike. Mallsoft climbs for five years and then holds a plateau.
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Year | Releases |
|---|---|
| 2013 | 6 |
| 2014 | 14 |
| 2015 | 27 |
| 2016 | 38 |
| 2017 | 36 |
| 2018 | 42 |
| 2019 | 34 |
| 2020 | 35 |
| 2021 | 27 |
| 2022 | 33 |
| 2023 | 36 |
| 2024 | 38 |
| 2025 | 24 |
From 6 releases in 2013 it reaches 38 in 2016 and peaks at 42 in 2018. After that the annual figure stays between 24 and 38: 34 in 2019, 35 in 2020, 27 in 2021, 33 in 2022, 36 in 2023, 38 in 2024. That is a scene that kept the same size while neighbours such as barber beats multiplied. The figure of 24 for 2025 may rise as databases catch up. Mallsoft is also an album form: 248 of the 403 releases are LPs, 88 EPs and 38 singles. Only 55 are self-released.
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Label | Releases |
|---|---|
| Palm 84 | 16 |
| FANTASY☆DELUXE | 13 |
| Seikomart | 12 |
| B O G U S // COLLECTIVE | 10 |
| Geometric Lullaby | 7 |
| Adhesive Sounds | 6 |
| No Problema Tapes | 5 |
| Enterprise Records | 5 |
The leading label is Palm 84, with 16 mallsoft releases of 56 listed. FANTASY☆DELUXE has 13 of 25, about half its catalogue. Seikomart has 12 of 114. B O G U S // COLLECTIVE, the biggest label in this list, puts only 10 of 222 into the tag, so for it mallsoft is a side branch; our B O G U S // COLLECTIVE: label profile and where to start page covers the rest. Geometric Lullaby adds 7 of 60.
On the artists: 猫 シ Corp. from the Netherlands has 16 mallsoft releases of 35 listed. The most prolific name is US Golf 95, with 34 of 43, listed under Great Britain; 39 releases in the tag also carry a "golf" tag, which suggests how a single prolific artist can leave a mark on a tag list. Country is known for 55% of the releases: the United States has 89, Great Britain 45, the Netherlands 19 and France 18.
Records to start with
The first few are named in the sources: Bandcamp's guide lists Palm Mall and Hologram Plaza among its examples.[2] The rest were picked to cover the years and to avoid repeating a label where possible.
- Disconscious · 2013 · Sonokinetic Spectrum · LPA 2013 album, one of Bandcamp's named examples, and the oldest on the page.
- 猫 シ Corp. · 2014 · No Problema Tapes · LPThe 2014 album on No Problema Tapes that Bandcamp's interview calls Corp.'s best-known record.
- Digital Voyager · 2015 · Ailanthus Recordings · LPA 2015 album on Ailanthus Recordings.
- Squarecom広場SOFTWARE · 2015 · Celadon Plaza · LPA 2015 album on Celadon Plaza whose title says what it is.
- Trademarks & Copyrights · 2016 · RKM Records · LPA 2016 album; the title states the theme outright.
- Zima Clearmalt · 2017 · power_lunch recording corporation · LPA 2017 album on power_lunch recording corporation.
- 385North · 2019 · B O G U S // COLLECTIVE · LPA 2019 album on B O G U S // COLLECTIVE.
- PolyCorp Interactive · 2020 · Dreams Interactive · LPA 2020 album on Dreams Interactive.
- Glaceau Music Co. · 2021 · Shatterfoil Industries · EPA 2021 EP styled as background music.
- Looking Through Sheets · 2022 · Enterprise Records · LPA 2022 album on Enterprise Records.
- h º r ¡ z º n щ ¡ r e l e s s · 2024 · Arctic Contact · LPA 2024 album on Arctic Contact.
- videofashion · 2026 · FANTASY☆DELUXE · LPA 2026 album on FANTASY☆DELUXE, one of the newest entries.
Questions people ask
Is mallsoft related to synthwave?
Only at a distance. Fifteen mallsoft releases carry the synthwave tag; the style grew out of vaporwave, which is a separate tradition. Synthwave vs vaporwave: same neon, different music explains where the two meet.
Where does vaporwave start and mallsoft begin?
Mallsoft is vaporwave with the sample-chopping turned down and the space turned up. What is vaporwave? A guide to the internet's slowed-down mall music follows the whole family from the first eccojams.
Sources
- The Mall, Nostalgia, and the Loss of Innocence: An Interview With 猫 シ Corp. · Simon Chandler, Bandcamp Daily, 8 Mar 2017
- Genre As Method: The Vaporwave Family Tree, From Eccojams to Hardvapour · Simon Chandler, Bandcamp Daily, 21 Nov 2016
- Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls · Laura Glitsos, Popular Music 37(1), 2018