Style: vaporwave, ambient, mallsoft
Primary Emotions/Themes: vast open spaces, liminality, hyper surrealism
Thoughts: Dedicated to the dead malls throughout the world.
A C A D E M Y chronicles vast open spaces that once showed great life but have now become abandoned and desolate. A strange sense of eerie nostalgia permeates the music contained on these two records. A familiarity for something that was once common, yet somehow has faded into the ether.
Mallsoft is a genre that I will typically not listen to. I've heard some of the staples such as Palm Mall Mars and they have simply left me wanting. For whatever reason though Hallmark '87 has filled that gap. The music on A C A D E M Y is both interesting and bizarre in a near other worldly manner.
Sure there are elements of walking through a dead mall and the odd slowed down muzak that would have played if this were only mallsoft... but it's more than that. There is a distance to this music, like we are hearing it from a place that we typically would not - such as another building, or passing by on the street. We only get glimpses of melody, the rest is shrouded in reverb and ambience.
I think that this is the differentiating factor for A C A D E M Y. It's not just an album about dead malls, it's an album about discovery and the great unknown. We only get to hear moments in time ranging from a few seconds to over ten minutes. Each song is a window into another world for a few fleeting moments before it is lost again.
I don't know if this will launch me further into discovery mallsoft of if this is going to remain one of the very few entries into my collection. I guess time will tell, but if I had to venture a guess this will be the exception to the rule. Most genre's have albums like this, that I enjoy despite their ties to music I typically don't get into. In this case I'm glad I finally got something in the mallsoft genre that I can enjoy.
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