Vaporwave Milton Keynes

Some short videos I took on a beautiful February morning in Milton Keynes Intu shopping centre. Being there shortly after 9am meant a low level of in-security guards, which made filming easier, even though I pussied out and made very short videos.

Recommended listening (click headings to listen on Bandcamp): 

Disconscious: Hologram Plaza. An eerie soundtrack to a mall of the mind. Familiar and strange, relaxing and disquieting. Tracks are the kind of bland background music played in a thousand malls, but the use of tinny distortions, layers of echoing reverb and ambient sounds create the melancholic feel of a tape that’s been playing forever, unnoticed and unloved. 
 

猫 シ Corp.:Palm Mall. Another recognised classic in the genre, effectively a double album with the first half comprising ambient mall-sounds and the second half developing into songs to consume to. The first Mallsoft album I really got into, I made a lot of art while listening to this as it plays in the background nicely in way which I find facilitates creativity and relaxation. 

 

猫 シ Corp. : Palm Mall Mars. Palm Mall’s sequel, taking the theme of capitalist fantasies of unlimited consumption a step further with apparently a mall…on Mars? There’s a lot more going on here than the original Palm Mall, with more varied tracks and arguably more depth, although I go back and forth on whether the first album isn’t actually more effective for it’s simple clarity and expression of a concept. 
 

식료품groceries: 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open. Another eerie soundtrack, this time to an oriental supermarket. 

 

夢ΛEON // FOTOshoppe: Venus Virtual Plaza. A new release for 2019. I am just getting to grips with this album, which bills itself as a soundtrack to a ‘virtual outlet mall’. Venus Virtual Plaza works for me as background music to create to, rather like Palm Mall. Unlike Palm Mall, however, there appear to be some suggestions of disquiet in this virtual shopping utopia, with the ambient crowd noises at several points spilling into sinister laughing and…wailing? Genuinely disquieting.