'Field Notes From a Dying Mall' Finds Ambient Gold in Dead Retail

The last thing you hear on side one is a public address system telling nobody that the centre will be closing in fifteen minutes. It is a recorded voice, warm, mildly enthusiastic, addressed to a concourse containing one security guard and one man holding a microphone on a boom. Then the tannoy chime. Then eleven seconds of escalator. Then the side ends.

'Field Notes From a Dying Mall' is credited to Concourse, the working name of the recordist Nils Aubert, and it was assembled across nineteen months in six shopping centres during their final weeks of trading. I am usually hostile to this kind of album. Field recording is the most forgiving genre we have: point a good microphone at a place with a story, print a serious sleeve, and let the location do the composing. This one composes.

A bassline nobody wrote

The up escalator at Brookvale Centre, installed in 1974 and switched off for good in March, hums a hair under B at around 62 Hz. It is remarkably steady, steadier than most bass players, and Aubert builds four of the eight pieces on top of it. He barely processes it. He arranges around it instead: a half-closed shop shutter as percussion, the ventilation plant as a pad, and the two-note tannoy chime as the only melodic instrument on the record, which happens by pure luck to be in tune with the escalator.

The best three minutes of the album are on 'Brookvale (Upper Level)', where a shopping trolley with one bad castor crosses a tiled floor at a steady walking pace and becomes, for about forty seconds from 3:12, a hi-hat. Aubert lets it run, brings the escalator up underneath, and you realise you have been listening to a groove made of maintenance failures.

Composition, not collection

What separates this from an archive is the editing, and the editing is ruthless. Eight pieces came out of what the sleeve says was around four hundred hours of recording. Aubert cuts on rhythm rather than on interest, which is the discipline most field recordists never acquire: a fascinating sound is not the same as a sound that belongs at 4:40 in a nine-minute piece.

He also makes one structural decision and keeps it for the entire record. No human voice is ever given the last word. Voices appear, several of them, and every time they are followed by machinery. That could read as misanthropy. In context it reads as accuracy, because these buildings kept running long after they stopped containing people, and the plant rooms were the last things anybody turned off.

Dead retail is not neutral

There is a version of this album that would be unforgivable, and it is the version where a sound artist wanders through other people's collapsed workplaces collecting atmospheres. Aubert avoids it by keeping the labour in the frame. You hear shelving being dismantled by two men who clearly know each other well. You hear a cleaner's floor polisher describe the exact dimensions of an empty unit. On 'Last Trading Day' a woman explains to somebody off-mic which of the closing shifts pay the extra rate, and the mall's own piped playlist keeps going underneath her, cheerfully, to an audience of nobody.

That detail is the whole record in miniature. What we tend to miss about these buildings is not the shops, which were mostly the same shops everywhere, but the fact that they were rooms full of people deciding things together, badly lit and free to enter. A mall was public space that had to pretend to be a business. Nostalgia for it is not nostalgia for retail, and as Dario Fontaine put it in his column in October, what we miss about anything is usually what it threw away.

The switch-off

The last piece is the one Aubert waited nineteen months to get. An engineer powers down the Brookvale escalator for the final time, and the motor takes about eleven seconds to stop. The pitch falls the entire way, unevenly, with a wobble near the bottom, and because the record has spent forty minutes rooted to that pitch, the album loses its tonic in real time and never gets it back. What follows is ninety seconds of a large empty building with nothing running in it, which turns out to sound nothing like silence.

Two of the eight pieces drift. 'Pinegate (Food Court)' is a good idea recorded twice, and the ten-minute 'Service Corridor' would be better at six. But this is the rare location record with an argument rather than an atmosphere, and it belongs next to the strongest submissions in our own atlas: proof that a place will tell you what it is if you are willing to stand in it long enough with the levels set properly and nothing to sell.