It was (probably) summer of 2021 when I was listening to random music while being bored out of my mind at home during the Quarantine, when I made one of the most important musical discoveries of my entire life. At the time, I had already been listening to Himiko Kikuchi’s Flying Beagle Japanese jazz fusion album, and I wanted to switch playlists after that one ended.
And my eyes were drawn to this specific video by Just Muzak:
As someone who had already been a fan of weird shit like silent film music, Kevin MacLeod and other background music niche stuff that people don’t normally know about unless they are involved with video editing, I felt like what I had just discovered had clicked with me like two inseparable two-stud pieces of LEGO.
The music itself is Cinematic as Fuck
It’s a bit hard to explain to people who aren’t typically into this kind of music or autistic enough, but personally, I feel like this specific album is really vividly appropriate for use in films, animations, or visual media of some sort. It really makes me imagine entire scenes when I am listening to it.
Take a look at Graham Todd’s To A Dark Lady (22:52) here. It’s some incredibly dramatic sounding music. It sounds directly like soundtrack from some film where the main character is going through heartbreak. The darkness, the melancholy, the softness deep inside.
The strings and the soft guitar make me feel the same feeling someone gets when they look at the ruins of a burnt down building. This is by NO MEANS normal supermarket music soundtrack. This is art, this is where humanity peaked. This is the type of music where if I heard it in an actual supermarket, I would stop walking and stare at cereal boxes or a fridge with milk and fall into deep thought about existence and the nature of the human psyche.
The whole production of this features an actual physical orchestra. Real instruments. All these guys got together – different artists with different songs for this album – to create library music supposedly put together for supermarket use. There is a lot of beauty, in fact, according to my own personal tastes, where humanity and effort and passion and meaning get across without lyrics, inside this type of music and especially this album.
The part with Roger Webb’s Love Match (20:20) evokes strong feelings in me, too. It makes me feel the exact sensation of when you have to leave the vacation house/hotel after your stay. The bittersweet feeling of having to escape the lighthearted and relaxing vacation atmosphere to slowly land back in the baseline of routine.
I don’t know how else to word it, but this auditory experience feels as if there has been too much passion and effort put into making this for such a use in forgettable commerce and not film. It genuinely surprised me. It HOOKED me.
Another part that makes me feel something is when Reg Tilsley’s Harvey Wallbanger 1 plays (43:43). To me, this part feels like relief. It feels like expecting someone to react badly to you trusting them with something personal. It feels like getting your results back from a school exam and seeing a grade better than what you would ever anticipate. It feels like hope, a breath of fresh air. Especially that sweet little piano plink at the end of the song, it sounds like the audio version of a smile!
My personal favourite is Roger Webb’s Morning Start (54:11). It brings me the feeling of freedom. The feeling of graduating, of moving into your first house, of having just cleaned the house. Of successfully finishing a task you have been dreading. It feels like the smell of soap, the freshness of it. Sunrise vibes.
These songs have no business being so good, and they are some of the most heart-touching pieces of music I have heard in my life. Emotional, evoking, immersive soundtrack created by actual soundtrack artists in the 70s, put inside a supermarket music compilation. It’s like opening an envelope from the electric company expecting to see an electric bill and instead finding a love letter.
This actually impacted my life
After having discovered this playlist in the summer of 2021 (I think), I kept listening to it at least once a day. I was playing it daily while I was doing boring tasks during the Quarantine to give myself a feeling of peace. I was navigating school work (badly) and socialising online a lot.
This playlist followed me through times when I was relaxing and normally texting people about various things, but also heartbreaks. I wasn’t very used to making friends neither in person nor online, so it was a thing that happened to have some mishaps, hurts, pain and crying come out of it.
The Sounds of the Supermarket album, as funny as it may sound, was really helping me process my feelings, especially the most emotional songs like Moment In Time, Love Match and To A Dark Lady. I have actually cried to these songs, and I will stand by this truth. As soon as I would reach the last hopeful songs that follow an emotional climax in my mind, the songs Remember, Morning Start and Outlook, I would have started feeling better emotionally.
I listen to this playlist multiple times a week, even to this day – 5 years later, as it seems to never really get old to me. I resonate with these songs deeply and every time I play them I feel as if I added some cinematic vibes to my life. My life feels suddenly more meaningful than it subjectively is when I hear them, as if what I am doing is part of a bigger process that contributes to a greater goal/success/joy in my life.
Because of this whole meaningful experience this album of 70s supermarket muzak has given me, I decided to write this article to honour it. It’s possible that barely anyone would read this and feel a similar way, but I still feel relief getting this off my chest.
Branching out in the world of Muzak
After having my brain rearranged by listening to that album more times than the average person has heard the Happy Birthday song, I felt the urge to keep looking for this kind of music to expand my listening library of relaxing, predictable old music, to autistically burn it into my brain like a CD.
I discovered an excellent YouTube channel called Fardemark during this research, an American fox furry guy who has an exquisite taste in library music (library music =/= related to libraries btw, it’s another term for commercial music) and easy listening stuff. He has the same name as me (Mark) and has the most bingeable elevator/department store/businessfunk music in all of YouTube. I highly suggest following him.
The video that lured me in and kept me hooked as if it were some sort of audio drug was More Sounds Of The Department Store:
I discovered this much later, after the Sounds of the Supermarket one, it was somewhere in 2022 or 2023 when I had first started working. I had an office job and was bored out of my life, or sometimes even feeling tense because of the environment being a bit hectic at times, and More Sounds of The Department Store was one of the few things that made me feel relatively safe in such an environment.
It’s definitely one of my top favourite 70s supermarket muzak selections of all time, and indeed one of the playlists that I play multiple times a week in the modern day as well.
From the same guy, I also really liked his adaptation/recreation of Sounds of the Supermarket in high quality audio and the Sounds of the Department Store:
I loved his mixtapes as well, but I might talk about them in another article.
I am not affiliated with Fardemark fyi, I am just deeply in love and lowkey addicted to his tape playlists and would feel like I’d suddenly have a big void in my soul if he suddenly disappeared from the internet and I didn’t have any of his work saved locally.
I love his stuff so much that I considered making physical artifacts by making physical tapes for me to use irl with his mixtapes (with credit, of course, and also for personal use only). I hope to be able to make this dream come true soon, as I am really into making tapes lately.
Forever happy with 70s supermarket music
This was the story of an autistic man whose life trajectory changed by a few 70s supermarket music albums rewire his brain. I hope you found it uplifting, or at least you got to feel a bit curious about it.
My family teases me for listening to this music and calls me “special” (yes, in the way you think it is meant), but I will keep listening to my beloved elevator music as if it’s a religious activity. Yeah, many friends of mine don’t get it either, but I continue to enjoy it. My brain is very picky about what makes it calm down, and these songs seem to do it, so I’ll keep doing it.
Long live 70s supermarket/department store music!